The Lugnut Report: Casey Mears Struggles in First Race of 2010

To make a race as a brand new team in NASCAR is not easy. For Casey Mears and his new team at Keyed Up Motorsports it has been especially difficult.

Mears has missed the first four races of the season and found themselves in a hole coming to Bristol Motor Speedway this weekend. To be honest their season was on the line had they not made the race this weekend.

It was announced during the off week that they would be getting their engines leased from Richard Childress Racing, Mears former car owner.

On Friday during practice the team was focused primarily on qualifying trim. Their fastest lap was their 17th lap of the 22 that he ran. He was still struggling to find the speed in qualifying trim. They finished the practice 35th on the charts.

For qualifying he had to race his way in and he did just that with a lap time of 15.8 seconds. A very relieved Mears would finally be back in the race car on Sunday.

They started 34th on Sunday with a very ill handling race car and starting toward to rear and quickly went a lap down.

Mears went multiple laps down and had to make an unscheduled pit stop. It was a rough day for this team and not what Mears had hoped.

They finished 30th, 17 laps off the pace.

The thing is they really had to get in a race and run laps and see where their equipment was in comparison to the rest of the field.

Until they made a race the team had nothing to go on and what direction the needed to go to improve the cars.

The move with leasing engines from ECR was a smart move; we have seen what they have done on the track every week.

It’s hard to say where this team is heading. They need to start making races consistently. This team has a lot of work to do this season but they accomplished goal one and that was make the race.