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MEARS AT POCONO: In 11 NASCAR Sprint Cup Series events at Pocono Raceway, Casey Mears has posted one top-five finish and three top-10s. Mears, driver of the No. 5 Cheez-It/CARQUEST Chevrolet, scored back-to-back top-10s at the track in 2007, earning his career-best finish of fourth in June and taking 10th in August.
FIRST POLE: Mears earned his first career Sprint Cup Series pole position at Pocono Raceway in August 2004 and led 17 laps before finishing 18th. Mears earned his second career pole the following week at Indianapolis Motor Speedway.
FIRST STOCK CAR VICTORY: Mears earned his first career stock car victory at Pocono Raceway in 2003 when he won back-to-back ARCA races at the 2.5-mile triangular track.
NO. 5 TEAM AT POCONO: Under the direction of crew chief Alan Gustafson, the No. 5 Hendrick Motorsports team has earned one top-five finish and two top-10s in seven starts at the tricky Pocono triangle. The No. 5 Chevy led two laps at the track before finishing 12th last August. The team has started in the top 10 in four of its last five races at Pocono.
CHASSIS NOTE: Gustafson has chosen Hendrick Motorsports Chassis No. 5-418 for Sunday’s race at Pocono Raceway. Mears most recently raced 5-418 at Las Vegas Motor Speedway in March and Texas Motor Speedway in April.
HENDRICK TOP 10: In 49 races at Pocono Raceway, Hendrick Motorsports has recorded at least one top-10 finish in all but four events. Overall, Hendrick drivers have combined for 11 wins, 46 top-five finishes and 78 top-10s at the track.
HENDRICK RECORDS 170TH WIN: Rick Hendrick recorded his 170th Sprint Cup win when Jimmie Johnson took the checkered flag on Sunday at Indianapolis Motor Speedway. Hendrick’s victories, which started in April 1984 with driver Geoffrey Bodine at Martinsville (Va.) Speedway, rank him first among car owners in NASCAR’s modern era (1972-present) and second all-time.
STREAK INTACT: Hendrick Motorsports’ streak of top-10 finishes improved to 85 Sprint Cup races after Johnson went to Victory Lane and Jeff Gordon took fifth in Sunday’s event at Indianapolis Motor Speedway. The last time a Hendrick driver wasn’t in the top 10 was April 9, 2006. Finishing 11th, Johnson was Hendrick’s top performer that day at Texas Motor Speedway.
QUOTES
CASEY MEARS, DRIVER, NO. 5 CHEEZ-IT/CARQUEST CHEVROLET (ON THE JULY RACE AT POCONO.): “We’ve had a lot of trouble this year with high-speed racetracks, and Pocono was no different for us. It seems like every time we go to big tracks, we just can’t get the handling right. We’re working on it, and we seem to be improving. We’ve just got to concentrate on qualifying well and starting up front instead of fighting that in the beginning of these races. Clean air definitely helps with the handling of these cars, too.”
MEARS (ON THE DIFFICULTIES OF POCONO.): “Pocono can be really frustrating. It’s nearly impossible to get your car perfect throughout the entire track. So you have to be able to give some of the handling in one turn, to get better handling in parts of the track where it’s a little more important. You want your car to be the best in Turn 3, so that you can exit that turn well and get all the speed you can down the long frontstretch.”
ALAN GUSTAFSON, CREW CHIEF, NO. 5 CHEEZ-IT/CARQUEST CHEVROLET (ON WHAT THE TEAM LEARNED FROM ITS LAST RACE AT POCONO.): ”We struggled at Pocono the first time around so this time we know what areas to focus on, and I think that’s the biggest thing. I guess you learn as much from your mistakes as your successes so we need to learn from those and know what to go back and make better. It wasn’t a great weekend for us. But there’s a good opportunity to fix it.”
GUSTAFSON (ON WHAT THE TEAM WILL ADJUST.): “It’s just a lot of the same things we’ve struggled with at high-speed racetracks. We just really struggled with the car being free into the corner, wanting to turn really good through the corner and then tight in the middle and then free off. Pocono compounded that with the three different corners. We had a little bit different situation in each corner, and now we know to what severity we have those issues, and we can work on it.”
GUSTAFSON (ON POCONO RACEWAY.): “Pocono is long. It’s a very big track; the long front straightway makes Turn 3 important, which is a very flat corner. You’ve really got to get through that corner well and off of Turn 3 well to get down that front straightaway to run a good lap. Then you’re going so fast into Turn 1, and it’s the highest-banked corner, which means that you get a lot of load there that you don’t see in other corners. Issues that we have in Turns 2 and 3 are usually similar to each other. Then Turn 1 is completely different because of so much load, and that is definitely the problem we had. We’ll have to do a better job of addressing those issues and making the car more consistent in load applications. We’ve got our work cut out for us on that.”
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