NASCAR Nationwide Series Preview : Landon Cassill
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May 27, 2008
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CASSILL THIS SEASON: Rookie Landon Cassill, 18, will make his 11th career NASCAR Nationwide Series start this weekend at Dover (Del.) International Speedway. This is his fourth of his 16 scheduled races driving the No. 5 National Guard Chevrolet for JR Motorsports this season.
CASSILL AT DOVER: Cassill posted his best career Nationwide Series finish of 18th at Dover on Sept. 22, 2007. He started that race in the 16th position.
NEXT UP FOR CASSILL: Cassill, a Cedar Rapids, Iowa, native, is competing for Raybestos Rookie of the Year honors, and this weekend’s race will mark the first of five consecutive Nationwide Series events that he will compete in for JR Motorsports. He next will compete in the No. 5 National Guard Chevrolet at Nashville (Tenn.) Superspeedway on June 7.
DOVER CHASSIS: Crew chief Chad Walter has chosen JR Motorsports Chassis No. 275 for this Saturday’s race at Dover. The car served as a backup this season when Cassill competed at Phoenix in April and at Richmond in May. The car recorded two top-five finishes at Bristol (Tenn.) Motor Speedway in 2007—a third-place finish in March and a fourth-place finish in August. In March 2006 at Bristol, Walter led the No. 5 Chevy to Victory Lane.
REPRESENT: The hood of the No. 5 National Guard Chevrolet will honor New Jersey’s 50th Infantry Brigade Combat Team this weekend. The New Jersey unit has deployed more than 3,200 soldiers, marking the state’s largest overseas deployment since World War II. The units, which will be mobilized for a year, include an embedded training team, two aviation units and a military police company. For 19 of the 21 National Guard-sponsored races in the No. 5 Chevy, a different Army National Guard unit will be honored on the car.
DOUBLE DUTY AT DOVER: Cassill will suit up for the 200-mile NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series event at Dover on Friday. He will pilot the No. 46 Chevy for Morgan-Dollar Motorsports.
FIRST NASCAR CAREER TOP-10: In an effort to get more seat time, Cassill drove in two NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series events in May. He drove the No. 46 Morgan-Dollar Motorsports Chevrolet to a ninth-place finish at Lowe’s Motor Speedway, notching his first career top-10 finish in a NASCAR event. He also competed at Mansfield (Ohio) Motorsports Park and finished 20th.
LANDON CASSILL, DRIVER OF THE NO. 5 NATIONAL GUARD CHEVROLET (ON WHAT HE LEARNED THE FIRST TIME HE RACED AT DOVER.): “Just a lot of characteristics of the track itself. Dover can get really narrow off the corners, and my first time racing there I bounced the car off the wall one lap. So you learn a lot about the characteristics and how to race there—the tight pit road, things like that.”
CASSILL (ON WHAT RACES HE IS MOST LOOKING FORWARD TO.): “I’m looking forward to Chicago. I think it’s going to be a lot of fun because it’s a fast mile-and-a-half with some banking, and the track can open up into a lot of grooves. To be able get good at an intermediate track like Chicago is a good quality to have. Dover obviously is going to be a fun race, and I get to go there twice this year. The fast ones are the ones that are going to be exciting.”
CASSILL (ON WHY SEAT TIME MATTERS.): “It’s the racing mentality. No matter what you’re in, it’s the desire to do better than you did last week. You almost subconsciously have goals that you set. You want to get more aggressive on restarts; you want to pass more cars or trucks. It’s that desire to race and do better than you did last time and that confidence going out there knowing you’re the best driver on the racetrack. It’s things like that that are almost generic regardless if you are in your Nationwide car or a truck or late model or whatever, it’s just kind of like a racing mentality.”
