Texas hold'em: Johnny Benson hopes to stay on point in Truck race

By Rea White - Associate Editor

Thursday, October 30, 2008

Bill Davis Racing's Johnny Benson has a 31-point lead in the series standings with three races left this season.

Rusty Jarrett
Getty Images for NASCAR

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Johnny Benson says he doesn't plan to approach races any differently in the coming weeks, even as he and his Bill Davis Racing team try to protect their 31-point lead in the NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series.

Benson has been in a fierce battle with Kevin Harvick Inc.'s Ron Hornaday, the defending series champion, in a run that has seen the pair swap the lead and watch it vary dramatically from week to week.

Now Benson is heading to Texas Motor Speedway for this weekend's Chevy Silverado 350k at a track where he has a best finish of second, which he has earned twice. He has four top-10 finishes there, but only one in his last four races at the track. He finished third at Texas in June, snapping a three-race streak of finishes of 27th or worse because of mechanical failures.

Hornaday, on the other hand, won there in June.

“Texas is cool," Benson said of the 1.5-mile track. "I like that track. It’s a fast race track, and it’s a finesse-style track, but it’s also very difficult to be fast there. Even though from the air it looks like Charlotte, or it looks like Atlanta, or it looks like other tracks, it’s not. It’s a fun place to race, and we’ve had some good success there, and we’ve had some failure there. Three races in a row we had engine problems, and I’m hoping we don’t run into that again. I’ve always ran good there, so I’m looking forward to it."

Benson said that his team is taking races one at a time. They have not changed their approach at all just because the season is nearing its end, instead hoping that by doing things the same way they have, they'll continue the type of performance that has led to five wins this season.

“We’re not approaching anything differently than what we need to," Benson said. "We’re just trying to run as fast as we can and do the best job that we can, and we’re really not doing anything different than we’ve done all season to get us here.

"Sure, you’re going to look around and you’re going to see what’s around and see what’s happening, but I don’t think we really did anything more or different earlier in the year either because they all count the same. I don’t see any big changes.”