Lame-duck status no deterrent for David Stremme in Atlanta qualifying
Penske Racing's David Stremme won't return to the organization's No. 12 NASCAR Sprint Cup car next season. // LaDon George, NASCAR Scene
HAMPTON, Ga. – David Stremme will start ninth in the Pep Boys Auto 500 on Sunday, but don’t correlate that qualifying effort at Atlanta Motor Speedway with the announcement Tuesday that Brad Keselowski will replace Stremme in the No. 12 Penske Racing car next season in the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series.
“Every week I just give them my best, just like I have been all year,” Stremme said Saturday after his qualifying lap. “We haven’t had the greatest of years. I know that. We have run very well. We don’t have results to show for it.
“I still have a job to do. I will give 100 percent. Where I end up next year, I don’t know. There is not a lot out there. We’re talking to some people. But right now is to go out here Sunday night and do my best.”
Stremme said he has known for at least a month that he likely would not be in the car next year. He is 31st in the standings in his first year at Penske Racing and third full season of Cup racing.
“It doesn’t matter if I’m out at the end of the year or they could be paying me $10 million to try to win the race, I run the same,” Stremme said. “In this day and age it’s hard, especially in the Cup series, to come right in and get going. … I’m thankful I got to drive this car and each week I get to run it, I will give 100 percent.”
A former Chip Ganassi Racing driver, the 32-year-old Stremme finished 33rd in the season standings in 2006 and 24th in 2007. He had 16 top-10 finishes driving for Rusty Wallace Racing in the Nationwide Series last year.
“There’s a lot of people who believe in me and can still give me an opportunity,” Stremme said. “We have to work through [things]. I have another year left here [on my contract] and we have to work through that. Rusty has seen what I did for his program last year, being able to go in and help ... and we were contenders all year with a startup team.”
Stremme also spent a portion of last year as a test driver for Penske Racing, but Stremme said that didn’t give him a foundation to run well for the organization as the replacement for Ryan Newman.
“You don’t get to test on the same tire, you don’t get to test with the [crew], cars change. That testing, it was more like go out and try stuff,” Stremme said. “You don’t get to test for tracks that you run on, you don’t get to run on the tires that you run on.
“It’s difficult. I struggled at qualifying earlier in the season and I feel like we’ve stepped up the later part of the year. A lot of it is the team just working together.”
The team continues to work together despite Stremme’s impending departure.
“The car is pretty good,” Stremme said. “We unloaded not so great and worked on it. We had notes to go off of from the spring, and that helped quite a bit. … All the of the guys have done a good job and we’ll keep moving forward.”
