Bubba Pollard tops World Crown 300 practice

Friday practice for the World Crown 300 at Cordele Motor Speedway has concluded. 

Bubba Pollard, who is racing with a broken hand, topped the speed charts. Gavan Boschele was second and Michael Atwell completed the top three. Short Track Scene caught up with several of the drivers after practice to see how they feel ahead of the crown jewel event tomorrow.

Until the entry list for the race was released, it was unknown if Pollard would compete after he suffered a broken hand in the ASA race at Toledo Speedway. The injury wasn’t enough to stop him from setting quick time on Friday though.

“It’s fine,” Pollard said in regards to his hand. “Surgeries helped it. This place is tougher. I kind of feel a little more pain here than at Pensacola. Corners are tight, so you turn the steering wheel more so but it’ll be alright. We’ll make it. We just had to change some things up, but we’ll be fine.”

Pollard had his brace for his hand made so that he could keep his hand in position on the steering wheel. Despite the challenges, he feels good about the 300-lapper tomorrow. 

“It’s pretty good,” Pollard said about his car. “I think we got a good car. [With] 300 laps a racetrack changes a lot, but I feel like the balance is there, the speed is there. We just got to make the right adjustments. Keep up the racetrack and make the right adjustments through the race. I think that’s where I haven’t done a good job the last couple years and some of these bigger races just having the confidence to make those changes.”

The Georgia native is looking to add yet another crown jewel to his collection especially with it being at his home track.

“The world crown is kind of where I started running the crown jewels,” Pollard said. “It’s kind of where I cut my teeth. So yeah, it would mean a lot especially here at Cordele, even though [the World Crown] has changed racetracks. This place. I enjoy coming to and hopefully we can put on a good show for the fans.”

Colby Howard finished Friday practice in fourth. Howard had to skip the last race in Pensacola just to make it to Cordele, but he feels good ahead of the World Crown.

“We didn’t really think the points were going to work out with the Southern Super Series, so we skipped the last Pensacola race and switched it for here,” Howard said. “I like this track a little bit more than Pensacola, too. I think we’re all right speed-wise. We had a good day yesterday, just sort of struggled with it today. We get it good, then we work ourselves out of it, but I think we’ll be fine in tomorrow’s practice, get it perfect, or close to perfect, and then we have three more laps to work on it.”

“I think it’s a really hard track, really line-sensitive. Obviously, Bubba Pollard’s really good here, so he’s the one we’re going to try and beat tomorrow, but I don’t know. I don’t know what it is. I like it. One of those tracks that [I] just work well with.”

Howard says since he has raced with most of the field all year long, he feels good and knows what it will take to win.

“I thought there would be a lot more cars here,” Howard said. “Obviously, you want to qualify good so you’re not in the back in the mess. It’s kind of the whole half the ASA field, half the Southern Super Series field, and then all the really fast guys that’ve been in both of those, I ran with all these guys all year. Just need to qualify good and stay up front, and be there at lap 299 and 300.

“It’d be huge [to win]. Like I said, this is my first Crown Jewel event, I guess you could say. $35,000, or $30,000 [to win]. So, that’d be really big, and just winning a 300-lap race just means a lot. Those are the big boy races. So, that, [and] competing with Bubba, Steven, Matt Craig, it’d be huge to win against them.”

Collin Allman is hoping to keep a streak of good momentum rolling tomorrow in the World Crown.

“We just battled tight all day,” Allman said. “Not sure why. I knew it was going to be tighter this weekend than it was in September, and I tried to free it up and didn’t free it up enough. Stayed on our tires from the September race practice set. Stayed on those for a while because we’re only buying one practice set, and we put on a set of tires at the end, and way too tight on our mock, and made adjustment, and then almost went as fast as our mock after that. So, I don’t know. 

“[I’ll] think about it tonight and try to make some adjustments for tomorrow. I think the track’s just going to continue to tighten up with all the rubber being laid down. These tires got a lot of grip, so I feel like they’re laying a lot of rubber down. So, we’ll have to come up with a game plan to get it freed up and be able to turn for 300 laps.”

Allman is hoping to take home the crown jewel win and the biggest win of his career tomorrow.

“It’d be huge,” Allman said. “It’d be everything for us. That’s why we’re fighting so hard. I think I’ve taken the shocks off four or five times today just to check everything and see where we’re at. Not loving it where we’re at right now, but I think the car’s got good race pace. It just doesn’t have the fire-off speed that we need, and who knows? This thing could come down to a 50-lap dash at the end. You’re going to have to have some speed. So, hopefully, we can find a little bit tomorrow, find a little bit more turn, and hopefully, we’ll be pretty good.”

After a long practice day and many adjustments, Johnny Sauter is feeling good about his chances tomorrow.

“It was an eventful day for sure,” Sauter said. “So we ended yesterday, felt like we had good grip, and did a mock run. We had decent speed, and then today we just worked on race trim stuff, basically. Then at the very end, we put a set of tires on to go do a mock run, and I ran just about as fast as I did on 50-lap tires. So that kind of threw us for a loop, so we panicked a little bit and kind of went back on some of the changes, and then went back out, did another mock run, and picked it up. So obviously we just had a tire that wasn’t great. So, just working on long-run stuff, make sure you can keep putting the throttle down all night.

“It sounds simple just to pick up a half a tenth on everybody, but it’s hard to do. You’re constantly just searching. So you change. You change gears, see if you can pick up a little bit. I think we’ve wore out shock bolts on this thing, just changing different packages. You’re just looking for that little bit, and that little bit makes you look like a hero. I mean, that’s all you can do is work through a progression of stuff that you think works. I think racers sometimes tell you they know what’s going on. I think it’s just more a trial and error and process of elimination.”

The 2016 NASCAR Truck Series champion is feeling good now and hopes to bring home a win in a crown jewel he’s been hearing about his whole life.

“As good as I’ve ran at this racetrack, I’ve just always come up short,” Sauter said. “I remember being a kid and hearing about this race and what it paid back in those days, you know, back in, what, [19]84, I think it was, [Dick] Trickle won it the first one. For me, being a Wisconsin guy, to be able to come down here and do something like that, that would be pretty cool.”

The World Crown 300 takes place on Saturday, October 25 at Cordele Motor Speedway. Racing starts at 6 p.m. ET with the last chance race. Fans can purchase tickets online or catch the action live on RacingAmerica.