By: Ashley McCubbin

MARKHAM, Ontario — Going into a new venue, the question that crosses everyone’s mind – who will figure out the track first?

The NASCAR Canada Series was supposed to get their first laps of the weekend to get an idea of the streets of Markham for the Markham 125, but due to the unfinished track, the scheduled practice and qualifying for Friday did not happen as planned.

Instead, the Saturday schedule for the event will feature a combined practice and qualifying session to open the day at 8am, with the fastest speeds from the session setting the starting grid. The race is still scheduled to take place later in the evening as originally set.

While admitting it is a little frustrating to not get the scheduled track time on Friday, D.J. Kennington understands the situation everyone is currently dealing with.

“I get it too,” he told News From The Pits. “It’s a new venue, and sometimes, you know, it’s, you bite off more than you can chew right away, and I’m sure they’ll get it right. And you just have to bear with it, and hopefully, once we do get out there it’s a good show.”

While the track preparations have been taking place, drivers have had a chance to make their way around the 3.52-kilometer track to see the challenges they are going to be facing. A rollerblade trip around for Kennington on Thursday revealed it will be technical with “a lot of room for error.”

Two of the corners that stood out during the trip around for Kennington were the backstretch straightaway leading into turn six, as well as the hairpin in turn five.

“When you’re breaking into this hairpin, at the end of the straight away, I don’t know how that’s going to work,” he commented. “It looks like there’s about 35 different grooves. So we’ll have to try them all, I guess to see what’s wrong works the best. But yeah, I think there’s areas for passing. It’s narrow, so you are just going to have to be very careful not to make mistakes.”

The driver of the No. 17 Castrol Dodge enters the weekend ranked fourth in the standings with eight top-10’s in the 10 races, highlighted by a third at Autodrove Montmagny Speedway.

“That’s been a tough one for me,” he admitted. “We’ve been up and down so okay in the points, but still not where we want to be. I mean, we’ve had a bunch of small issues with tires and mechanical issues. It’s just one of the most frustrating things. They say that is big time auto racing, so hopefully we’ve got some stuff behind us. Now we can keep the ball rolling here and try to finish the year strong.”

When asked where he feels his team can get better, Kennington joked about stealing points leader Marc-Antoine Camirand’s notebook.

“I mean, you gotta keep working on chassis, we gotta keep working on handling, and just the whole package,” he added. “I mean, they’ve got their stuff together. There’s three or four teams that are, you know, right up front every week – we’re close, but we have a bit of work to do to catch up.”