Atwood’s Season Improving

Casey Atwood has had an awkward season so far. Moving from Evernham
Motorsports’ No. 19 to the new Ultra/Evernham merger’s No. 7, it took him a
while to get used to his new surroundings. Now that he has, look out, this kid’s
on a tear.

The Nashville native started out 2002 with Kevin Cram as his crew chief. Cram
was released after only three events and the team’s general manager; Buddy
Barnes took over on an interim basis. At Richmond, Barnes was released and after
parting ways with Hendrick Motorsports, a team he’d been with since the
mid-nineties, veteran crew chief Tony Furr jumped on board.

After struggling and holding an unfamiliar feeling, Atwood is coming on
strong as of late. "Beginning of the year, I couldn’t get out of the 30th
place range. Tony Furr has come on to help us. We’ve had a car that should have
finished in the top-10 three weeks in a row and had a little bit of bad luck.
You’ve just gotta have everything come together and you’ve gotta communicate
well and that’s what we’re doing now and things have picked up a lot."

Atwood will head to Michigan coming off a four spot jump in the points, from
33rd to 29th, following Sunday’s race at Pocono. He also improved his best
finish of the season from 14th to 11th. He now has three straight top-20
finishes.

"I feel like I’m a lot better on bigger tracks now. Used to, I could
only run good on flat tracks and short tracks. I’ve never really ran good on
fast banked tracks. I’ve seemed to learn something on those last year, that’s
helped me for this year."

Last year at Michigan, Atwood finished a strong 10th while Sterling Marlin
grabbed the first victory for Dodge since its return to Winston Cup.
"Dodges seem to run well. We learned some stuff on the setups with the
racecars. I learned a lot as a driver. I had never run good here at all before
that race."

This week’s race at Michigan will be a special one for the driver of the No.
7 Dodge, his sponsor, Sirius Satellite Radio is the title sponsor of the
400-mile event. "It’s a little bit more pressure. We’re definitely wanting
to do good. It’s going to be a real important race for us. There’s going to be a
lot of people here from Sirius, it’s going to be a big race for us. Hopefully we
can do good."