Brandon Whitt and the #38 Werner Ladder/Cure Autism Now Ford F-150 team head to the one-mile Phoenix (Ariz.) International Raceway for Friday’s Phoenix 150 NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series race.
Whitt, the El Cajon, California native, and the Werner Ladder/CAN team will be carrying tremendous momentum to his last “home” game of the season. After winning the Raybestos Rookie of the Race award at Las Vegas and Texas, Whitt drove to a career-high 12th-place finish at Martinsville, Va., just two weeks ago.
Werner is the world's leading manufacturer of ladders, climbing equipment and ladder accessories. Backed by over 50 years of product innovation, Werner leads the industry with its commitment to design and manufacture quality products that meet or exceed applicable Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) and American National Standards Institute (ANSI) codes and standards for strength and structural integrity. Werner is headquartered in Greenville, PA.
The Cure Autism Now Foundation is a non-profit organization dedicated to promoting and funding autism research and accelerating the pace of scientific progress toward effective treatments and a cure. The organization is the largest private funder of biological research in autism, providing more than $20 million in grants since its inception in 1995.
The thoughts of Werner Ladder/Cure Autism Now Ford driver Brandon Whitt heading into Phoenix:
“Hey, anytime we get to go out west and race, I look forward to it. There aren’t that many weekends in the Craftsman Truck Series where we race out in the western states anymore. Me being from El Cajon (Calif., just outside of San Diego) it’s always fun to go race on some of the tracks I grew up going to and eventually racing on.
“I’m actually quite familiar with Phoenix International Raceway. When I was a rookie in the Southwest Series in 2002, I had the opportunity to race there twice. . then once again in 2003, before we moved to the Truck Series. In 2003 we started the Southwest Series season off by qualifying third and finishing ninth. All-in-all a pretty good weekend at Phoenix last year. This will be my first time back since then, and I’m not going to lie to you; we’ll take a repeat performance… maybe even get greedy and switch those two around. You know, start ninth and finish third.
“Phoenix is one of those tracks where you have to be smooth and patient. The turns are pretty flat, but sweeping enough to where you can get a pretty good run off the corner and pass going down the straightaways. We’ll need to be on our game in qualifying because track position is a huge factor there, especially in a 150-lap event as opposed to the Cup cars running 312 laps. Generally the rule of thumb is, the shorter the event the more important qualifying is.
“This entire team has really been coming on strong in the past month. We ran well at Las Vegas, were running well at California until we blew up, ran well at Texas, and then had our highest finish of the season at Martinsville. As a team we’re growing up. We’re learning how to finish races a little better as the year goes along. That can be attributed to the hard work these guys put in at the shop on a daily basis. We’ve also made a new addition to the Werner Ladder/CAN team; Jamie Jones came on board last week as the new crew chief and he brings a lot of experience to this team. So, we have a lot of good things going on here at Clean Line Motorsports as the 2004 season is coming to a close.
“We’re pretty excited about the future as well. A lot of people don’t realize that not only am I a rookie driver, but this is a rookie team. We’ve experienced our share of growing pains, but all of us are really looking forward to the 2005 season. This season we raced on many of the tracks for the first time. Of the last three races, two will be tracks that this team, as a team, will be seeing for the first time. It’s a growing process but we’re starting to see some real improvement. I can’t wait to get back to some of these tracks for the second, third, or fourth time next season.”
