Friday/Saturday Brickyard Notes/Quotes

SATURDAY NOTES:

• Kyle Busch captured his 54^th pole in 322 career XFINITY Series starts. It was also the sixth pole and 11^th top-10 start in 2016.
• Beside battling for the win in the Lilly Diabetes 250, the Dash 4 Cash competition promised the top two points-earning drivers in each of the two heats a chance to compete for the Dash 4 Cash prize money.
• It continues to be a matter of concern regarding the sub-par performance of the Hendrick team. No Hendrick entry made it to the Third Round of Sprint Cup qualifying today.
• It is hot here at IMS. It’s so hot here (How hot is it?) that during Sprint Cup qualifying the Wind Chill was 92-Degrees. Get out the earmuffs.
• NASCAR Sprint Cup veteran Greg Biffle is racing with a heavy heart this weekend at the Tuesday passing of his father Jack Biffle in Mooresville, NC. Mr.Biffle, 75, was a U. S. Army veteran who served in France and Germany. Services will be held Tuesday, July 26, in Mooresville.
• Indy Car driver Josef Newgarden made an appearance at the XFINITY Series drivers meeting. No word about him making a career move to the stock cars.

FRIDAY NOTES:

• It’s the historic home of the Indianapolis 500, but Joe Gibbs driver Kyle Busch was asked Friday what it would take if he was to participate in that iconic open-wheel race someday. “You definitely can’t do it (plan) a month before for sure. There’s got to be planning involved and you’ve got to be ahead of the curve and probably this is about the start time in which you’ve got to get some things started, “noted Busch, whose brother Kurt did the double (Indy and Charlotte on the same day) in 2014. “All those plans need to be solidified by the end of the NASCAR season in November.” But the question still needs the answer of whether he would do it. “By saying that, would I do it? Sure, I’d give it a shot and see what it’s all about, but obviously you’ve got to have funding to go run that race…and putting on a good effort for myself means that you want to get with a top-tier team that has success here and that you know can run well…and just being able to learn as much as you can, trying to get a little bit of track time in the times we’re not busy doing what we’re doing (practicing and qualifying for the Charlotte NASCAR race) is awfully hard to do.” And so will the talk with car-owner Joe Gibbs about that Indy effort.
• When the announcement was made that Jeff Gordon would come out of his retirement to sub for the injured Dale Earnhardt Jr., it stole a bit of the spotlight from Tony Stewart and his last race at Indianapolis as he heads off into the sunset with perhaps a second career ahead in the sprint car world. But what does the 45-year-old “Smoke” think of his final bow at the track that means so much to him? “It would be cool (to win here on Sunday). There are marquee events on the schedule each year and this is one of them for everybody. The whole series wants to win here. It would be cool,” the two-time Brickyard winner admitted. “I like what I’m doing. I’m enjoying it. As far as a legacy, I really don’t know. At the end of the day I’m just having fun doing what I’m doing right now.”
• Six drivers will attempt to run both Saturday’s XFINITY race and Sunday’s Brickyard 400: Kyle Busch, Matt DiBenedetto, Kevin Harvick, Kyle Larson, Joey Logano and Paul Menard.
• History will be made on August 13 when Israeli-native Alon Day will drive for MBM Motorsports in the NASCAR XFINITY Series at the Mid-Ohio Sports Car Course. Day will also drive for the team two weeks later at Road America. Day, who lives in Tel-Aviv was one of eleven drivers selected to the 2016-17 NASCAR Next Class and is the first driver chosen from NASCAR’s Whelen Euro Series.

Paul Gohde

Paul Gohde heard the sound of race cars early in his life.

Growing up in suburban Milwaukee, just north of Wisconsin State Fair Park in the 1950’s, Paul had no idea what “that noise” was all about that he heard several times a year. Finally, through prodding by friends of his parents, he was taken to several Thursday night modified stock car races on the old quarter-mile dirt track that was in the infield of the one-mile oval -and he was hooked.

The first Milwaukee Mile event that he attended was the 1959 Rex Mays Classic won by Johnny Thomson in the pink Racing Associates lay-down Offy built by the legendary Lujie Lesovsky. After the 100-miler Gohde got the winner’s autograph in the pits, something he couldn’t do when he saw Hank Aaron hit a home run at County Stadium, and, again, he was hooked.

Paul began attending the Indianapolis 500 in 1961, and saw A. J. Foyt’s first Indy win. He began covering races in 1965 for Racing Wheels newspaper in Vancouver, WA as a reporter/photographer and his first credentialed race was Jim Clark’s historic Indy win.Paul has also done reporting, columns and photography for Midwest Racing News since the mid-sixties, with the 1967 Hoosier 100 being his first big race to report for them.

He is a retired middle-grade teacher, an avid collector of vintage racing memorabilia, and a tour guide at Miller Park. Paul loves to explore abandoned race tracks both here and in Europe, with the Brooklands track in Weybridge England being his favorite. Married to Paula, they have three adult children and two cats.

Paul loves the diversity of all types of racing, “a factor that got me hooked in the first place.”

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