Landon Cassill to try to make NASCAR truck race field on Thursday

Landon Cassill of Cedar Rapids is a 20-year-old race car driver without a full-time ride, but he'll try to make a good impression on people this week at Daytona.

Cassill will try to qualify a car Thursday night for Friday night's NASCAR Camping Truck World Series season-opener at Daytona International Speedway. He'll be ThorSport Racing's third entry there, along with 2009 Series runner-up Johnny Sauter and Mike Crafton.

ThorSport has run trucks in every race the Series has held since 1996.

Cassill made seven starts on the trucks circuit in 2008. He had one top-five and three top-10 finishes. That was the same year he was the Nationwide Series Rookie of the Year while driving for Hendrick Motorsports. He had five top-10s in his 19 starts.

Hendrick still employs him as a developmental driver. But Hendrick has no openings for drivers, and young Cassill has to race whenever he can.

"It's so tough out there right now, you can't predict anything," Cassill told me by phone on Tuesday afternoon. "The economy is so tough right now. Everything revolves around money."

The 100-lap trucks race Friday is at 7 p.m., Central time, on the Speed network.

Cassill, by the way, prevented an attack on a woman in Charlotte, N.C., last month. I didn't know about this when I had him on the phone, I'm sorry to say, or I'd have asked him for details.

Here is the sbnation.com story on the episode.

By the way, you can follow Cassill on Twitter at

http://twitter.com/landoncassill