A week after getting a surprise call in fill in for NASCAR’s Most Popular Driver, Josh Berry was able to put the No. 9 Hendrick Motorsports Chevy in the top 10 at Phoenix.
The finish comes a week after he started 32nd in Vegas and finished 29th.
Saturday Berry was able to grab a 17th place starting spot. During the race he was able to avoid trouble, stay inside the top 20, and emerge from the chaos of an overtime finish to come home with a career best tenth place in just his fourth NASCAR Cup series start.
“It was a really solid day for the No. 9 Kelley Blue Book Chevy team,” Berry said. “We were able to improve a lot from what we had last week. We were able to stay on the lead lap basically the whole race.
“We had a couple of runs in there that were really good. A couple runs where we fell back a little bit, but it’s just all part of a learning experience for me. These races are so long and I need to be able to learn this car a little bit better where I can give Alan (Gustafson, crew chief) a little bit better direction on how to help me.”
“Towards the end, we found that we were a little bit on the free side of our better runs. At the end there, we were probably going to finish 15th or 16th, which I was still pretty happy with. Obviously had the cautions there and we executed a couple of really good restarts there and was able to get a top-10.”
Greg is the author of "The Nuts and Bolts of NASCAR: The Definitive Viewers' Guide to Big-Time Stock Car Auto Racing" and has been published in major publications across the country including the Los Angeles Times, the Cleveland Plain Dealer and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. He was also a contributor to Chicken Soup for the NASCAR Soul, published in 2010, and the Christmas edition in 2016. He wrote as the NASCAR, Formula 1, Auto Reviews and National Veterans Affairs Examiner for Examiner.com and has appeared on Fox News. He holds a BS degree in communications, a Masters degree in psychology and is currently a PhD candidate majoring in psychology. He is currently the weekend Motorsports Editor for Autoweek.
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