Lester Hoping for Quietly Effective Michigan Race

The thing Bill Lester would like most this week at Michigan International Speedway is to be treated the same as any other NASCAR Nextel Cup driver.

That’s not likely, though.

Lester, the first black driver to race in the Cup series in 20 years, is hoping to make today’s 3M Performance 400 his second start in NASCAR’s top series.

The Craftsman Truck Series regular was the center of a whirlwind of publicity and hype in March when he qualified 19th for a Cup race at Atlanta Motor Speedway. His race was a fairly ineffective run to 38th, six laps behind winner Kasey Kahne.

“Hopefully, we got some of the hoopla out of the way during the Atlanta race, and this time around we can focus solely on the racing end of it,” Lester said.

“Don’t get me wrong, I appreciated the opportunity and all of the attention I was getting from the media and the fans and am glad everyone was so interested and excited about the weekend. But, this time around, I hope it will be a little bit more of a normal type of a weekend for everyone involved.”

Besides qualifying for the race, which he must do on speed since his Bill Davis Racing entry is not among the top 35 in car owner points, Lester hopes to be a lot more competitive than he was at Atlanta.

Still, following that race, Lester said he was pretty happy with what he had accomplished.

“I was able to bring it home in one piece and able to build up my database of knowledge,” he said at the time. “There were some opportunities for me to take some chances and I could have gotten in the way. But I’m not trying to do that.”

Now he heads for Michigan, where he has averaged a 15th-place finish and completed every lap in his truck since first racing on the two-mile oval in 2002.

“I’ve always liked racing in Michigan and have been able to put together a couple of decent finishes in the past couple of years there in the truck series,” Lester said, “so our confidence level, as far as being able to have a little bit better race then we did in Atlanta, is pretty high.

“We had the chance to take this car out and test it out a bit a while back, and I think it should be a pretty good car for us. We accomplished what we set out to do in Atlanta, which was first of all to qualify for the event and then finish the entire race. But we’ve got some loftier goals this time around that we’re hoping to accomplish.”

Greg Biffle, the defending champion in the Cup race, said he was impressed by the job Lester did in Atlanta, and he expects more today.

“Different drivers have their different strong suits, and Bill Lester’s strong suit in the truck series, as much as I’ve been able to pay attention, is qualifying,” Biffle said. “He usually qualifies fairly well but doesn’t race very well, for some reason. Whether it’s the way his race car drives around other cars, or whatever, hasn’t seemed like it matches up with his qualifying performance.

“Yet, at Atlanta, that was a little bit different, meaning he ran better in the Cup race. He qualified and ran pretty decent. I think he’s going to run well at Michigan.”

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It’s been a horrible season so far for Joe Nemechek.

In the first 14 races, the veteran racer has no result better than 13th and 10 finishes of 23rd or worse. He goes into the Michigan race 28th in the season points.

The good news, though, is that Nemechek is back at Michigan, where he had two top-10 finishes last year.

“Yes, we had two strong runs last year in Michigan, but we were just as strong the year before,” noted Nemechek, who was running in the top five when his engine broke with 27 laps remaining in the June 2004 race.

A year ago, he was coming off a third-place finish at Pocono, rather than the 29th he scored last Sunday in Pennsylvania.

“We kind of veered off our normal path and got stuck in a performance rut,” Nemechek said. “Though these things do happen in our highly technical world of auto racing, it’s no fun. In fact, it’s miserable. We just need to get back on the path that made us a challenger week in and week out.

“After Michigan, we have a stretch of races that has been good to us in the past -- Sonoma, Daytona, Chicago and New Hampshire. A breakthrough race this weekend would definitely give us a huge lift.”

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A year ago, Tony Stewart came to Michigan 10th in the points, 380 points behind series leader Jimmie Johnson and down in the dumps because of all the bad luck he had been encountering.

Stewart was running well in the races before that, but it seemed like something -- a mechanical problem, an accident, a tire problem -- slowed him down just about every week.

Then came his first visit of 2005 to Brooklyn, Mich., and everything changed.

After leading the most laps and finishing second to Greg Biffle in the race, Stewart went on a tear that carried him all the way to his second Cup championship.

He won the next two weeks, at Sonoma and Daytona -- his first victories of the season -- and went on to record 19 top-10 finishes in the final 23 races of the season. That streak included five race wins and 14 top fives.

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Biffle tops all Cup drivers, leading at least one lap in 12 of the 14 races this season. He has earned 80 lap leader bonus points, 50 more than series leader Jimmie Johnson, who has 30.

That’s where Biffle’s advantage ends, though. The defending Michigan race champ is 12th in the standings, trailing Johnson by 503 points and 24 points behind 10th-place Kyle Busch.