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Rain washes out practices at Daytona
Busch, Cup cars scheduled to hit track early Friday morning
By Ryan Smithson, NASCAR.COM
June 30, 2005
05:28 PM EDT (21:28 GMT)

DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. -- For the second restrictor-plate race in a row, persistent rain wiped out significant practice time.

Heavy showers forced NASCAR to cancel Thursday's twin practices for the Pepsi 400. A single practice will be held at 9:10 a.m. ET on Friday.

The weather doesn't look promising for Friday, either. Thunderstorms are in the forecast again.

If the rain stays away, Pepsi 400 Bud Pole Qualifying is at 4:40 p.m. ET, and the cars are impounded following qualifying.

The lack of track time doesn't bother the drivers that much.

"There is not a lot we can do," says Greg Biffle. "There is not a lot to be gained, learned. If we went out for three hours, the things will change are minimal."

But some teams, especially ones with unproven cars, will miss the track time.

"We are going to be in kind of a panic because [Friday] will be our only race practice, so we won't have near as much time to tune," said Steve Hmiel, crew chief for Dale Earnhardt Jr.

"It's probably going to affect us a little more this time than it has in the past," said Todd Parrott, crew chief for Elliott Sadler. "We will look back on some notes and some things and it's an educated guess.

"Maybe this is not a bad thing. We've had the car in the wind tunnel and we feel good about it."

Another problem lies with the teams that wrecked cars at Talladega. The teams re-skin the cars and often run them two months later at Daytona. Others elect to build new cars or run the ones they ran in the Daytona 500.

"We build the bodies as small as we can naturally, so there is going to be some tire rub," said Hmiel. "Before qualifying and before race practice, it's neat to get a couple laps to see what rubs and what doesn't.

"The trouble we are going to have is there are going to be a lot of cars smoking tires on fenders because there is not a lot of new cars based on what happened at Talladega."

Crew chief Shane Wilson was actually hoping teams would miss some practice. Wilson brought his Daytona 500 car, which finished 19th with Travis Kvapil, and Wilson already knows what the car can and can't do.

"We haven't changed much on this car," Wilson said.