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Notes of Interest |
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● Coming off their eighth top-15 finish of 2022 last Sunday night at Darlington (S.C.) Raceway, Cole Custer and the No. 41 HaasTooling.com Ford Mustang team for Stewart-Haas Racing (SHR) turn their attention to the mile-and-a-half oval at Kansas Speedway in Kansas City for Sunday afternoon’s Hollywood Casino 400 NASCAR Cup Series race.
● Sunday’s 267-lap race will be Custer’s 103rd career Cup Series start and sixth at Kansas. His Cup Series debut at Kansas in July 2020 resulted in a seventh-place finish en route to earning that year’s Rookie of the Year honors, and it stands as the best of his previous five Kansas outings. It was his fourth top-10 through his first 19 Cup Series starts.
● Custer has four Kansas appearances in NASCAR Xfinity Series competition, the most recent three in the No. 00 SHR Ford and the first in the No. 5 entry for JR Motorsports, with a best finish of 11th in the 2019 event after leading a race-high 85 laps.
● In his lone NASCAR Camping World Truck Series outing at Kansas, the 24-year-old from Ladera Ranch, California, qualified fourth and finished seventh in the No. 00 JR Motorsports entry in the May 2016 race.
● Riding along with Custer and his SHR Mustang is team co-owner Gene Haas’ newest holding, Haas Tooling, which was launched as a way for CNC machinists to purchase high-quality cutting tools at great prices. Haas cutting tools are sold exclusively online at HaasTooling.com and shipped directly to end users. HaasTooling.com products became available nationally in July 2020. Haas Automation, founded by Haas in 1983, is America’s leading builder of CNC machine tools. The company manufactures a complete line of vertical and horizontal machining centers, turning centers and rotary tables and indexers. All Haas products are constructed in the company’s 1.1-million-square-foot manufacturing facility in Oxnard, California, and distributed through a worldwide network of Haas Factory Outlets.
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Cole Custer, Driver of the No. 41 HaasTooling.com Ford Mustang for Stewart-Haas Racing |
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You’re headed to Kansas after scoring your eighth top-15 of the season last Sunday night at Darlington. How will it be adjusting from the quirky, egg-shaped Darlington oval to the unique, mile-and-a-half Kansas layout? “Even though the tracks are totally different, I think it’ll be a good thing to build on as we go to Kansas. We were one of a handful of teams in the top-15 that weren’t in the playoffs last week, and a non-playoff driver won the race, so that shows that there’s some parity with this new car that we haven’t seen so much of over the years. It gives the non-playoff drivers hope for each of these final nine races that most anybody can win if everything goes your way. Hopefully we can build on the positives from Darlington. Kansas is actually a tough racetrack. You have to move around and work the different lanes. You have to have the speed, as well, obviously. Track position is going to be huge and how you work the strategy is important. It’s a track where you have to put everything together. You have to make sure you can work the lanes good, and work them from the bottom to the top of the track.”
Kansas has been one of your best tracks since your Rookie of the Year campaign in 2020, when you scored your third career top-10 in the spring, then came back in the fall to almost grab another. How was that experience for you? “The guys fought all race long both times that year and we definitely were able to make something of it in the first race, even though it wasn’t the prettiest day. We were in a good position in the fall race. Right there at the end was the best I had been in the top groove all race long. But a speeding penalty set us back and we still ended up with 14th place, which was disappointing when we considered what might have been. Our spring race last year turned out to be a frustrating day, but we came back and had a decent run in the fall race.”
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