LONG POND, Pa. — Kasey Kahne resents, a little bit, the assumption that he and his Budweiser Dodge team have gone from zeroes to heroes since the NASCAR circus made its annual spring stop on home turf in Charlotte.
So does team director Kenny Francis.
“Everybody says that but we’ve been running good all year,” Francis said. “Started off, we ran really good at Daytona. Went to California, and we honestly had a car that could have had a run at the 99 (Carl Edwards) in California. We had something messed up with the way we had the jack post and we didn’t have the jack work right all day, and ended up — they could not get the tires off right.”
“In Vegas, the guy (Kasey) had flu and we finished eighth. Atlanta we were so-so, ran 20th, learned some stuff. And then you know, we had a good run at Texas going and something broke the splitter off of it, crazy. And then we had a good run at Phoenix going and cut a right-front tire, and we had a good run at Talladega and led some laps.
“We’ve had a really good season going. We’ve stayed kind of quiet and nobody talks about us a lot, and that’s fine with me. I’m sure Budweiser wants everybody to talk about it.”
Francis has a right to be a little miffed at the assumption that his team was lying in the weeds until now.
“Yeah, I feel like — I felt like, anyway, and the whole company has been like we are going to take this slow and steady and build it back up from where we are at, and we’ve still got a long way to go. We keep learning every week and we try to get better every week. It’s tough sledding out there, for sure.”
The pit-road mishap that set the team back to 38th during Sunday’s Pocono 500 is a perfect example. The front changer didn’t get the word that the stop had been changed from a four-tire stop to two and ran some of the lugs off when Kahne abruptly left the pits.
“We had three of them [lugs] off,” Francis said. “We definitely had to come in. If he only knocked one off, we probably would have stayed out because the official didn’t see it.”
The victories at Lowe’s Motor Speedway — the first one coming after fans voted him into the All-Star Race following a fifth-place finish in the Showdown qualifier — served notice that nothing major was wrong with the No. 9 team.
“As a driver, I didn’t feel like my confidence was down,” Kahne said. “I went to the track every week and I felt like I was ready to win and ready to — I went in with a good attitude. But until I actually won this year, the All-Star Race, I realized that I was leaving a little bit out there and wasn’t communicating probably like I should have been with Kenny and maybe I wasn’t communicating quite as well as I have in the past.
“So since then, I’ve done a better job, and it’s just kind of like everything is clicking at the same time. I don’t think it started at the All-Star Race. Like Kenny said, we’ve had good cars all year. But the Charlotte test, I feel like we hit on some things and we had a great car at Darlington, until I ran it into the wall. To me, that was where it all started, the Charlotte test and Darlington, you know, we were hitting on some things at that point.”