Say What?!

"I felt really good about our car there last year, but it didn’t last very long with the tire issue. Kansas [Speedway] is a really fun racetrack. It’s a place where you can move around.The tires wear out and it gets slippery. It’s just a fun place to race and we’re looking forward to it with our Auto-Owners Insurance Camry. At the same time, I think it’s a real measuring stick of your cars and where you’re at. It takes everything to get around there. You have to have horsepower and downforce, a good setup with a lot of tire grip and things like that. It’s a big challenge and usually the guys that have the fastest cars are up front there, so hopefully we’ll be one of those guys because it seems like our Camrys have been really strong this year." - Martin Truex Jr.

"Kansas was built like other mile-and-a-half tracks but it doesn’t race like them. It has progressive banking where it gets steeper the further up the track you go up closer to the wall. The winters in Kansas can be tough so that has a big bearing on how the track ages each year. I’ve only raced on the current pavement. I went there the first year of the current pavement in the Truck Series. I’ve gotten to progress with the asphalt there as it ages from super good stuff to where you wanted to stay in the rubber and now you’re looking to get away from the rubber. Now, you want to drive anywhere but where the vehicle in front of you is or where most cars aren’t running. I love the Kansas track. Sometimes I feel like I have to hang on to something so the wind doesn’t blow me away, and sometimes you feel like you’re going to get shoved in the wall because the wind gusts are so strong." - Ross Chastain

"Kansas is also a very unique mile-and-a-half just because it’s very high-speed. I would say it probably has the fastest corner speed of any mile-and-a-half we go to. So if your stuff was OK in [turns 3 and 4] at Texas, I’d say it maybe correlates a little bit to Kansas. Kansas is just so fast and smooth. There are no bumps, no anything, so it’s kind of a weird racetrack. We don’t really go anywhere that’s like Kansas. Our mile-and-a-half stuff’s been pretty good this year. I don’t know if we’re going to have race-winning speed going there, but I do think we’re going to at least be in the hunt." - Chase Briscoe