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BUSCH: Montreal: Steve Wallace Friday notes
All NASCAR Busch Series practice has now concluded prior to Saturday's qualifying session and the inaugural running of the NAPA Auto Parts 200 presented by Dodge at Montreal's famed Circuit Gilles Villeneuve.19 year-old Steve Wallace has impressed ...
Edited: Apr 16, 2008, 12:40 AM
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All NASCAR Busch Series practice has now concluded prior to Saturday's qualifying session and the inaugural running of the NAPA Auto Parts 200 presented by Dodge at Montreal's famed Circuit Gilles Villeneuve.19 year-old Steve Wallace has impressed all thus far in preparations for what will be only his second career road course start.
After a top-ten run in Thursday's first practice session, Wallace posted, in front of an enormous practice day crowd, the fastest time of Friday's morning session; he followed it up with a top-ten in the final practice on Friday afternoon as well. His best lap of 103.086 seconds (94.605 MPH) in Friday's final practice session put him tenth fastest and seeded him in the seventh of nine groupings for Saturday's 12:10 PM ET European-style qualifying session (espn2-Live).
STEVE WALLACE, DRIVER, NO.66 HOMELIFE COMMUNITIES DODGE CHARGER
ON LOCAL RESPONSE TO THE RACE: "I'm really excited about how well we've been received in Montreal. This race is a happening just like the F1 race here. Everywhere you look, they're talking about the race; on TV, radio, billboards, I mean everywhere. There's a just huge buzz about the race here. I turned on television this morning and there was a woman on a talk show talking about me. I just hope it was all good stuff, because I have no clue what she said; it was in French. The practice day crowd today was enormous for a Busch stand-alone event. You would have thought it was race day; the stands were packed; there were people everywhere."
ON HIS RACE WEEKEND OVERALL: "I've had a blast running here. It's a really technical and demanding track, but once you start to learn it, it's really fun. My HomeLife Communities team has given me a very good car this weekend. We've been in the top-ten for most of the weekend and I feel that if we can finally get a little luck, we've got a good shot of finishing there, or at least in the top-15. There's a ton of road course "ringers" and guys like Patrick Carpentier that have a ton of experience here; they're going to be tough to beat, but we're going to give it everything we've got. There's a lot to be said for having experience in these cars too, so we'll see."
ON HIS PRACTICE RESULTS: "I'm really excited about our final practice results. There towards the end of the session, it was madness, everyone was cutting through the chicanes just trying to post a fast number so that they could get in a later qualifying grouping. Even the fastest guys, the road course "ringers," were doing it. I don't think that your qualifying grouping is that important though; I'd rather see what we might be capable of doing in qualifying. So, I opted to make pretty much a totally legit lap and we still ended up in the top-ten; hopefully that'll translate to the real deal tomorrow. I think it was pretty obvious to everyone here that our fast lap in session three wasn't totally legit; we were almost 3/4 of a second faster than the field. I got into one of the chicanes a little hard and had to cut off some of the corner. We were going to have a great lap that time, but not quite that great."
ON THE KEYS TO SUCCESS IN MONTREAL: "I have one word for you: brakes. Almost everyone here has been having pretty severe brake issues, with both heat and wear. I mean, F1 cars have trouble with brakes here, so you knew we would. I'm not sure that most people anticipated how bad the trouble would be for a lot of teams though. I think you're going to see a lot of people just riding around and conserving their equipment for the first part of the race, because if you're not totally conscious of your brakes and really taking care of them, you're not going to make it to the end tomorrow. As always, but even more so here, you've got to stay out of trouble too. This track is very tight and there are a ton of blind corners here. It's very easy to get caught up in someone else's mess. Just like any road course race, pit strategy will probably play a huge part in the outcome as well; hopefully we'll have the best one."
-credit: rwi
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