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When a late race wreck took out several potential
frontrunners out of contention of the NASCAR Truck
Series race at The Milwaukee Mile, an opportunity opened
up for
Landon Cassill. The
Fairfax, Iowa four-star pounced.
Cassill piloted his Morgan-Dollar Motorsports entry to
his best career Truck Series finish – a third place run
– all the while, tuning on what was admittedly a
puzzling truck setup.
“We weren’t too happy with our truck in practice,” said
Cassill. “We really worked on it a lot in that second
session. I made a couple of qualifying runs, we just
weren’t happy with it. It was just like ok. [Crew chief]
Eric Phillips and I sat in the hauler after practice and
said ‘Ok we can take a stab at it and make it better and
have a good run, or we can take a stab at it and make it
worse and I will just have to drive the wheels off of
it.
“When I went out and qualified, we thought we made it
worse, there was a lot of joking around going on then,
but we got in the race and it was free enough you could
roll the bottom. Matt [Crafton] and I were talking
about that after the race and, here it doesn’t matter
how loose you are, if you can put that thing on the curb
and ride the bottom, you can just roll by all those
trucks that go up the race track. We were loose enough
to do that to pass a lot of people all night and had
good pit strategy. And here we are.”
Cassill, the first driver to win in all three of ASA’s
major touring late model series, had a 2007 season
filled with bad luck and disappointing runs in his first
year major stock car competition. 2008 has been a
complete reversal of sorts: he has earned three
top-fifteen finishes in five Truck Series starts for
Morgan-Dollar and recently earned his best career
Nationwide Series finish, a ninth place run, at
Nashville Superspeedway.
Veteran Johnny Benson claimed the win at Milwaukee, his
third-straight at the West Allis, Wisc. track.
Des Moines, Iowa three-star
Michael Annett,
piloting the No. 22 Bill Davis Racing entry, finished
sixth in his series debut.
LOGANO, KESELOWSKI MAKE MILWAUKEE MEMORABLE
NASCAR Sprint Cup Series regular Carl Edwards scored
his first NASCAR Nationwide Series win in over a year
Saturday night at The Milwaukee Mile.
Edwards held off the advances of Middletown, Conn.
five-star
Joey Logano late in
the 250-lap contest.
While Logano’s finish (his second-straight finish inside
the top-two) was newsworthy, his aggressive move on
Brad Keselowski
made headlines. With 79 laps to go, Logano went
fender-to-fender with Keselowski in an effort to take
the lead. The move left Keselowski with a bent fender
and an eighth place finish after the Rochester Hills,
Mich. five-star had led 145 laps on the evening.
Keselowski was also the pole winner, courtesy of a lap
of 29.679 seconds around the mile-oval.
Mauston, Wisc. four-star
Kelly Bires
finished 11th, holding off Mobile, Ala. prospect
Cale Gale, who
finished 12th. Plano, Tex. five-star
James Buescher,
making his third career Nationwide Series start,
finished 14th.
June 23, 2008
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