Travis Kvapil Wins at Nashville, Six Ford F-150s in Top-10

Travis Kvapil Wins at Nashville, Six Ford F-150s in Top-10

It was pretty awesome. It took our K&N Ford half the race to get the track position and the right adjustment in it. We started practice yesterday and really weren’t any good. I expected to come here to be a contender. This is the truck we won with in Michigan with and finished second in Kentucky. We had a good note on it an always had speed every time we take it to the race track. We were 10th or 15th yesterday off the truck and we ran a lot of laps and made a lot of changes. The team really busted their tail in practice yesterday and the team engineer made all the right moves yesterday. We didn’t spend much time on qualifying effort and then got ready for qualifying.

We started the race and it was a little too tight, but I felt like a lot of that attributed because to the fact that I was back there 10th and having a lot of traffic. Mike (Beam, crew chief) told me what the truck was doing and wanted to do some air pressure adjustments. That first stop, we made an air pressure adjustment off the tires and really lift the truck up and really brought it to life. The lap times we could run in the long haul were just amazing, we were three-tenths better than everybody and my truck was just driving good and we didn’t make any adjustments on the second stop, just made a fuel run. I want to say, that I mentioned it in both the TV and radio interviews that I was thinking the last 10 or 15 laps about Bobby Hamilton and the champion that he is. It’s pretty special to come to his home turf and win in front of his home crowd and get the guitar is pretty special.”

DID YOU KNOW YOUR TRUCK WAS THAT FAST? “I wasn’t sure. I knew our truck was so good at the end of practice yesterday. Mike, my crew chief told me before the race that if up there a bit, that we could really dial in with air pressure and so I believed in that. This track was pretty tough, for some reason everybody was sliding around and didn’t have a lot of grip and complained about being really tight in the corners. You have to be really disciplined in being a driver not driving in the corner real hard, not charging the corners, not using a lot of brake. But once I found my rhythm, then we had our truck adjusted after the first stop.

We had some really good lap times and after the second stop and we started racing in the long runs. We knew that it was just a matter of time. My truck settled down and started running consistent lap times. I’m just glad we raced green until the end. My truck was so good that I didn’t want to get caught up by a short run in the end.”

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