Musgrave Satisfied But Not Content With 11th At Dover

Ted Musgrave left Dover International Speedway very pleased with the way he and his HT Motorsports team performed but wanting more after driving the No. 59 Team ASE/Harris Trucking Toyota to an eleventh-place finish in the AAA Insurance 200.

“I am really happy with the way we ran this weekend,” Musgrave said. “This team is really starting to come together well. There is a very strong core that we’ve built upon. It showed this weekend. We were fast in practice and we qualified well. We were in the top five with 50 laps to go and we took a gamble on tires and it just didn’t pay off the way we thought it would.

“We had a set of tires saved for late in the race and we even caught a caution just right there at the end,” Musgrave said. “I think it was the right call to make. I like to take those gambles sometimes because when they pay off they tend to pay off big. But we just ran out of laps there at the end. I think we needed another ten laps.”

Musgrave was just one position away from picking up his fourth top-ten finish of the season. He and the HT Motorsports team have set their goals for 2008 and scoring top tens is just the first step along the way to becoming contenders to win.

“We missed out on the top ten by one spot, so we were a little upset about that,” Musgrave said. “You have to crawl before you can walk, and you have to walk before you can run. I think if we contend for a top-ten finish every week, the next step is racing for the top five. If you are a top five contender then the next step is racing for the win. With the group of guys we have on this team I know we’re capable of it.”

Musgrave remains 13th in the NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series championship standings, 160 points behind leader Rick Crawford and 18 points behind Erik Darnell for 12th. Musgrave is just 55 points behind Chad McCumbee for the tenth position in the standings.

Musgrave returns to Texas Motor Speedway – where he won last fall – for Friday’s Sam’s Town 400. The 167-lap/400-kilometer race is scheduled for a 9 P.M. Eastern start and will be televised live on SPEED. MRN Radio will also have the live radio broadcast on select affiliates nationwide and on Sirius NASCAR Radio Channel 128