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Event Preview Fact Sheet Event/Date: Food City 500/March 23, 2003 Venue: Bristol (Tenn.) Motor Speedway Robby Gordon’s NASCAR Winston Cup Performance History at Bristol Motor Speedway
TOTALS Avg. Start: 20.8 Avg. Finish: 31.2 Laps: 1,682/2,500 Money: $248,192 NASCAR Winston Cup Points Position: 21st NOTES:
ROBBY GORDON QUOTES: “Bristol is down-and-dirty racing in a bullring. It’s racing at its best — short-track racing with high banks. I really have begun to like Bristol a lot. It’s one of my favorite tracks now. Every time we leave there, it seems like there’s a pit brawl brewing. You think ‘Damn, that pissed me off. I want to get out of here.’ Then it’s ‘I can’t wait to go back to Bristol again. We’re going to win it next time.’ Bristol is just so much fun. “Bristol is a rush-hour interstate at 120 miles-per-hour. There’s 43 cars sitting right on top of each other, usually trying not to hit each other but wanting the next guy to get out of the way. It’s a little nerve-wracking to go around for 500 laps and hope the guy behind you or in front of you or beside you doesn’t make a mistake. Because then it’s your mistake, also. “Surviving is the key to doing well at Bristol, just like it was at Darlington. But your team can put more work and effort into the Bristol race than any other team and still end up dead last at the end. Bristol is about survival but it’s also about luck. Too often it’s about being in the right place at the right time or the wrong place at the wrong time. One moment you can be leading and the next minute someone runs over you and puts you in the fence. The next thing you know, your guys are loading your car onto the hauler to go home. Bristol doesn’t seem like a very fair race track but I guess it all shakes out evenly over the years among the teams. I just hope we can look back after Bristol and say ‘that was a lot of fun and we learned a lot.’ If we can’t win the race, we have to accept what we’ve got and not overdrive the car. “Bristol is a track where you can get wrecked pretty hard and still fix your car and get back in the race. There are 500 laps, so if you’re 100 laps down and can get back in, you will. Everyone tries to keep their fenders on at Bristol but if they get sheared off in a wreck, you can still make laps there. You can’t do that as easily at Atlanta or Texas.” “Bristol is a pretty rough track and the banking is very steep. When you come off pit road, you’ve got to be careful going up the banking. It’s so sharp that you can tear up the front valance when you get up on the banking. The Cingular Wireless Chevrolet almost has to tiptoe going up the banking coming off of turn one at Bristol. The biggest key to a good lap is getting back in the throttle at the right time. You think you’d have to drive it in as deep as you can, slide it in the corner and get back in the gas. But in reality, when it comes down to being quick, you have to lift off the gas a little early, get the car stuck down in the corner and get back to full throttle as soon as you can. “Most of the tracks we run on are asphalt but Bristol is concrete. There’s a big difference between an asphalt track and a concrete track as far as a car’s grip is concerned. The track temperature doesn’t seem to change as much on concrete because it’s not a black surface that draws in the heat and makes a slicker surface. Concrete creates a more equal qualifying environment for everyone because the qualifying draw doesn’t matter so much based on the time of day. With asphalt tracks like Charlotte, you always want a later qualifying draw when the sun has gone down a bit because the track is usually faster then. But the concrete at Bristol is rough and there are a lot of seams in the surface, so shocks are very important for keeping the tires right on the track. Our shock specialist will be one of the busiest guys on the Cingular team this weekend at Bristol.”
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