Question: This will be your second start at Dover in the Cup car and your seventh overall. How do you like the Monster Mile and what is the key for you to get around it?
Regan Smith: “Dover is probably one of my favorite tracks on the circuit. It’s basically a big Bristol which is one of my other favorites. It’s fast and things can really happen in a hurry. The car needs to be good and free, but not to the point that you’re chattering the rear tires out from under it.”
Question: What is your team’s goal for this weekend at Dover?
Regan Smith: “Our goals are to continue to improve on the past few weeks. Dover is a good track for myself and DEI as a whole, so we want to go and do everything in our power to get that first top ten. We also need to focus on getting the Raybestos Rookie award for the final nine weeks of the season. That award is not only important to me, but the company as a whole.”
Question: You have led the Raybestos Rookie of the year points for the past 10 weeks. What do you think is the key to holding on to that lead?
Regan Smith: “The main thing with the rookie points is to just keep winning rookie of the race awards. There isn’t any other way for me to continue gaining points other than being the top rookie and getting some top tens. I feel like were the strongest rookie team out there each week and there’s no reason that we shouldn’t be able to accomplish that.”
Question: You have shown a lot of improvement each time you go back to a track this season. With seven of the nine remaining tracks return events, are you excited about going back with some more experience under you belt?
Regan Smith: “Very much so. Any time that you get to go back to a track that you’ve been to before or raced at you have a great deal more confidence as soon as you unload. Looking at the schedule there is going to be probably three races that were really going to need to improve greatly on our performance from earlier, and the other six we just need a little and we will be competing for top 15 and top-10 finishes.”
Question: Has this Sprint Cup rookie year been more of a challenge than you expected or pretty much what you thought?
Regan Smith: “I would say this year has definitely been more of a challenge than I was expecting. I thought after the season I was having last year in the Nationwide series that things would come much more easily to me this year. Some of the struggles have been things we could have controlled better from the start of the season, and some have been my learning curve but as a whole I have been very humbled this year.”
Question: What has been the biggest lesson for you this season?
Regan Smith: “There’s been a couple of them. One is just how incredibly tough this series really is. There are so many great drivers who are all at the top of their game each week, that just getting top 15s can be difficult. Every driver out there can win in any other series in the world if they were in it, and that says a lot for the competition level.”
“The other has been the importance of having great people surrounding you. We went through a lot of turnover with my team at the beginning of the season and it seems like now that we have capped that off and got some stability in the crew chief position with Dan Stillman, that our performance has begun to reflect that. We’re not by any means happy with 20th-place finishes, but there was a point at the beginning of the season we would have done back flips for those results. Now we are wanting more each week, and pushing each other harder.”
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