NASCAR NCTS (KANSAS) - Musgrave, No. 9 Team ASE Toyota Finish 12th

Ted Musgrave started strong but was forced to make a late race rally to finish Saturday's O'Reilly Auto Parts 250 NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series race in the 12th position. Musgrave's Germain Racing No. 9 Team ASE Toyota took the green flag ninth, but quickly knifed his way towards the top five. Musgrave continued to have one of the strongest trucks on the track throughout the event, but an ill-timed caution flag during a round of green flag stops put the 2005 series champion a lap behind.

Musgrave's truck was one of the strongest of the day on the short runs, and at the drop of the green to start the race he quickly moved towards the front. However, the farther the field ran under green flag conditions left Musgrave fighting the handle on his Toyota Tundra. He brought the truck down pit road to crew chief Rick Gay and the Team ASE crew during green flag conditions on lap 60. However, a bobble on pit road proved costly to Musgrave; those troubles were magnified when a caution came out on lap 73. An ill-timed crash on the backstretch involving Johnny Benson and Kelly Sutton before the rest of the field cycled through their stops left Musgrave and his No. 9 Team ASE crew trapped one lap down.

"We were a little tight in the beginning, but we knew we could fix it," Musgrave said. "But we had some problems on the pit stop. The caution coming out a couple laps later was really a double whammy there. But once we got the truck adjusted to where we wanted it, we were almost a half a second faster than almost everyone out there except for (race winner Erik) Darnell. Track positions got us. We kept waiting for a caution and it never came. We should have called Tony Stewart to see if he could find us a debris caution!"

Fighting track position wasn't the only challenge of the day for Musgrave. With the 5 pm local start time, the setting sun was an issue when the drivers made their way through turns three and four, and it got worse the later in the day the race ran. That problem was also magnified by trouble on the track.

"I can't see anyway, so it didn't bother me a bit," Musgrave joked. "I actually asked the guys on one of the stops to get me some tape for my visor to act like a visor in a street car. I thought it was an ace in the whole to help us see a little better than the competition out there. But once the 21 truck had engine problems there and laid down all that fluid, it really made the glare problems even worse."

Musgrave sits sixth in the current NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series championship standings after five of 25 races, seven points behind Jack Sprague for fifth position and 178 points behind leader Mike Skinner.

Next up for Musgrave and the Germain Racing No. 9 Team ASE Toyota is the Quaker Steak and Lube 200 at Lowe's Motor Speedway in Concord, N.C. The race is slated for live telecast on SPEED, and can be heard live on select affiliates of the Motor Racing Network starting at 8:30 P.M. Eastern on Friday, May 18. TruckSeries.com will have complete event coverage, including practice, qualifying, and race updates online athttp://www.truckseries.com. ________________________________________________________________

What is Team ASE? In the early days of racing, the driver was often recognized as the main reason for a team's success. Recently, the crew chief and crew have been acknowledged as equally important in creating a winning situation for every race team. A parallel exists between racing and the automotive service industry. Similar to the way a crew chief and crew must deliver a satisfactory product to the driver in order to win the race, an employer and the technicians in a service and repair shop must satisfy the needs of their customer in order to create return business. But what makes TEAM ASE most unique is the level of commitment from our certified technicians involved in the program - both on and off the track. Being competitive on the race track is important to TEAM ASE because ASE is itself a standard of excellence. However, TEAM ASE's success in motorsports is not solely measured by pole position, top-five finishes or by slapping hundreds of decals on racecars.