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Craftsman Truck Crew Chief Fred Graves Comments on Hornaday's Success

12 August 1997

The following provided by Chevrolet Motor Division, General Motors
Corporation Public Relations:

The "hottest" streak going in the NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series
belongs to driver Ron Hornaday. Following an early win at Tucson,
Hornaday suffered a mini-slump. Fred Graves joined the Earnhardt team
at Loudon, NH, and things began turning around by mid-June at Bristol
where Hornaday's second flag-to-flag. Following a late race crash at
Nazareth, Hornaday went on to win the next three races in a
row...Milwaukee, Louisville and Colorado.  Louisville was Hornaday's
second flag-to-flag win. Two more wins came at IRP and Flemington. He
credits his new Crew Chief Fred Graves' return to Saturday night/short
track technology for the team's recent success.

"It not that we've thrown away the 'high-tech' but we're using that as
another tool in our tool box. We want to get back and get all our
basic stuff done. To me, if you can't get the basics right you're not
going to make the 'high-tech' to work for you.

"The basics that I'm talking about are basic set-ups, camber gain,
weights and things like that. The Chevy truck is new to me with the
aero(dynamics), we're not having the luxury of a lot of downforce in
the front. And we had to work on changing the nose percentages on the
weights and stuff like that to compensate for the aero package.

"We do some computer stuff but we don't dwell on it a lot. We use it
when we think we have a problem and we want to check. We use it to see
if we've got the basics right. From there, we can look at our options
on the computer and if we think there's something there...we might try
it in practice.

"We didn't use the data acquisition program here because we only had
two one-hour practice sessions and we wanted to test both trucks. In
the time frame we had, we would have lost too much time practice
looking at the data and probably not got our basics done."