CONOVER, NC - While most NASCAR Nationwide Series teams will breath a sigh of relief with an open date this week, the Faith Motorsports crew is feeling the pressures of big time racing.
Coming off a last lap crash at Darlington last Friday night that totaled the team’s primary intermediate car for the second time this season, Crew Chief Morris VanVleet and staff will be celebrating the off week with extra days and nights in the race shop.
The team plans to field a whole new car at Lowe’s Motor Speedway in two weeks, in hopes of getting back to where the team was in the third weekend of the season after back to back Top 20 runs at California and Vegas.
The team, which has tumbled out of the Top 30 in owner’s points the past few weeks, has to have its best effort to at Lowe’s in order to make the field.
“Charlotte is always one of the toughest fields with a bunch of cars,” said Driver Morgan Shepherd. “We need to be on our game there or we won’t race.”
In recent weeks, Shepherd said the team has acquired a chassis from the former Gillett-Evernham Motorsports that the team is preparing for the primary car at Charlotte. The team’s former Yates chassis which was the workhorse of the stable in 2008 will serve as the team’s backup car. The Harvick car, wrecked badly at Bristol and Darlington, will be set aside for now, Shepherd said.
“It was never right after the Bristol wreck and we could never pinpoint why,” he said. “Sometimes something very small throws the whole geometry off and you can’t tell what exactly it is that is doing it.”
Shepherd said while the car ran well the first two times to the track at California and Vegas, it never performed up to expectations after being rebuilt following the Bristol crash.
“We should be running much better than we have been running,” he said. “There is no reason we shouldn’t be in the Top 20 every week. We just have to dig ourselves out of this hole and try to get back to running like we can.”
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