Kasey Kahne’s Bristol Diary: Friday

After the day I had Friday, I’ll be the first to tell you that Bristol Motor Speedway is one tough place, but a good run tonight will make up for any frustration we’ve had this week.

We qualified our No. 9 Budweiser Dodge at 29th in Sprint Cup qualifying. Then, our No. 10 McDonald’s Angus Third Pound Burger didn’t get to run but about 18 laps before a hole in the radiator ended our race Friday night.

That’s frustrating, but there isn’t much you can do. We wanted to win Friday’s race for a lot of reasons.

As I told you Thursday, I was hoping I would win because Stanley would have donated $500,000 to the Children’s Miracle Network.

Our team has one last chance at it tonight. If Elliott Sadler can win, then Stanley will donate $1 million. It’s part of the “Racing for a Miracle” program created by Stanley, the Ace Hardware Foundation
and the Children’s Miracle Network. “Racing for a Miracle” benefits sick and injured kids by raising money for the hospitals that provide their care.

Qualifying the Budweiser Dodge at 29th isn’t what we were hoping for. I’ve been loose every day I’ve raced here starting with Wednesday night in the modified race. It was the same today in Cup qualifying. We just have to make good decisions on the setup. We need to get the car under control and maintain that throughout the race tonight.

So what is our strategy tonight? We need to stay out of trouble, take it one lap at a time, have good pit stops and all that kind of stuff. It’s all part of what we plan to do tonight.

But it would be really cool if we could relax with a Budweiser after tonight’s race, knowing we have taken a big step toward getting our team in the Chase. I think we have all of our bad luck behind us and we’re ready to go for tonight.

I hope all of you have fun tonight. Maybe we can celebrate together if things go really well for us.