NAPA AUTO PARTS WINTER HEAT 150
Phoenix International Raceway
Oliver Gravity Separators will be the sponsor again of the Geoff Burney owned #00 Monte Carlo
for the 2001 season entering it's 11th year in the NASCAR Winston West series.
Our first session was a little scary in the car, we just couldn't get the rear end to stick and at 160+
that's a real important thing. We made some changes but just couldn't get the car to work the way we wanted. The second practice wasn't much better. We decided we had to make more changes before qualifying, which normally we don't like to do but we had to get the car going through the turns better.
We clicked off our best time for qualifying but still ended up 21st out of 33 cars on the grid. We were all pretty happy with that for what we had earlier in the weekend but knew we had our work cut out for us during the race. The entire crew put our heads together slept on it and arrived race day with fresh determination.
We made several more changes before the race, again not recommended in most cases, but we all
agreed that things could only get better, and they did.
The #00 Oliver Gravity Separators Monte Carlo ran great during the first part of the race
where we moved up to 8th after starting 21st. Then at about lap 91 of 150 the engine lost a cylinder and for the rest of the race we were running on seven cylinder but still finished 10. Without the engine problem I think we would have finished in the top five.
pR>
We have the most Winston West starts with 7 and have finished in the top 10 the last three years
at Phoenix International Raceway. This 10th place finish gives us 5 top tens out of the last 6 races, and some pretty good momentum going into our next race at Las Vegas February 28th.
Scott Gaylord #00
