Meijer300

June 13, 2009
Sparta, KY

Derrike will be driving in Kentucky with the flipNbags Nationwide series car. He said, "This coming weekend we will be heading back to the Nationwide Series with flipNbags.com sponsorship at Kentucky Speedway. The entire crew and I am looking forward to improving on our race at Charlotte. We are going to go pull this car down as well with the hope of improving the characteristics of the car. We are making some additional changes to this car as well. flipNbags will once again be at Kentucky with the showcar and further promotion of the flipNbag brand."

In the first practice, Derrike was 33rd fastest with a time of 31.921 and speed of 169.168. In the second practice, he was 25th fastest with a time of 31.597 and speed of 170.902.

In Qualifying, Derrike produced his fastest lap of 31.729 with a speed of 170.191. At the end of the round, this was fast enough for 28th position where Derrike will start the race.

Derrike started the race in 28th position and finished in 22nd position.

After the race Derrike said, "This past weekend's race at Kentucky came off pretty well for us. We practiced better than we qualified which was 28th. We did not adjust for the warmer weather as well as we should have and the car was very loose in qualifying so I took it a bit easy and calculated not to make any mistakes since we had a lot of flipNbag people there and various other friends.

"The one problem we are faced with is that we are a non-lock in car and that does not allow us the luxury of practicing in a race configuration like the top 30 lock in cars, so when the race comes, we are off on the chassis. Like Saturday night when we took the tape off the front of the car and lowered the air pressure, coupled with the night time we were very tight and the car would absolutely not turn. We had to work hard all night to get the car to respond. I made a few mistakes which hurt us as well. All in all, not a bad effort and the finish is respectable for our small race team.

"As for the pull down rig we used, it is a fixture that you put the car on and there are load cells and platforms in which you can actually pull the front of the car down and simulate the car going through its travel as it would on the race track. You then can measure geometry points, look at camber and caster, the coil bind of the springs in Nationwide and the bump stops on the Cup cars. We still need to correlate with what the pull down rig shows us and what the race track actually shows us to better understand and further our learning of what is needed. This has been the first time we have had the opportunity to get on there and learn. Hopefully we will be able to aid in the bump stop configurations on the Cup car when we run it next."