BRAD COLEMAN – No. 27 Cottonelle/Meijer Ford Fusion – YOU HAVE A GREAT HISTORY AT KENTUCKY SPEEDWAY. “Yes, I won here in Kentucky in a Ford Taurus in 2006, it was my second ARCA race. In my first ARCA race, I finished second, and then came here to Kentucky for my second race. We had awesome Ford Taurus and won that race.”
IS KENTUCKY ONE OF YOUR FAVORITE TRACKS? “It is. It’s a really fun track. It’s really wide and surprisingly flat. It’s one of the flattest one-and-a-half mile tracks we go to, if not the flattest. It’s a really good place for side-by-side racing. It gets to two and two-and-a-half grooves. It gets bumpier and bumpier every year, so it makes it a little tougher, but it’s fun.”
HOW DO YOU RACE THE BUMPS? “You just hope you have a good suspension set-up and good shocks. It’s really hard to prepare for the bumps. We went to the seven-post rig for the first time this week. And you can really see how bumpy the track is. The car is bouncing everywhere. That’s what you’ve got to do to prepare for it. You have to do a lot of simulation testing. That was our first time to use the seven-post rig this year and the first time in long time. We’ve just got to keep doing it.”
SINCE PRACTICE WAS CANCELLED YESTERDAY, DO YOU DO ANYTHING DIFFERENT FOR THE RACE, SINCE IT’S NOW A ONE-DAY SHOW? “You can’t let the weather throw you off. This first part of the year has trained me to not let it affect me. I think the first four races, we qualified once and that was Daytona. You can’t let it affect you. If it rains, you hang out. There’s nothing you can do about and there’s no reason to stress. It’s good training at the first part of the year. When it rained yesterday, I wasn’t worried. This is one of my favorite tracks and I’ve been here a lot and I have a lot of laps, I was ‘oh, no big deal.’ I don’t care if we just qualify and go straight to racing.”
CAN YOU TALK ABOUT YOUR COMFORT LEVEL AT KENTUCKY? “Well, any track that I’ve been to, I have that comfort level. It doesn’t matter if it’s here or Gateway or Nashville or any race track, even Lowe’s now. Any track that I’ve been to, if it rains, it’s not a big deal.”
KENTUCKY IS KNOWN AS A BREAKOUT WIN TRACK. LAST YEAR YOU FINISHED SECOND, IS TONIGHT YOUR NIGHT? “It’s tough to say. We’ve been improving our cars a lot this year. I think we’ve improved since where we were at the beginning of the year. We’re not where we want to be yet, it’s going to be hard to beat the JR Motorsports cars, the Roush Fenway cars, and they have all that Cup testing. It’s hard to beat those guys because they have all those resources and they have hundreds of people on our team and we have about 30. For where were are in Nashville and how many people we have working at Baker Curb Racing, we’re doing a really good job.”
WHAT WOULD IT MEAN TO YOU TO WIN AT KENTUCKY? “Well, it really doesn’t matter where I get my first win, just as long as it happens. It would be cool to win here because this is where I had my first ARCA win.”
