July 16, 2003

Hamilton discusses how team will overcome adversity

Overcoming Adversity: "After our finish in last weekend's race, it wasn't very fun in the meeting room of my hauler.  While we were in the back discussing what happened, the guys were tearing down the shocks and double checking things on the truck, which wouldn't normally be done until Monday.  It's not really fair for Square D or Dodge at this point for us to come in here and run the way we did in Kentucky.  I've got my owner hat on now.  Newt is a great crew chief and he is really on my guys hard right now because of this championship.  We were just sitting here talking about how we need to go back and start having fun like we were at the beginning of the season.  We don't want to shoot ourselves in the foot.  I promise the race fans out there that this is a great race team.  We have two other teams who are good as well.  We're just going to calm down a little bit, reach back and drink a couple of Bud Lights and go out there and have some fun."

Driver Hat, Owner Hat: "I'm not a good boss.  I've always built my deal with a real mild mentality.  I've been doing this so long that I've seen the end of it where owners or crew chiefs go berserk.  I want the guys to be kind to one another and respect each others positions.  But I also expect people to pull their weight and do their job.  I know they are all capable of doing it.  We just have to get their personalities to click.  It was a big shock to them when we lost 84 points, Bam, like that.  So we come back the next race and had to pit late in the race and finish 14th.  Then we have a shock break last week and finish 18th.  That's a pretty big blow to people who work as hard as they do.  They take a lot of pride in having good stuff.  We'll turn it around and be ok.  I think I need to stay as the driver for a little while and work with my crew and let my team manager help me fix my problems.  Sometimes I think the owners can get in there and stir up too much trouble at times.  We're just trying to take the proper way to do things, but we're going to be running their butts off before the year is out."

Notes:
" This weekend's No. 4 Dodge is the same truck that Hamilton raced in Bakersfield, Martinsville and Milwaukee earlier this year.  
" Hamilton will be attending a media luncheon for Gateway International Raceway on Thursday, July 17th.  For more information, please contact Pete Wickham at Gateway International Raceway.            

The Halfway Point: "Everyone gets really nervous about points in the beginning of the season.  They all start saying well Hamilton has dropped to fifth in the points by race 11.  But nobody seems to notice that we are not even to the halfway point of our season yet.  There is still plenty of time for us to turn this season around.  If you look at it, we've had three bad races, and so have some of the other championship contender drivers.  We still have 14 more races to go and we want to get our finishes up there to average a top five every week.  I know we have the trucks to do that, we just have to get our finishes to reflect where we race.  I've never raced at Gateway before, and Newt has only been there once when he raced with Kenny Wallace in a Busch Series race years ago.  We hear it's a lot like Milwaukee.  So we thought if we took the same truck and went off pretty much the same setup we had in Milwaukee, we would be pretty good.  Well at least it will be a good start."