INDIANAPOLIS - A year ago, the Warsaw-based ML Motorsports team would have been excited to finish 21st in a NASCAR Nationwide Series race.
But after scoring four top-15 finishes in the previous eight races this season with series veteran Mark Green behind the wheel of Mary Louise Miller and Stephany Mullen's No. 70 Chevy, Saturday's 21st-place effort in the Kroger 200 at O'Reilly Raceway Park left some visible disappointment."I thought we'd be better," said ML Motorsports crew chief Brian Ross. "I'm not sure what it was, we were just off."
Kyle Busch was certainly on his game, continuing his dominance by qualifing second and leading 197 of the 200 laps for his sixth Nationwide Series win of the season.
Colin Braun, Mike Bliss, Scott Wimmer and Josh Wise rounded out the top five.
Cale Gale finished sixth, followed in the top 10 by Landon Cassill, Joey Logano, David Ragan and Steve Wallace.
For ML Motorsports, Saturday's race was a bit of a homecoming, as O'Reilly Raceway Park is the only track the series visits in the Hoosier State.
It also marked the end of a stretch in which the team competed in seven races over the last eight weekends.
The team is scheduled to race in 21 of 35 Nationwide Series races this season, and in the recent busy stretch that made ML Motorsports look more like a full-time team, they finished worse than 22nd just once.
Highlighting the busy stretch were finishes of 13th at Milwaukee and 14th at both Nashville and Gateway.
"I'd say we learned quite a bit," Ross said of the team's busy June and July schedule. "We just can't seem to get over the hump. One week we're on, the next week we're off just a little bit. We're getting better, we just need to be a little more consistant."
Of the three top-15 finishes in the last seven races, none of them came consecutively.
After the 14th-place finish at Nashville, Green was 22nd in the following event at Kentucky Speedway, which was a homecoming for the Owensboro native.
Following the 13th-place effort at Milwaukee, the team was 30th in the race at Daytona.
Saturday's 21st-place finish came a week after the 14th-place finish at Gateway.
"We're getting closer," said Ross. "We're not quite there yet, but now we have a couple weeks before we go to Michigan. I hope we can go do some testing and be strong when we go to Michigan. We're gonna keep working at it and keep getting better."
The CarFax 250 is scheduled for Aug. 16 at Michigan International Speedway.
For Saturday's race at ORP, the team named 8-year-old Muncie native A.J. Stinger the honorary crew chief.
Stinger, who attended the race with his mother and father, Tom and Deb Stinger, was a patient at Riley Children's Hospital, where he was receiving treatments for Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia.
ML Motorsports is currently trying to help Stinger raise money, as he said he wanted to be able to buy Christmas presents for the other patients at Riley Children's Hospital.
