NASCAR

BNS: Loudon II: Matt Kobyluck race notes

Mohegan Sun Racing's Matt Kobyluck can't seem to catch a break at New Hampshire International Speedway. Armed with the No. 40 Chevrolet Monte Carlo that was rebuilt after wrecking in the NASCAR Grand National Division, Busch North Series race at the ...

Edited: Dec 22, 2003, 5:59 AM

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Mohegan Sun Racing's Matt Kobyluck can't seem to catch a break at New Hampshire International Speedway. Armed with the No. 40 Chevrolet Monte Carlo that was rebuilt after wrecking in the NASCAR Grand National Division, Busch North Series race at the one-mile track in July, Kobyluck was running fifteenth late in Saturday's New Hampshire 125 when lapped traffic caused an accident that eliminated him from the race, leaving him 28th in the final rundown.

Kobyluck, a native of Uncasville, Connecticut, took his newly rebuilt car and applied the setup he used in July, and found success right off the bat, posting the ninth fastest practice time in the first session and improving to fifth in the second session. But in qualifying, oil on the track left it significantly different from what it was in practice and that cost Kobyluck over a second, leaving him fourteenth on the starting grid.

"One of the early guys to go out dumped a boatload of oil on the track," he said. "Everybody was just terrible from that point on, nobody was close to what they were doing in practice after that. We got the car good during practice and got a good qualifying setup, but we went out there and the track wasn't even close to what it was during practice. There was so much speedi-dry and stuff out there. It's just one of those deals that we can't do anything about. We did the best we could with the circumstances that we had. We've got a good car, so I'm not really worried about it, we'll make some headway to get to the front on Saturday."

Running in the top twenty, and making progress, Kobyluck and team had plans for changes to the car for when the time to make a pit stop arose. That opportunity came under a lap 38 caution. He came out of the pits in ninth place after a gas and adjustments stop, taking advantage of the next caution, which came out on lap 68, to put on fresh right-side tires.

Returning to the race in eighteenth place, Kobyluck found himself mired in traffic. Lapped cars lining up in the front of the field on the restart were also needing to be dealt with, and he fought with both lead lap and lapped cars to come to fifteenth with fifteen laps to go. But just six laps later, his race took a turn for the worse.

"A couple of lapped cars on the bottom were trying to pass each other while I was trying to go around both of them on the outside," he explained. "One of the lapped cars hit the other and the second lapped car came up and hit me in the left front. I had to get out of the throttle a little bit to keep from hitting the wall, and when I did, that the 56 [Martin Truex, Jr.] that was right behind me had nowhere to go, got into the back of me and spun me up into the wall. It wasn't his fault, it was the lapped traffic again.

"It's just a bad ending, that's all," Kobyluck continued. "I didn't really have that good a car, we adjusted on it all day but it just kept getting tighter and tighter. We were running back where we shouldn't have been, mostly because we had to keep coming down pit road to make adjustments. We had to fight our way back through and then come in and adjust on it to make it better and do that all over again."

Kobyluck quickly put New Hampshire behind him and looked forward to the next race, which will be Friday's MBNA America 150 at Dover International Speedway. Kobyluck is the defending winner of the race.

"We had similar circumstances last year," he said. "We got wrecked at Loudon with just a few laps to go, and then we went out and won Dover. We're going back to Dover with the same car, we haven't touched it since last year, so we'll take it back to Dover and try to get the same result as last year."

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