CHAFFIN, DODSON EYEING GATEWAY TRUCK RACE
 TO TURN KEY MOTORSPORTS’ FORTUNES AROUND

To this point in the 2006 NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series season, veteran driver Chad Chaffin and his Key Motorsports team have had little to crow about. The 37-year-old pilot and the team’s new crew chief, Barry Dodson, both believe that this is all about to change with the running of the Missouri-Illinois Dodge Dealers Ram Tough 250 at Gateway International Raceway in Madison, IL at the end of the month.

“We’ve been running as if the race truck was wearing ankle weights”, Chaffin said, alluding to the fact that his #40 Key Motorsports Chevrolet Silverado has entered the first four races this season grossly down on horsepower and only qualified for one of the shows (California).

“Curtis (team owner Curtis Key) prides himself in owning his motors, but the pieces we have, even refurbished, were as much as 48 horsepower down to the rear wheels. You can make a lot of little changes to the race truck to compensate for some horsepower deficiency, but nothing can make up for what we were lacking”, Dodson explained. “That should be straightened out at Gateway, though, now that we have brought in Dennis Fischer and his company (Fischer Engineering) to hopefully restore that power”.

Chaffin has competed in three Craftsman Truck Series races at Gateway during his career and really loves its fast, 1.25-mile oval layout. That love comes mainly from posting no worse than a 13th place finish in those races (that coming in 2003 in Chad’s very first appearance) and topped by a fourth place effort in 2004. He finished ninth last year. As a qualifier at Gateway International, Chaffin has been almost as strong, starting 12th, sixth and 13th in the 2005, 2004 and 2003 events, respectively.

“I really like the place (Gateway International), and though I say that a lot about tracks where I have run good at, I have had some pretty good luck there. The only disappointment came in the 2004 race when I was leading with a lap to go after running in the top three all night, got hit from behind and fell back to fourth at the line. I should have won that race,” added Chaffin, who scored his two career Craftsman Truck Series victories (at Dover and IRP) that same season.

The combination of new-found horsepower and Dodson’s history of success in NASCAR as a set-up man is something that Chaffin is very much looking forward to experiencing when his #40 Key Motorsports machine hits the track on April 29th for the 1-day show.

“We qualified 16th in California, led six laps and finished 18th and on the lead lap without a lot of horsepower”, explained Chaffin, who admitted that he had to flat foot it around the 2-mile Fontana track in order to accomplish that. However, he was bumped from the field in the Daytona season opener because of NASCAR’s top 30 rule despite turning in the 28th fastest time, and was then just a couple of tenths shy of making the field in Atlanta and 94 hundredths of a second too slow in Martinsville.

“Imagine what we could have done if we had the 680 or 690 horsepower that you need for those tracks”, Chaffin mused. “I like our new engine program a lot, which should help us get into the race. But it’s going to be what Barry can do with our set-up that is going to determine just how good we can race. The potential is there, and now we all have to live up it”, Chaffin added.

For Dodson, who replaced Lance Hooper as crew chief just a couple of days before the Martinsville race, he has spent the last few weeks setting a totally different list of standards by which Key Motorsports will now approach each race.

“We have stopped looking back now. We have evaluated and gone through all of our trucks, and even though we have made some significant revisions to some of them, I was encouraged when Dennis Fischer told me to just work on tweaking them a little and not changing a whole lot”, Dodson explained. “He said from what he could see on the chassis dyno, our trucks are good. We just needed the power to really show what they were capable of doing. The race at Gateway will thus be our testing session to prove that he is correct”, Dodson ended.

It is now apparent that Chaffin and his Dodson-led Key Motorsports contingent are now focused on only looking forward. That philosophy will begin to take shape at the Missouri-Illinois Dodge Dealers Ram Tough 250 that is scheduled to get the green flag on Saturday night, April 29, at 7:15 p.m. CDT with practice and qualifying to be held earlier in the day.