Kasey Kahne will try to become the first driver to sweep the Sprint All-Star Challenge, Coca-Cola 600 and Bank of America 500 in one season when he tries for the triple play Saturday night at Lowe's Motor Speedway.
Kahne has won three time at the Charlotte track and feels confident he'll have the car to compete for the historic win on Saturday night.
"You either feel that you have a competitive racecar or that you have work to do to make the car faster," Kahne said. "From there, the first couple laps of the race it’s always a big question mark. Once you run three or four laps you’re like, ‘We’re going to have a shot tonight.’ You know how competitive you are going to be as soon as you get inside the race car."
Since winning both May events in Charlotte back in May as well as the opening week in June at Pocono, Kahne has cooled off. His summer slump cost him a shot at making this year's Chase field.
But he believes a return to LMS will get him back to his winning ways.
"The good news is that we came to the test here, and [team manager] Kenny [Francis] brought some new things that really worked well," Kahne said. "I think that we’ll be competitive here Saturday night.”
With his success at LMS, it is a mystery to Kahne why that performance hasn't carried over to other intermediate tracks on the schedule.
"I'm not really sure," Kahne said. “Tracks that are similar to Lowe’s, we’ve been able to apply some things that we’ve learned and have been successful. For the other banked mile-and-a-half tracks, we just haven’t hit on the combination needed to be really strong."
The Gillette Evernham Motorsports driver is confident that he can finish the season on a strong note and perform well at the mid-sized tracks that make up the bulk of the remaining schedule.
"We have to go back to Atlanta and Texas and then on to Homestead – tracks that we’ve struggled at and haven’t been as consistent as we need to be," Kahne said.
