BMS Not Been Good to McClure

Any time NASCAR returns to the high banks of Bristol Motor Speedway, it marks the return of Nationwide Series driver Eric McClure to his ‘home track’ where he grew up watching his dad Jerry and his uncles pick up their first win in the Morgan-McClure Motorsports Cup team.

But the track has not been good to the Abingdon native. Saturday’s finish (30^th) in the No. 24 Hefty Brand Chevrolet Sharpie MINI 300 was no different, except he was able to finish for only the second time in his career at BMS.

McClure said after making a lot of gains in practice, he was disappointed with the finish after losing only a couple of laps with a tight condition in the first 100 laps.

"Then we made some contact with another car and knocked a fender in on a tire and we flat-spotted the right front tire trying to save the car," said the 29-year-old driver. "As a result, rather than pit with the rain coming, we tried to ride it around as long as we could and we lost four laps just nursing it around.

"Right before that happened, the car was the best it had been all day. We were running our best lap times and we were within three tenths of the leader. We made some gains today but there are still some things that we can work on being a new team."

This is the first year'that McClure and the Front Row Motorsports team have worked together.

"We put the program together very late, but (car owner) Bob Jenkins really did a good job giving us a head start on this deal but we missed a lot of the testing in the preseason," he said. "But the Hefty team has been plugging along and we’re getting better every week.

"We’re still learning a lot with these new cars and setups. We get the communications down, we keep finishing races, keep staying locked into these things the second half of the year I think will be a little better."

McClure said the team now has a second car to take to next week’s Pepsi 300 at Nashville Superspeedway.

"How we started out today, maybe we can keep that through a whole race," McClure said. "We’ve made four races there. We ran Jimmy Means’ car competitively there and I like the race track.

"But to come out of Bristol [without crashing], I was pleased with the way we started, disappointed with the way we finished. But all things considered, we’re better than we were last week."

Being a single-car team in today’s racing circles while competing against a number of Sprint Cup teams makes the chore tougher each race for drivers like McClure.

"Number one, we’re fighting the Cup drivers in the series and then the Cup affiliates and the teams in the series," said McClure, who posted a career-best 18^th place finish at Talladega in 2007. "Being a single-car team, we don’t have the resources they have.

"We don’t have the engineering, we don’t have the data they have and certainly when we practice we can’t go to a teammate and find out how they are doing. So we are certainly fighting a huge uphill battle, but we have got a really good, young race team and we have a good sponsor in the Hefty Brand.

"So there’s a lot of potential for us. I don’t know that we can win as a single-car team, and with the level of involvement from the other series that we can win races but it we can come out and finish near 25^th every week, continue to take baby steps, maybe this time next year we can look for those top-tens and top-fives."