Late Rally Earns Cook, HT Motorsports Toyota 11th-Place NCTS Finish

With 40 laps to go in Saturday’s Michigan 200, Terry Cook was mired in 25th position and hoping the most recent round of pit stops would correct the race-long handling issues that had plagued his No. 59 HT Motorsports Toyota Tundra.

“My truck was really loose, almost out of control, and we were really fighting to get it back to where I could drive it competitively,” said Cook, who rallied to finish 11th in the final stages of the NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series event. “Fortunately, the guys on this HT Motorsports team kept on making the truck better, especially at the end of each run, and we were able to drive to the front and get a good finish.”

Cook started 18th in the 200-mile event on the super-fast, two-mile Michigan oval after posting an average speed of 175.640 miles per hour in qualifying earlier in the day. The veteran driver, who was making his 250th career Truck Series start, got a great jump on the at the green flag passing several trucks only to quickly fall back in the pack.

“We sprinted up to 11th in the first two laps and then drove straight to the back,” said Cook. “The truck was so loose that I thought I had a flat left-rear tire. It was really a handful. You just have to be smart at that point – take what the truck will give you and not wreck - and put yourself in a position where you can still be there at the end of the race.”

A pit stop at Lap 31 made Cook’s red and white Toyota better, but still not good enough to compete with the leaders. A second stop, however, with just over 40 circuits remaining, gave Cook the truck he needed to dominate the final portion of the race.

“We took a spring rubber out of the right rear and put one in the left rear on our final pit stop,” said Cook. “That took quite a bit of time to do that and cost us a lot of spots on the racetrack, but the changes woke our truck up and we were able to pick up a bunch of positions late in the race. To be able to come up from 25th to 11th in the final portion of the race was awesome. It was a total team effort. There’s no quit in anybody on this team. When you have everybody fighting for the same goal like that, it’s pretty cool.”

About the only disappointment for Cook was not scoring a Top-10 finish, a goal that was short-circuited in the final handful of laps.

“We were closing in on Ron Hornaday, Jr. for 10th at the finish,” said Cook. “We definitely had a faster truck than he did - we were turning lap times equal to the leader - but I burned the right-front tire off our truck driving through the field and I could start to feel it going away with a couple of laps remaining. It was a little disappointing to have to back out and not get a Top-10, but it wouldn’t have been too smart to stick it in the fence that late in the race trying to do that. If we’d have been racing for the win, it might have been different, but this was a day where we could definitely be satisfied with 11th.”

Cook’s exciting late-race charge provided the most recent solid finish for the Martinsville, VA based HT Motorsports team. Over the last eight events, Cook has completed all but one of the 1,404 laps contested and has rallied from 29th to 11th in the NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series season championship standings over that period.

The Sylvania, OH native is now just 15 points out of the Top 10 in the title chase heading into the next event at The Milwaukee Mile in West Allis, WI – a track where he has won in the past (2002) and has a current string of six-straight Top-10 finishes.

“We’ve got a nice little streak going at Milwaukee,” said Cook. “I’d definitely like to keep that going, as well as continue the run of solid finishes we’ve been having. I told our team owner, Jim Harris, that I wanted to be in the Top-10 in points by the time we ended this summer string of seven-straight weeks of races at Memphis. Thanks to a great effort by the guys on this team, we’re right there. We just need another solid effort at Milwaukee to do that before we head to Memphis in a couple of weeks.”

The Toyota 200 at The Milwaukee Mile will take the green flag this Friday, June 22, at 9 p.m. Eastern Time. The SPEED Channel will televise the event live while MRN and Sirius Satellite Radio will broadcast the event worldwide as it happens.

For more information about Terry Cook and HT Motorsports, please log on to www.htmotorsports.com.