NASCAR Camping World Trucks Series
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TRUCKS: Ron Hornaday Driver Diary - Pocono
In racing, the highs of winning are short lived - once the clock strikes midnight, the new week starts and you look toward the next track...
Ron Hornaday Jr.  | http://www.kevinharvickinc.com/  |  Posted July 30, 2010   Long Pond, PA
Ron Hornaday celebrates after winning the AAA Insurance 200 NASCAR Camping World Truck Series race at O’Reilly Raceway Park in Indianapolis.(Photo: Getty Images)
The Inaugural Truck Race at the ‘Tricky Triangle’

I’m so happy to finally be able to lead off this week’s diary by saying we won. I couldn’t be more thrilled to finally get the monkey off our backs. I knew going into last weekend’s race at O’Reilly Raceway Park (ORP) that we had a good chance to come away with a victory. I’m just glad that the No. 33 team had awesome pit stops and that my crew chief Ernie Cope, made all the right calls. I knew that we had the equipment and the people at Kevin Harvick Inc. (KHI) to do it, we just needed a little luck and we finally got it.

In racing the highs of winning are short lived. Once the clock strikes midnight, the new week has started and you have to look toward the next track. This weekend the Truck Series travels to an inaugural track: Pocono (Pa.) Raceway. Most of the Truck Series drivers this weekend will be seeing the track for the first time, but I have raced at Pocono twice before, in 2001 when I was driving in the Cup Series for A.J. Foyt. We never really had too much luck there, but I still have quite a few laps around the track.

I’m looking forward to getting in a Truck at Pocono. I think it will be a lot of fun, plus the race is short enough that there will be a lot of action. I think we will be four or five-wide going down into turn one on the first lap and the fans will really enjoy that type of side-by-side racing. I think the biggest challenge for me will be just remembering the track and getting used to some of the new improvements that they have made since I was there in 2001. A few years ago they installed new curbs which are a little taller and smoother than the ones I remember. I think the curbs will be important, because you will have to hit them going down into the corners. I also think in order to have a good handling truck you are going to need a good shock package, because the track is really bumpy.
VIDEO: Last Lap Indy/ORP Trucks - Hornaday Wins Ron Hornaday in victory lane at O'Reilly Raceway Park. (Image: SPEED)

NASCAR has also made a change in qualifying, so we will have a new format for this weekend’s race. They are going to stagger the trucks going out for qualifying based on practice speeds. So, the slowest trucks from practice will qualify first and the fastest will qualify last. There will be three trucks on the race track at one time. I’m actually excited to do it that way, because it will take less time to qualify and I’m already a little used to that format after running the Nationwide Series road-course race a few weeks back at Road America in Wisconsin. I have to commend NASCAR for coming up with new and improved ways to do things and always trying to make our sport more exciting for the fans. Plus, with the faster trucks going out at the end, we probably won’t know who will be on the pole until the last truck is finished.

A lot of people have asked me who I think will have an advantage in Pocono or if it will be an even playing field. I have to say both. No one really knows how the trucks will react on the 2.5-mile track. Every single team is going to have to guess at a set up. However, this weekend Cup regulars Denny Hamlin, Kasey Kahne and my KHI teammate Elliott Sadler probably have a slight advantage over everyone else. They have raced at Pocono in recent years and Denny and Kasey have had a lot of success at the track. They will probably catch on a little faster than some of the other drivers. I think that me, Todd Bodine, Mike Skinner and other Truck Series regulars who have raced at the track before in other types of vehicles will be right there with that group because we know the trucks, we have seen the track, but we are also way more familiar with the vehicles that we are climbing into than the regulars in other series are.

I think too that everyone might be surprised and a rookie might step up at this track. I say that because when you come to a new track you don’t have any expectations, you don’t have any old habits to break. The drivers who have raced at Pocono before are going to have habits and things that we do that might not work, but rookies like Austin Dillon don’t have those routines.
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Ron Hornaday Jr.

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