Chevy Rock & Roll 400 - Elliott Sadler Notes

ELLIOTT SADLER, M&M’S Racing
Richmond International Raceway
September 10, 2005

Sadler Looks To Score First Top-5 Finish at RIR

CHARLOTTE, NC - Richmond International Raceway (RIR) sits just 70 miles north of Emporia, Virginia; the hometown of NEXTEL Cup driver Elliott Sadler. Sadler openly talks about the impact the track had on his childhood and his early exposure to stock car racing. "It's a very special place to me," says Sadler. "I've been going to races there since I was a little kid. I've spent a lot of money over the years on tickets myself coming over here to watch races. It's been a dream of mine to win a race here in front of a home town crowd."

Sadler clinched his first career top-10 at RIR in May by finishing seventh. This weekend he looks for his first career top-five finish in hopes of closing in on the top-10 in the Chase for the Championship. Currently, fifty two points outside of the top-10 Sadler knows that it will take a career performance to close the gap standing between him and a shot at returning to the Chase. For this Virginia native, hopefully "there's no place like home" to capture his first win of the 2005 season.

Quoting M&M'S Driver Elliott Sadler:

On returning to Richmond...
"I'm looking forward to Richmond. I had two career nights here in Richmond in May, finishing second in the Busch car, which is my best career finish (at RIR). We finished seventh in the Cup car, my best ever finish. We ran good all weekend long. I was so happy, so pumped up. This is home for me so to have the final race before the Chase and to have the opportunity to have one of the biggest nights of my racing career in my home state, it's exciting. To have the chance to do that in front of a lot of your family or friends is a great opportunity a lot of people don't really get to I think enjoy or be a part of. We're coming here with the attitude that we can make it and we're going to strap in and see where the chips fall at."

On the cutoff for the Chase...
"This definitely isn't the position that we wanted to find ourselves heading into Richmond. We're just going to go in and try to win this race, get the best finish that we possibly can, and see what happens at the end of the night. Unfortunately, a lot of it is out of our control. We know that we need to have a better night, a lot better finish than the cars in front of us. We can only focus on what we can do as a team and that's to try and win this race on Saturday night. We had a good car here in the Spring, probably a top-five car, so we'll improve upon that and see where the points stand at the end of the race."