Andy Lally hoping for a good weekend at Watkins Glen

Lally Hoping For a Heluva Good! Homecoming
TRG Motorsports Driver Plans to Double Dip This Weekend

Andy Lally, TRG Motorsports Ford

Photo by: Eric Gilbert

Mooresville, N.C. (8/11/2011) - TRG Motorsports heads to Watkins Glen International this weekend for the running of the Heluva Good! Dips at the Glen NASCAR Sprint Cup Series event. A strong weekend at Pocono further solidified the team’s position in the top-35 of NASCAR’s owner’s points standings.

Andy Lally will be pulling double duty as he will compete in both the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series and the Rolex Grand-American Series. Lally, a three-time Grand-Am Champion and a four-time Grand-Am Watkins Glen winner is looking forward to the weekend.

“I’ve been looking forward to this weekend all season long. We have put a lot of extra effort into the road racing program. I’m excited to be pulling double duty this weekend. We have done a lot of work on our Sprint Cup car since Sonoma and our Grand-Am car is actually the same car TRG won the 6-Hour at the Glen with last year, so I know that I’ll be in two very good racecars this weekend.”

The trip to the Empire State will also be a homecoming for the NASCAR rookie.

“I grew up on Long Island, so I’m happy to come home and race this weekend. It’s just another reason to have a little extra motivation this weekend. I can’t say enough how much I’m looking forward to this trip.”

Lally’s teammate in Saturday’s Grand-Am event will be Duncan Ende. Ende will be seeking back-to-back victories as he and teammate Spencer Pumpelly took home the checkered flag in their class at Mid-Ohio last weekend. Ende has been on an incredible run since his big win at last years Petite Le Mans.

Crew chief Doug Richert is seeking a strong run for the no.71 team.

“We missed some things at Sonoma, but we’ve learned from them and I think we have taken some big steps towards fielding a competitive ride for Andy this weekend. I have all the confidence in the world in his road racing abilities. He’s shown time and time again that he can win turning left and right. Obviously, these Sprint Cup cars are a lot heavier and drastically different from anything he has ever raced before. But he is doing a good job every week and I’m looking forward to seeing what he can do for us at a track he has a good amount of experience on.”

Richert also stressed the importance of a good qualifying run.

“No one has ever qualified outside the top-20 and won here. Track position is very important here. It’s not like Sonoma where you can start in the back, get off sequence in your pit strategy and end up in the front at the end of the day. You can still try those things to some extent, but it makes your whole weekend a lot easier if you have a good starting position when the green flag drops. The other thing that makes qualifying here more difficult is that the driver only gets one chance to put down a solid lap. That’s different from every other track we go to where the driver gets two laps to set his time.”

Team owner Kevin Buckler is hoping for a pair of solid races for his organization.

“We’ve been competitive in sports car racing for a very long time. On that side of things, we’re the team to beat most weekends. The NASCAR side of things has been somewhat humbling, but we are making progress every single weekend. I see our cars getting better, our team getting stronger and Andy driving more competitively. If we continue to improve in each of those three areas, we will continue to make progress as an organization.

Andy has done some real heads up driving the past few weekends for us. He’s being more aggressive, but still driving smart. He has more laps around this place than any track we go to on the schedule. This is where he made his first Cup race and where I think he has as good of a shot as anyone at having a strong weekend. Hopefully a good race Saturday will boost his confidence heading into Sunday and we can come out of this thing with our heads high and a pair of results we can be proud of.”