Hi HotLap.com readers! Hope everyone had a really good weekend. I know mine turned out pretty well! It was crazy doing double-duty, but it is always fun. All our guys over at Turner Motorsports work so hard it makes it really easy to do our jobs as drivers. Both my Truck team and the Nationwide team gave me good race cars this weekend and we showed that in our results. I finished eighth in both races.

Dover is such a tough track. After 20 laps you feel like you’ve raced 100 at some other tracks. The banking is high, and it almost feels like you are on a roller coaster that you are in control of. As hard as the ‘Monster Mile’ is, it is one of my favorite race tracks, so I was pumped that it was my first double-duty race weekend.

The weekend started off a little shaky but with hard work on everyone on the team, we got it turned around. When we unloaded the truck, we knew we had some work to do. The No. 31 Space Coast Center team worked hard and we had a pretty good truck for Friday afternoon’s race. After a long day, we ended up with an eighth-place finish, which we were pleased with. The team had some problems on pit road, with a loose wheel and a dropped lug nut, but we overcame that for a solid top-10.

It was a different story on the Nationwide side. When we unloaded on Friday for practice we had a fast car from the start. It was the happiest I have been with a race car right off the truck in a really long time. We worked on the balance during practice and when that ended, we felt like we had a car that could really contend. We woke up on Saturday morning to rain. It continued to rain all morning and qualifying got cancelled. Because of that, NASCAR set the field by practice speeds, so we rolled off 12th.

There was short break in the weather, enough time to get in driver introductions but as soon as we got off stage it started raining again. I headed to the hauler for about an hour before it was finally time to take the green flag. When we got to racing it was a completely green track, with the rain washing away all the rubber that had built up over the two previous days of racing. Fortunately, the tire Goodyear brought to Dover rubbers the track up really fast, and it wasn’t long before our car was handling as well as it had in practice.

We started seeing rain on the track after the halfway point and NASCAR had to stop us for about 25 minutes while they dried the track. As the racing action got back underway, it really started to get dicey. These ‘new’ cars seem to drive really well at Dover, and there were a lot of guys who had fast, well-handling cars. We raced inside the top-10 for most of the afternoon and it came right down to the end of the day. We had two attempts at a green-white-checkered finish, and I think everyone saw what happened there. That last crash with Clint and Joey and Brad was crazy! We were coming around turn four and all I saw was the No. 33 in the air. I have to admit, it was a pretty scary thing to see one of your competitors flying across the track in the air. I am just glad that everyone ended up okay.

With the help of my spotter, Jeremy Brickhouse, I made it through the wreckage and was listed in the eighth spot. I am really happy with that result. It is proof of all the hard work my ABF team put into the car. I was able to drive it all day and compete with some of the best guys in the field. I had a pretty intense, but clean, battle with the No. 2 of Elliott Sadler for the 10th spot. It was great to be able to race a veteran of his caliber, I feel like I learned a lot in those five or six laps about racing cleanly but hard for position.

I have to say the team made huge gains from Richmond. I’m excited to get back behind the wheel of the No. 30 Fraternal Order of Eagles Chevrolet at Iowa Speedway. It’s a stand-alone Nationwide Series event which means there is a good opportunity for non-Cup regulars to shine, and I plan to take full advantage of that. As always, check back on Thursday for my pre-race blog about heading to Iowa and thanks so much for checking this week’s recap out!