JOHNNY GREAVES

#22 Monster Energy Toyota

Red Bull Frozen Rush

January 9, 2014

Greaves posted the fastest practice time in Wednesday’s sessions and followed it up with the fourth fastest time on Thursday. He will face off against Scott Douglas in the first round on Friday.

You had the fastest practice time yesterday and did decently in qualifying today. What about this track do you think suits your driving style in particular?

I’m guessing maybe that I have a little more experience just driving in the snow because that’s where we live, but it drives so much different than you’d expect, especially in a race car. But our engine, once we get up and moving, it seems to accelerate pretty good and I think a lot of them are struggling with gearing and everything. In our qualifying run we had a little oil line come loose and I lost some oil, so I just kind of nursed it around to get a time on the board. It’s going to definitely improve tomorrow—we’re going to get back to where we were in that practice.

There are a lot of jumps on this course, and there’s a lot of very wild driving—I’m sure it’s like night and day driving snow versus driving dirt. What are some of the differences with apexing into the corners and acceleration?

You know, at first you would think you want to throw it and really use the snow to get you rotating and everything. But to me, it’s almost better if you roll the turns and just get it turned, because once you throw it you really don’t know when it’s gonna stop. It just—depending on how deep the fluff is there, you just kinda keep floating across that, so it’s definitely different. When we practiced and the track was hard it was similar to dirt, but that’s all gone away.

And then of course tomorrow where you’ll actually have the head-to-head, is having the other truck on the course with you when you’re practicing without that- is that really going to be a big thing on your mind tomorrow, or is it  just going to be a case of running your own race?

No, it’s still going to be running your own race. Collectively we all decided that we need to separate the trucks and we’re going to do it like a staggered start because the snow dust is so bad, the guy who got the whole shot would be gone—you can’t even see after that. We’re going to try to separate them by the over/under so we’re kind of jumping over each other and make that part cool, and then from there it’s just run better than the next guy and see how the times end up.