Schrader planning busy holiday weekend
Ken Schrader, newly named the Hall of Fame Racing driver for this weekend, will be taking on more than the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series in the next few days.
The versatile driver plans to leave Auto Club Speedway, site of Sunday's Cup race, quickly to compete in Monday's ARCA race at the DuQuoin (Ill.) State Fairgrounds.
For Schrader, that's just business as usual. The driver generally runs in a string of local races during the course of the season. But racing in California in the Pepsi 500 Sunday night - which he must first make the field for since the team is outside the top 35 in owners points - and then again on Monday would be taxing.
Schrader is making his second appearance in the Hall of Fame Toyota after the team opted to put him in the car at Bristol last weekend as well. Now, though, he'll add the Southern Illinois 100 ARCA race to the schedule. If he makes the Cup field, he'll spend the early hours of Labor Day making a cross-country trek to take on the 1-mile dirt oval hours after running on the 2-mile paved Auto Club track.
Schrader has made this trek in the past.
“I’ve been pretty fortunate that I’ve been able to do it the last couple of years," he said. "… Tony Stewart has been awful good to me. After the race, I’ll get on a helicopter with Tony and fly to the airport. We’ll get on his plane and he’ll drop me off at the Carbondale, Ill., airport, I’ll hop in the rental car, grab a shower at the hotel and then meet the boys in the lobby because I think practice is at 9 a.m."
He says that the flight is actually a lot of fun since it gives him time to catch up with Stewart.
"Tony and I usually talk all the way to Illinois, which isn’t that long of a flight, it’s three-and-a-half hours or something, but when you’re going through those time zones – you get on the plane at 11 p.m. in Fontana and you’re all pumped up and then it’s 5 a.m. in Illinois when you land it’s kind of like ‘Oh shoot, this could be a long day.’ We’ve won DuQuoin the last two years, so we’re looking forward to going back there," he said.
It's a credit to the friendships NASCAR competitors have crafted that drivers are so willing to help one another out in events like this.
Schrader says that if Stewart, who lives in Indiana, had been unable to help that someone else would have - even if it meant a late-night detour on the way to Charlotte.
As to the actual racing, Schrader downplayed the impact of adjusting to cars and tracks. The 53-year-old has done this type of thing virtually his entire life.
“There’s no adjustment on this stuff," he said. "You’ve got this circle, you sit in a car, you’ve only got a couple of pedals that do anything and you go around the circle as fast as you can."
