The season finally starts full-bore

Running consecutive weeks for the first time this season, Brandon Whitt and the #38 Cure Autism Now Ford F-150 team head to the 1.5-mile Lowe’s Motor Speedway this week for Friday night’s Infineon 200 NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series race. It is the fifth race of the season.

Coming off a spectacular run at Mansfield (Ohio) Motorsports Speedway, Whitt is looking forward to a second race this week, instead of the three-to-four week break that has been the norm the first part of the season. Whitt finished 18th at Mansfield but only because he was “punted” on a restart 11 laps from the end while running seventh, losing a shot at an easy top 10 and possible top-five finish. He was 14th at Martinsville, Va., the race prior to Mansfield. The Cure Autism Now Ford has been strong on the superspeedways, though, a wreck caused by other trucks relegating him to a 22nd-place finish in the season-opener at Daytona and an untimely caution flag leading to a 20th-place finish at Atlanta. In both superspeedway races, Whitt was an obvious top-15 contender.

Following in the footsteps of former California phenoms Jimmie Johnson and Kevin Harvick, Whitt has moved to this level of major league stock car racing. He comes to the Trucks from a successful stint in NASCAR’s Winston West Series – where he qualified on the outside pole for the California race last Spring – and the NASCAR Southwest Touring Series, where he was the 2002 Rookie of the Year.

Jerry Pitts is a veteran crew chief who worked in the NASCAR Nextel Cup Series with Bill Elliott, then moved to lead Eric Norris to the 2002 NASCAR Winston West championship. Marty Gaunt is general manager, coming to the team after a winning stint with Penske Racing.

The Cure Autism Now Foundation is a non-profit organization dedicated to promoting and funding autism research and accelerating the pace of scientific progress toward effective treatments and a cure. The organization is the largest private funder of biological research in autism, providing more than $12 million in grants since its inception in 1995.

The thoughts of Cure Autism Now Ford driver Brandon Whitt heading into Charlotte: “I keep hearing how the Cup schedule is so tough and all, and it looks like it could be pretty grueling, but what we’ve gone through the first part of the season with the Trucks has to be a lot harder. Going a month in between races, and reaching the end of May and just now running the fifth race of the year, makes it tough.

“If it were up to me, we’d run every week . . . maybe twice a week. That’s what we’re all here for is to race and to run. Racing is the kind of thing you have to do regularly and consistently to be any good at. Some sports are set up to do awhile, take some time off, and then do again – like golf or tennis or something. Sports like baseball and racing, you have to do it as often as you can.

“True, you need some time to build and rebuild trucks, and to prepare. And I know NASCAR has done all it can to give us a really good schedule. But I’m glad we’re moving forward now and running more regularly. Mansfield last week, then Lowe’s this week. . . we take a week off and then go to Dover, Texas, Memphis, Milwaukee, Kansas, Kentucky and Gateway before we have another weekend off. After Gateway, we might be screaming for mercy but I doubt it.

“From a racer’s standpoint, you just want to race. Not racing is harder than anything you can do. You can practice and you can work on trucks and you can bench race but, after awhile, it just doesn’t fill the time too well.

“From a team standpoint, some of the breaks here – especially at the first of the year – come in handy. (The season-opener at) Daytona can mess up a lot of trucks, and you can use that break between there at Atlanta (the second race, a month after Daytona) to get in line for the rest of the season. The break between Atlanta and (the third race at) Martinsville started to drag a little bit, and the (month-long) break between there at Mansfield (Ohio, last week’s fourth race of the season) seemed like it took forever.

“Now we start finding out who used that off-time wisely. We worked hard to get all of our stuff ready for this upcoming stretch of races, and get ourselves in a position to do well in all of them. You can’t cover every possibility of what could happen in a long string of races, but you can cover most of them. I believe our guys, (general manager) Marty Gaunt and (crew chief) Jerry Pitts have put together a pretty good plan, and know what we need to do.

“To me, these string of races coming up could be the most important part of the season. Where you stand at the end of this string will depend on what you did with all of the off-time before we got into it.

“We feel this Cure Autism Now Ford team made good use of its time, and we’re ready to go.”