Justin, TX (April 18, 2005) Michael Waltrip brought the No. 99 Aaron’s Dream Machine to the Texas Motor Speedway for Saturday’s O’Reilly 300 NASCAR Busch Series race. After qualifying 12th on Thursday, NASCAR impounded all of the racecars and kept them under lock and key until Saturday morning before the race. The impound procedure is designed to save teams money by reducing on-track practice and time in the garage. However, the downside of the impound is that you race with the setup you qualify with.

When the green flag dropped Saturday afternoon, Waltrip had his hands full of a racecar that didn’t want to turn. The car was “pushing” so bad that Michael brushed the wall coming out of turn two and knocked his right front fender in. The damage wasn’t bad enough to pit, but hurt the handling enough where he started falling back through the field.

The crew made some drastic changes to the chassis during the first three pit stops that helped the handling somewhat, but a cut tire forced Michael into the pits for an early green-flag stop that put the Dream Machine two-laps down from the leader.

Waltrip made one-lap back when the lead cars had to make green-flag stops, but lamented back in the mid-twentieth position for much of the race. Michael got back on the lead-lap with forty-laps to go and dodged a couple of late incidents to pick up a few positions and finished 15th.

Kasey Kahne won the second Busch Series race of his career, followed by Greg Biffle, Reed Sorenson, Carl Edwards and Elliot Sadler.

The next Busch Series event for the Aaron’s Dream Machine will be the Aaron’s 312 at Talladega April 30.