Late-Race Crash Relegates Musgrave to 20th at Memphis

Ted Musgrave and the HT Motorsports team were looking for a good run in the O’Reilly 200 NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series race at Memphis Motorsports Park to end the season’s first six-week stretch of consecutive races on a positive note. Musgrave and the No. 59 Team ASE/Harris Trucking Toyota were in position to challenge for a top-ten finish in the closing laps but a tap from another competitor with just six laps remaining sent Musgrave spinning in turn four and several other trucks piled in. The resulting damage and loss of track position left the 2005 series champion 20th at the finish.
 
“We had tried some stuff to gain some track position early in the race,” Musgrave said. “We pitted when the leaders didn’t hoping we’d get up to the front. It was the “do what they don’t” strategy. We knew we weren’t going to have the tires to hold them off the whole time, but we figured we’d be able to stay a little closer to the front. Unfortunately at the end we got turned around and banged the truck up. We didn’t have enough laps once they went green to make up any of the lost positions. It’s a shame because we were running a little better than we have the past couple of weeks and it stinks to see it go out the door late in the race like that.”
 
Musgrave isn’t quite ready to put a period on the 2008 season just yet.
 
“We’ve spent a lot of time thinking about what we need to do to get back to the wat we were at the start of the season over the past couple of weeks,” Musgrave said. “We’ve lost some key personnel and that’s a part of it. We have scheduled some short track and intermediate track tests during the off-time between Memphis and Kentucky so hopefully we can start to get that feel in the truck that we had in the early part of the season. As a smaller team we don’t have some of equipment the big operations do – the shaker rigs and things like that. All of our knowledge has to come from what we learn on the track. This team has the potential to race for top tens and that’s what we need to be doing. If we can start getting back into the top ten on a regular basis then we can take the next step and start racing for top fives. None of us are going to give up, that’s for sure.”
 
Musgrave sits 14th in the NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series championship standings, 62 points behind Brendan Gaughan in 13th and 136 points behind tenth place Chad McCumbee.
 
The next race for Musgrave and the No. 59 Team ASE/Harris Trucking Toyota is the Built Ford Tough 225 at Kentucky Speedway on Saturday July 19. The race is scheduled to go green shortly after 7 P.M. Eastern and will be televised live on SPEED and broadcast live on select affiliates of the MRN Radio network nationwide. The MRN Radio broadcast can also be heard live on Sirius NASCAR Radio Channel 128.