Terry Cook No. 60 Wyler.com Toyota Tundra Preview

Round 9 of 25 – Sam’s Town 400: Texas Motor Speedway

Terry Cook heads to Texas Motor Speedway for his 21st career start at the 1.5-mile quad-oval. Cook’s Wyler Racing Team was in contention to win the last Texas race in November 2007: Jack Sprague was challenging for the lead on a restart with two laps to go when contact was made and Sprague’s night ended with a damaged truck. Cook would like to close the deal in Texas this year and score his first win at TMS.

 What kind of race should we expect at Texas? “It’s easy to say we’ll see racing just like we did at Atlanta and Charlotte, and we might, but I think it will be a little different. The groove has really widened out at Texas so it usually leads to some good side by side racing. But one thing that’s different is for whatever reason you usually see at least one round of green flag stops at Texas. This race always has some sort of fuel mileage issues. It might not play out as a mileage race at the end, but fuel mileage comes into play whenever you start looking at your green flag stop. So you have to start conserving fuel almost from the get-go.”

 Is it difficult to try to race to the front and conserve fuel at the same time? “What I do is race for the big picture and keep my eye on the small picture. Obviously the big picture is the championship. The small picture is the race. You don’t want to put yourself in a position that will hurt you in the long term by making a big gamble to try to win the race. It’s tough early in the race and on restarts because that is the easiest time to make up positions when everyone is all bunched up together. But you also need to be careful because you don’t want to get mixed up in something silly and ruin your day.”

Is the Indy Car rubber a help for this weekend? “It’s been a long time since we talked about rubber compatibility issues with the Indy cars. It is actually a big help this weekend because they run such a higher line than we do it helps widen out the track for us even more. The rubber they use gives us a lot of extra grip. The problem is when it wears off is when you start to lose grip.”

It’s forecast to be very hot this weekend. How do you prepare? “It’s supposed to be in the 90s, a real scorcher. Sometimes in the fall you deal with a real cool weekend, but usually this weekend is extremely hot. The best thing you can do is make sure you stay hydrated in the truck. You try to prepare it so that air can get in to you and you stay as cool as possible. It’s not just the driver though, the guys on pit road really need to be careful and stay hydrated too.”

This week’s truck: Terry is racing chassis No. 84 this weekend in Texas. The last outing for No. 84 was Kansas. Cook was on the verge of a top five finish before an engine problem with a handful of laps to go sidelined him.

Terry Cook’s Texas Motor Speedway stats: Terry Cook has started all 20 previous NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series races at Texas Motor Speedway. He scored his first career NCTS top-ten finish in June 1998 at TMS. In all he has six top-ten finishes at TMS with a best of sixth in October 1999. He has completed 2,750 of 3,172 possible competition laps (86.7%) and led 70 laps in five different races. His average TMS start is 14.1 and his average finish is 15.8.

 Introducing the 2008 Wyler Racing Over-the-Wall Crew:

Led by Crew Chief, John Quinn: