Kasey Kahne points to better equipment behind his top-12 resurgence
Richard Petty Motorsports' Kasey Kahne is 12th in the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series standings after 18 races this season.
// David Griffin, NASCAR Scene
JOLIET, Ill. – Richard Petty Motorsports driver Kasey Kahne credits better equipment and improved pit stops as the reason why he has been able to climb to 12th in the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series standings heading into Saturday night's LifeLock.com 400 at Chicagoland Speedway.
By finishing 15th in last weekend's Cup race at Daytona International Speedway, Kahne moved back into the all-important top 12 with eight races remaining before The Chase For The Sprint Cup begins Sept. 20 at New Hampshire Motor Speedway.
"We’ve had a good couple of months with cars and engines," said Kahne, who hasn't been in the top 12 in the standings since early April. "Everything has been getting better on that side of things. [RPM] has done a nice job giving their teams and drivers better equipment, so I think [we] keep building on that."
After winning his first race of the season earlier this month on the road course in Sonoma, Calif., Kahne climbed higher in the standings the following week by finishing 10th at New Hampshire. Now it's just a matter of whether Kahne can run consistently enough in the final eight races before the Chase gets under way at New Hampshire, something he wasn't able to do in 2008.
"We can have good cars every weekend," Kahne said. "Our pit crew has been great. Last week, we gained spots every time on pit road; they’re doing an awesome job. We need to keep that kind of stuff up, and I think that we’ll have a really good shot at making the Chase.”
Following Saturday night’s race, the Allstate 400 at Indianapolis Motor Speedway is the next race on the Cup schedule on July 26, and Kahne jokes that he has done so much tire testing for Goodyear at the famed facility that his No. 9 Dodge will be the car to beat.
"I think that I had tested six or seven times there, and we should be the favorite going into that race with all the testing that we’ve done," Kahne said.
Kahne is also confident that this year's Cup race at Indy won't be anything like the caution-filled fiasco there a year ago when tire issues forced NASCAR to throw caution flags on a regular basis.
"I feel like with our car, we know where we are going to start when we go to Indianapolis, and I’m excited about that," Kahne said. "I’m excited that I was able to be at some of those tests and work on that tire with Goodyear. They just did a good job. I feel like they gave us a good tire. They’ve done everything they could to make a tire last on that surface and that race track with those long straightaways. I think there’s a lot to it because it seemed like a pretty tough process."
