The Stewart-Haas Racing No. 4 Ford Mustang will sport a new set of work clothes on Sunday.
Harrison’s will make its debut on Josh Berry’s ride at the Ambetter Health 400 at Atlanta Motor Speedway in green and brown colors synonymous with hard work. The green represents grass and farm produce while the brown accents represent dirt and hard-working blue-collar Americans. Harrison’s will be the primary partner for two races this season – Sunday at Atlanta and May 19 during the All-Star Race at North Wilkesboro (N.C.) Speedway.
“I'm excited to have Harrison’s on board this weekend,” Berry said. “They have been a big supporter of mine throughout my career and I've had a lot of success with Harrison’s, so hopefully we can continue our luck together and win a race that is pretty close to their home base.”
Berry heads to Atlanta Motor Speedway on the heels of his first Daytona 500, where the rookie started 30th after suffering a mechanical issue in his Bluegreen Vacations Duel qualifying race. Berry and the No. 4 team finished 25th in the rain-delayed crown jewel event Monday but showed speed throughout the 500-mile race, running as high as second before being collected in an incident on pit road.
This Sunday, Berry heads to the superspeedway-like Atlanta Motor Speedway for the second points-paying race of the 2024 NASCAR Cup Series season. Coming off the Daytona 500, Berry is focused on implementing the lessons he learned from last weekend when he takes to the 1.54-mile Atlanta oval. Berry has made six NASCAR Xfinity starts at Atlanta, four of them on the track that was repaved and reconfigured to facilitate superspeedway-style racing prior to the 2022 season. In those four most recent starts, the driver of the No. 4 Harrison’s Ford Mustang has one top-five finish, two top-10s, and has started each within the top-10. His best finish came in July 2022, when Berry took the checkered flag in the runner-up position. Coincidently, that Xfinity Series car was also sponsored by Harrison’s.
“I think there will be a lot of similarities with the draft, the strategy, and continuing to work on the communication with Rodney (Childers, crew chief) and Eddie (D’Hondt, spotter),” Berry said. “The biggest difference at Atlanta is that it's starting to age a little bit. Hopefully, handling becomes a little bit more of a factor this time around.”
Childers’ presence could work as a huge benefit for Berry. He’s called the shots for two wins, five top-five finishes, nine top-10s, and 1,123 laps led at the track. In fact, in Childers’ first race with former No. 4 driver Kevin Harvick in 2014, the duo won the pole position on the old Atlanta layout. They then found victory lane in 2018 after leading 181 laps. Just two year later, Childers and Harvick found their winning combination again and led 151 laps in that event. But Berry knows that despite that success, Atlanta is a different beast these days.
“With Rodney’s success there, the only thing that is similar is the location,” he said. “The reconfiguration and the repave have really changed the racing at Atlanta, so we have a new opportunity to continue their success in the past, but basically on a new layout. I think with the way we could work through the field in Daytona, that gives us confidence heading into the weekend that we can do the same at Atlanta.”
Berry hopes to capitalize on experience gained at Daytona, and to stay out of trouble in the second race of the season.
“There were a lot of positives coming out of the Daytona 500 weekend,” he said. “Obviously, we experienced some issues here and there but I thought our team showed a lot of speed and we were able to race up front a good bit. So my expectation is that we can do the same thing and build off our first weekend and continue to race up front. Hopefully, this weekend we can get a better finish than what we had last week because that didn’t represent the race we ran.”
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