Cool Down Lap: Ford 300 and 2009

Last Updated on Tuesday, 30 November 1999 00:00 Written by Amy Henderson Wednesday, 25 November 2009 04:50

The 2009 NASCAR season ended this week at Homestead-Miami Speedway, and though the No. 28 U.S. Border Patrol Chevy didn’t handle the way Kenny and his Jay Robinson Racing team would have liked, they were able to use strategy-and a little luck-to grab a 17th place finish and move up a spot in the car owner point standings to 19th, which will mean that the team will take home roughly a quarter of a million dollars from NASCAR’s point fund to build toward 2010.  Kenny finished 11th in driver points, just 21 outside the top ten, capping Jay Robinson Racing’s best season in twelve years.  

“Homestead went pretty bad, but we should be put in jail for robbing 17th position,” Kenny says.  “The car never handled good at all.  It was tight right off the truck and tight on the corners the whole time.  We qualified way in the back.  We rarely qualify that bad-we’re usually good for 20th to 28 in qualifying, but I think we were about 38th.  My car owner, Jay Robinson, rolled the dice.  I told him he needs to go to Vegas he’s so lucky.  We worked on the car and it got better early in the race and then I got the drive around.  From then, our strategy was to keep the car topped off with gas.  And then here we are 23rd or 25th  and all the leaders start pitting and then the caution comes out.I it was beautiful!  So there I am at the of the race in 15th trying to hold off Mike Bliss and my brother Mike, who had a really fast car.”

Kenny reports that he will return to the No. 28 in 2010, and despite an ongoing sponsorship hunt, the team will run the entire NASCAR Nationwide Series schedule by doing what they always have-making more out of less.

“It stings pretty hard that I finished 11th in the points,” says Kenny.  “Last year understood, because we were still building the team, but I know I’m way better than that-I’m a damn good driver- so that hurts.  We had some mechanical failures in the summer, and without those, we could have finished probably eighth or ninth in the points.  So, it’s on to next year.  I’m excited to get going-we’ve got a lot of new things on horizon.  We’ll have new car that we will run five times in the Nationwide Series.  We will continue to work on sponsorship.  We have sponsorship for eight races as of right now.  We will run all the races next year.  Some owners will not go to the races if they don’t have the money, but  all our cars and our motors are used, and will race used tires from the Cup guys who don’t make races that we can get for half price.  We can go to the track and if it takes 100% to go to the track, we can go and race on about 40%  of that and finish 20th every week.  We often start the race on 5-lap tires because a set of new tires costs about $1700, but we can buy used for $800.  We can race on the purse money.”

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