Charlotte, North Carolina, USA (August 4, 2010)  Narain Karthikeyan will fly to Nashville, Tennessee this weekend to race at Nashville Superspeedway, which is a 1.333 miles race track where Karthikeyan will race in his sixth NASCAR Camping World Truck Series race for one-hundred fifty laps.  The Starbeast Motorsports team will prepare for another one-day show where practice will take place in the morning, qualifying in the afternoon, and then race at night.

Karthikeyan will be experiencing even more new sights and sounds as he enters the “home of country music”.  The city of Nashville will not be the only new experience that Karthikeyan will have over the weekend.  Racing at yet another new racetrack will bring new challenges, especially since this track is a “D” shaped oval.  

“Racing at another new race track is pretty exciting for me.  It’s great traveling all over the country getting more seat time in these ovals.  Racing on concrete I have heard is different than racing on asphalt.  I haven’t raced or tested on any concrete ovals yet so far, but I am really looking forward to getting out there and learning the driving style.  My crew chief and I have been working continuously to communicate with each other the set up of the racecar and we will continue to improve as we head to our sixth race of the season,” says Karthikeyan.

“The team practiced pit stops this week for extra preparation for this weekend’s race.  It’s great to see how well the team works together to overcome the learning curves.  Karthikeyan has been adapting so quickly to tracks in which he has no experience which is truly showing how much talent he has.  Nashville will be a very exciting race to watch because the superspeedway is a really wide track with sweeping corners.  The most difficult part is going into turn one because it is a very late apexing corner,” explains team owner, Miguel Abaroa.  The apex is the center of the corner in which the car comes closest to the inside of the race track.  Nashville has late apexing corners, which means that the driver will turn low late, giving the car a straight shot down the straightaway.  

Crew chief, Chad Kendrick, and driver Stacy Compton, who is also Karthikeyan’s spotter, raced at Nashville Superspeedway in April of this year.  In April, Compton qualified seventeenth and finished ninth.  In the previous year, there was only one race in Nashville.  During the race of 2009, Kendrick was part of the Red Horse Racing team working with Timothy Peters.  While working with Peters, the team was able to grab the pole position and wound up finishing fourth in the race.  Kendrick has several Nashville races under his belt and has strategized a great pit strategy that will hopefully be part of the success that the Starbeast team will bring to the racetrack on August 7^th.  Kendrick’s knowledge, experience, and accomplishments are great assets to have at the racetrack.

“I feel I have a huge amount of momentum going into this next race.  Although we finished twentieth in my last NASCAR Camping World Truck Series race at O’Reilly Raceway Park, I feel that ORP was my best race of the season so far.  During the race we were disappointed to be involved in an accident because it changed the momentum.  The damage wasn’t terrible and we were still able to be competitive, but we worked hard to stay on the pace.  I also won again at Brands Hatch this weekend in the Superleague Formula race, which was very exciting.  We started from the pole position and finished with a twelve second lead,” said Karthikeyan.  

The Nashville 200 NASCAR Camping World Truck Series race at Nashville Superspeedway will be broadcasted live on SPEED in the United States and on NEO Sports in India.