Cassill’s ‘roller coaster’ season continues into Kansas Speedway practice

KANSAS CITY, Kan. - The 2015 season may only be 10 races deep, but for Cedar Rapids native Landon Cassill, it's been a veritable roller coaster ride, with boom or bust results - and on two occasions, a boom resulted in a bust.

The 25-year-old Hillman-Smith Racing driver started the season with back-to-back blown engines in the Daytona 500 and at Atlanta Motor Speedway. Two weeks after that, though, started a three-race stretch where his No. 40 finished in the top 25 and on the lead lap, with a best finish of 21st at Martinsville - a feat his team didn't accomplish in any stretch last season.

At Bristol, Cassill qualified a season-best 17th and was running inside the top 20 on the lead lap before a loose wheel sent them behind the wall, and a hard wreck after returning ended his race. Then last week, while running eighth at Talladega Superspeedway, he was caught up in the Big One and relegated to a 39th-place finish.

His cars have been faster than last year across the board, but Cassill said the team just hasn't been able to get in any type of rhythm.

'I don't know if there's one word for it, but it's just been a roller coaster,” Cassill said. 'We've just had a lot of really good shining moments of the improvements we've made in the team and our program. But then we've had a lot of terrible luck. Just bad weekends really.

'We've had engine failures, finished bad a Bristol, wrecked at Talladega, all while we were running really good. We just can't get going. We have what we need, we just haven't gotten going yet.”

Coming into Kansas Speedway originally was a track Cassill's team looked forward to coming to, due to their 21st-place, lead-lap finish in the October race at the Kansas City, Kan. track during the Chase for the Sprint Cup.

But right off the truck, the team was scrambling to find speed in the car, eventually discovering a few key measurements were off and needed readjusting with just a few minutes left in final practice.

That resulted in less than five laps with the setup the way the team wanted it, and a 41st-place qualifying effort. The frustration was evident after qualifying for Cassill, his crew chief Mark Hillman and team owner Mike Hillman Sr.

Incidents like Friday's practice are indicative of the small things that have added up to plague the start of the season and faster cars than they've ever brought to the track.

'This weekend in Kansas, it took us to the second practice to figure out what was wrong with our car, and it was the most simple thing we just kind of didn't get right,” Cassill said. 'We'll hopefully run decent (Saturday) and get the car driving better, but we cost ourselves two hours of practice we could've used to get ourselves in the top 20 instead of scrambling to run 30th.”

Having rough practice days and turning that around on race day has happened before for Hillman-Smith Racing, so Cassill remains confident the work the team does overnight will get the car back to where it should've been to start the weekend.

He pointed to the last time they were in Kansas of evidence that it's possible.

'We (aren't) thrilled with qualifying, but if we build some adjustability into the car for the race (Saturday), I think we'll be fine,” Cassill said. 'We've had that in the past here at Kansas - I've had terrible practice sessions; I think a little bit might be me - and raced really well. It's not like we unloaded off the truck that good last fall.

'I'm still a little tentative because it's the same car we ran at Las Vegas and we were just garbage at Las Vegas, so we don't know if it could be in the car. But I think we'll be OK, we'll just have to see how it works. We'll have to outrace some guys, make good adjustments because the car won't be perfect when the race starts.”

The SpongeBob SquarePants 400 is set to take the green flag just after 6:30 p.m. Saturday, and can be seen on Fox Sports 1.

l Comments: (319) 368-8884; jeremiah.davis@thegazette.com