DFS NASCAR: O'Reilly Auto Parts 500 Practice Notes

Final Practice at O’Reilly Auto Parts 500

Saturday, April 7^th 1:30 p.m. ET

55 minutes in length (rain shortened to 25 minutes)

Weather

Cloudy, light mist, 33 degrees ambient air temps, track temp is 48 degrees, 19 mph winds

Penalized Drivers

Ryan Newman 15 minutes at end of practice

Top-20 Speeds (one lap)

Best 10-lap Averages

Items of note:

• Not many cars are on the track to start practice with bad weather and low temps not being close to what race day will hold
• Kurt Busch wants to make as long a run as possible in this session
• Kevin Harvick is putting sticker tires on his car and would like to make a 15-lap run to watch for tire fall off over that span.
• Jimmie Johnson has a 29-race winless streak currently but two of his previous long winless streaks ended at Texas Motor Speedway as part of his seven career wins at the track.
• Erik Jones' Crew Chief said they are still not comfortable with tire wear at the track and may work on that this session.
• Several drivers have held the top spot this session and have seemingly changed spots each time someone completes another lap.
• With five minutes left, four drivers haven’t been on track yet
• Kyle Larson and Kurt Busch were racing each other with four minutes left in practice to see how the aerodynamics worked when near other cars on the track at speed.
• Austin Dillon said his car was a little loose off of Turn 2 late in the final session
• David Ragan said his car was inconsistent on entry and it got very free in traffic in the abbreviated session.
• AJ Allmendinger liked where his car was by the end of final practice and it showed the most consistency it had all weekend.
• Ricky Stenhouse Jr. was able to get on the track with five minutes left in practice and take his backup car for a spin, he liked where it was overall for not having anytime to really get adjusted to it.

Second Practice at O’Reilly Auto Parts 500

Saturday, April 7^th 11:00 a.m. ET

55 minutes in length

Weather

Air temp is 36 degrees and the track temp is 49 degrees with 19 mph wind

Penalized Drivers

No drivers were penalized for this session

Top-20 Speeds (one lap)

Best 10-lap Averages

Items of note:

• Kurt Busch says there’s really no relevance to this practice session with the weather not matching anywhere close to what race day will see
• Several drivers were out early making laps to see how their car was reacting to big temperature swing. Several others were simply making pit road speeds
• With 40 minutes left in practice 30 of the 37 cars have made at least one lap and 22 cars have run a lap in the 27-second range, which matches qualifying speeds.
• With 36 minutes left in the session, William Byronran the fastest lap to this point of 27.216 seconds. He will start from the back of the field after qualifying P33 Friday evening.
• The tire fall off so far has been non-existent with Kyle Busch running his best lap on the seventh one of the run.
• There hasn’t been a lot of long runs to this point, with 28 minutes left in practice, simply because the weather won’t give you better indications if you run longer than shorter.
• With 27 minutes left in practice, William Byron topped his best lap with a 27.171 run that averages 198.74 mph.
• Hendrick has been having a very session to this point with four drivers in the top-11 with 21 minutes left.
• Kyle Busch says he likes his car but considers this practice to be not relevant to Sunday’s race since the temps are so low. He does like the balance and is just fine tuning the car this session.
• Ricky Stenhouse Jr. hit the wall in Turn 4 with 17 minutes left in the session when his splitter got into the track and kept it from turning. He will be going to a backup car and move to the back of the pack to start the race.
• The 24-team is just working on small car adjustments to find out exactly what minor changes do to the car despite the weather.
• With nine minutes left in the session, three cars haven’t run a lap yet.
• There is a pretty even split manufacturer-wise in the top-10 with seven minutes left.
• Daniel Suarez posted the fastest lap of the session with 6:30 left on the clock at 27.136 seconds or 199.998 mph. That also puts two Toyotas at the top of the charts with his teammate Denny Hamlin.03 seconds behind him.
• The top-12 drivers in this session ran faster laps than Kurt Busch’s qualifying lap that won the pole last night. The top-28 practice times in this session would be in the top-10 of qualifying.
• Daniel Suarez says he feels comfortable with the car but the only question he has is properly getting onto pit road in the race given the speed carried around Turn 4 and into the entrance.

First Practice for O’Reilly Auto Parts 500

Friday, April 6 1:00pm ET

55 minutes in length

Weather

75 degrees ambient air temp with a strong tailwind down the back straightaway

Penalized Drivers

No drivers were penalized in the opening practice

Top-20 Speeds (one lap)

Best 10-lap Averages

Not enough drivers ran 10 consecutive laps this session to generate this metric.

Items of Note:

• The track has been dragging, and will continue to drag, a truck fitted with a frame of tires in order to get more grip on the track since it is still just in the third race since the repave. It will be dragged each evening up to midnight until Sunday.
• Most drivers started in qualifying trim in the first session. Joey Loganowas the most notable driver in race trim to start things out and run 13 laps before switching to qualifying trim
• William Byron said he went through a few laps and then everything let go and they will probably have to change out a motor which will take a lot of his practice time away
• Jimmie Johnson got loose into Turn 3 with 25 minutes left in practice mainly due to the tailwind pushing him faster into the corner and having to whoa up more than he thought
• Brad Keselowski said he likes the balance on the car but he will just have to try multiple lanes to find the speed in the track at the moment
• Goodyear has a new left front tire for this track that has a softer compound and slightly more fall off than previous tire iterations here.
• David Ragan had issues in Turn 3 with “no front turn” and drove up the race track but didn’t hit anything. There are a lot of drivers having the same issue including Kyle Buschand Jimmie Johnson
• Joey Logano said it was hard to tell what needs to be done with his car since the track was green at this practice but he hopes they can figure out more in Saturday sessions.
• There was a lot of cars that topped the chart throughout practice, each time a car came back out to run a lap they took over the top spot. Clint Bowyer, Kyle Busch, Kurt Busch, Martin Truex Jr., Kevin Harvick, Brad Keselowskihave all held the top spot at one point.
• Kurt Busch says this is a fun track to go hard on for qualifying. He still needs to get the balance right for the 500 mile race but he has confidence in the car right now.