October 31, 2006
East Fights to 15th in Easy Care 200 at Atlanta
Bobby East racked up another top-five qualifying run and fought to a hard-earned 15th-place finish in the Easy Care 200 at Atlanta Motor Speedway. East kept the No. 21 Edy’s Dibs/State Fair Corn Dogs Ford in and around the top ten for much of the night, but suffered damage to the critical left front fender in a late-race skirmish on the frontstretch.
East was in a tight pack of trucks fighting for position when Chad Chaffin’s truck slid up the track coming out of turn four, contacting the left front of East’s Ford before slamming nose first into the outside wall. Chaffin’s truck suffered serious damage to the front end, but East’s truck wasn’t significantly damaged. While he was able to continue on, the rumpled left front fender took needed downforce off the nose and hindered East’s chances to race back into the top ten.
After taking the truck back to the shop for some minor repairs, East looks forward to getting back into the seat again this weekend in Texas , a track configured similar to the Atlanta Motor Speedway.
"We're going take this thing to Texas next week because we qualified good and ran good,” East said. “I just want to thank everybody on this Edy’s Dibs/State Fair Corn Dogs Ford F-150 team and everybody at Wood Brothers/JTG Racing. We started fifth and finished 15th, but we still feel like we made big gains in our mile-and-a-half program.
“I think the biggest gains were mainly with the driver, because that's been my biggest struggle,” East said. “I'm actually happy with it because we started off the race and weren't very good, but the guys just kept getting the truck better and better, so I want to thank them for that. I thought we had a shot to get that first top ten, but we had that little scrape on the frontstretch that hurt us a little bit. But we came out of here with a top-15 finish, and learned a lot.”
East made his season debut at Atlanta in the spring, scoring a 23rd-place result that day. After racking up two solid finishes at Atlanta in 2006, East reflected on where the team was and now is since March.
"When you think back, it's amazing how far we've come as a team,” East said. “We're going to each track with one goal - to win. We finished the race at Atlanta with a strong truck, and we'll pick right up where we left off for the race at Texas ."
Next up for Bobby East and the Wood/jtg Racing No. 21 Edy’s Dibs/State Fair Corn Dogs Ford is a 350 kilometer event at Texas Motor Speedway. SPEED will have live coverage starting at 7:30 P.M. Eastern on Friday November 3, with Motor Racing Network carrying the live radio call on selected affiliates nationwide. TruckSeries.com will have complete event coverage online at www.truckseries.com.