Kobyluck Turns Things Around At NHIS With Top-10 Finish

Busch East Series driver Matt Kobyluck is a strong believer in making your own luck. So this week, despite the fact that the last eight races at New Hampshire International Speedway have gone poorly for the Uncasville, Conn. native, Kobyluck was able to pull off a sixth place finish in the New England 125 – his first top-10 there since 2002. The key, he said, was going there without any expectations.

“We had a top-10 car today. I don’t know if I would have been able to get by Joey (Logano), but hey, the car is in one piece. I drove it over to the trailer after the race was over with a sixth place finish. I’m happy with that,” he said. “It was a relaxing day. It didn’t matter what happened on the track. I just drove the car for what we had, and took what we got.”

Kobyluck was the second fastest in practice Thursday afternoon and backed it up with a qualifying effort of 31.004 seconds (122.849 mph). The time trial lap earned him a 13th place starting position.

“It’s an impound race, and you have to set the car up for the long run. While it would have been great to go out there and set the pole winning lap, we are thinking about having the car set up for the race. We’re confident we’ve got a car strong enough to be consistent through all 125 laps.”

And consistent Kobyluck was. He got better and better as the race went on.

After starting 13th, Kobyluck was up to eighth by lap 21, and pitted with a majority of the field on lap 49 for fuel. But Kobyluck and the Mohegan Sun Casino team were one of only about a dozen teams to re-pit on the following circuit for a fresh set of tires.

When racing resumed on lap 53, Kobyluck was 18th on the grid and ready to get to the front. Caution, however, dictated the second half of the race, and made racing that much more difficult.

“We probably should have finished third, but on every restart I would pass a car, we would have a caution, and I would be put back. I think I passed the same cars about a half-dozen times to get back to where I was before the caution,” Kobyluck explained.

Despite the hurdles, Kobyluck kept plugging. At lap 78, the Mohegan Sun Casino Chevrolet was back in the top-10. Two red flags and several more cautions made it impossible to get to the front, but by the time the checkers fell – two hours after it began – Kobyluck was sixth. More importantly, a streak of bad luck at the ‘Magic Mile’ had finally been put behind them.

“We’re going to build on this,” said Kobyluck. “It was a great day for us, and I’m really excited about this for the guys. They work so hard to have a good finish here, and we haven’t been able to capitalize on that over the last couple of years. There’s a lot of places that I probably would have been disappointed with a sixth place finish, but not here. Here, this is almost like a win.”