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Dover 400
Casey Mears and No. 42 Texaco/Havoline Dodge at
Dover International Speedway, September 24

Texaco/Havoline Team Facts:
NEXTEL Cup Series

• Standings: Casey Mears and the Texaco/Havoline team are holding fast in the 15th position in the NASCAR NEXTEL Cup standings for the third week in a row. Mears finished 21st last weekend at New Hampshire International Speedway and now sits 14 points out of 14th.



• Running at Dover: Mears has participated in seven races at the 1-mile track in Dover, Del. Mears rallied to finish 10th at the concrete oval last fall after falling back to 41st on lap 17. In June, "The Monster Mile" was anything but kind to Mears and the Texaco/Havoline team. After running in the top 15 for most of the day, the No. 42 Texaco/Havoline Dodge got extremely tight over the last 100 laps and Mears fell back to finish 21st.



• Dover Stat: In Mears' past three NASCAR NEXTEL Cup races at Dover, he has made 135 green-flag passes. He is second only to Kyle Petty and one spot ahead of Tony Stewart. He is also third in total green-flag passes for the 2006 season with 2,126.



• Testing: Mears and the Texaco/Havoline team took the No. 42 Dodge to Nashville on Tuesday in preparation for next weekend’s event at Kansas Speedway. He tested with teammate Reed Sorenson.



• Chassis: Crew chief Donnie Wingo and the Texaco/Havoline team are returning to the track with chassis #616 for this weekend's Sylvania 300. Mears ran this chassis last weekend at Richmond where he drove it to an 11th-place finish. This chassis was a new short-track car developed at CGRFS and first ran at Loudon in July.

Casey Mears Quotes:
"Dover has always been a fun track for me, but I can't seem to finish well. I think the last four out of five races we've had really competitive cars, but haven't seen good finishes. The frustrating part about a place like Dover, is that I know I can run well but the stats don't show that. We tried to change our strategy a little bit at the short tracks and focused on qualifying, but since we still didn't seem to qualify much better we are going to go back to our original plans. We're going to unload in race trim and focus on long runs. We'll still do a couple of qualifying runs, but it won't be the focus of our practices.

"Reed (Sorenson) and I tested at Nashville on Tuesday to shake down our Kansas City cars. Because of the limited testing and practice schedules, Donnie (Wingo), the guys and I just tried some things that we usually don't have time to do at normal test sessions. It went well; I don't know if we made the car any faster but we definitely figured a couple of things out."