Cook Rebounds to Finish Sixth in Charlotte

Terry Cook rebounded from adversity in practice to score a solid sixth-place finish in Friday night’s North Carolina Education Lottery 200 NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series race at Lowe’s Motor Speedway. Cook had a right front tire go down in the early moments of practice and destroyed the primary No. 60 Wyler.com Toyota, but his John Quinn-led crew unloaded the backup truck and tuned on it all night long to score the team’s third top-ten finish of the season.

“These guys just never gave up at all today,” Cook said after the race. “We had a tire go down on the primary truck and crashed it in practice. They worked on the backup truck all day long to get it to where it was pretty competitive at the end of the race. Sure, we had some help from some of the guys crashing and taking themselves out but we also got up there and passed some pretty strong trucks too. Their hard work paid off with a really good finish tonight.”

Cook was sitting in the top five when the final caution of the race came out, sending the race into over time.

“I didn’t want to see it go to a green-white-checkered,” he said. “We had a run going on (Rick) Crawford for fourth and if it went to the finish without the caution I think we had a chance to get past him. I knew on the restart we would have our hands full because (Erik) Darnell was really strong. I hate to give up a spot in the final two laps like that but after the day we had sixth isn’t too bad at all.”

Cook found the high line to his liking all night long.

“We were great up in the high groove,” Cook said. “I went past a couple of guys who thought they were up high, but we were running about a football’s length off the wall. The only problem is we couldn’t run the bottom at all. We followed Crawford around for quite a few laps because he was up high too and I didn’t want to wreck the truck going hard on the bottom. That’s the only problem with these tires is that it was really hard to race side by side with them if you were on the bottom.”

Cook now moves into tenth in the NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series championship standings. He is just eleven points behind Erik Darnell for ninth and just 57 points behind fifth-place Dennis Setzer.

Next up for Cook and the Wyler Racing Team is the Ohio 250 at Mansfield Motorsports Park . The seventh race of the 2008 NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series season is scheduled to take the green flag shortly after 1 P.M. on Saturday May 24. SPEED will broadcast the race live, and the race can also be heard live on select radio affiliates of the Motor Racing Network nationwide.