WRAL Sports Fan

NASCAR

Gilliland pleased with 14th-place finish in Vegas

By SceneDaily.com

Mar 3, 2009

David Gilliland seemed almost a little surprised himself by his 14th-place finish in Sunday’s Shelby 427 NASCAR Sprint Cup race at Las Vegas Motor Speedway, a result he achieved while driving conservatively.

“Our whole things is this is the car that we have to race next week at Atlanta,” Gilliland said after the race. “So I kept telling the guys that we cannot take any extra chances. We just had to be extra conservative, extra patient and everything else. We raced the same car last week at California.”

The No. 71 TRG Motorsports team is just two points out of the top 35, currently sitting behind the No. 78 of Regan Smith and Furniture Row Motorsports. Furniture Row is running a limited schedule, but NASCAR does not require a team to compete in every race to be able to earn one of the 35 guaranteed positions – unlike in Nationwide and Truck, where to get one of the qualified spots a team must attempt to qualify for every race.

There are two more races before this year’s owners points will be used to determine the 35 automatic qualifiers on a weekly basis.

TRG Motorsports owner Kevin Buckler has pledged to run two more races with Gilliland and then determine its schedule after that, depending on where it is in points. The team has a couple of cars from Richard Childress Racing and gets its engines from Earnhardt Childress Racing Technologies.

“It’s neat we were able to do that – a 14th-place finish on the lead lap shows a lot,” Gilliland said. “A top-35 position in owners points after five races is going to be a lot easier than not. That’s our goal. … Our goal is to come to the race track, try to bring the car home in one piece and do the best we can.

“Hopefully, that will put us in the top 35 after five races. [The team] missed Daytona, but a lot of people have had bud luck, too, so we’ll see.”