Wallace breathing life into the #23.

There is still a long way to go for the #23 Bill Davis Racing team but Kenny Wallace's arrival as the driver of the Hills Bros. Dodge appears to have given the Philippe Lopez-led crew a much needed boost.

Since taking the reigns of the car formerly piloted by Hut Stricklin at Darlington earlier this month, Kenny Wallace has done exactly what he needed to do and has brought the #23 machine home safely in three straight races. What's more two of those finishes have been inside the top 20 and both have come on weekend's where the team did not have any qualifying Provisionals to fall back on.

Now Wallace heads to the fearsome banks of the one-mile Dover International Speedway for the MBNA All American Heroes 400 looking not only for a safe passage through Bud Pole qualifying but a third straight top 20 finish on Sunday.

"Dover is a good race track for me," said Wallace who has yet to crack the top ten at Dover in the race but has crucially qualified in the top ten twice in the last two years.

"Early in my career I really didn't get along with the place that well. Since they have concreted it, things have gone real well for me. It seems like I tend to run good on concrete tracks. Martinsville and Bristol have been good tracks for me and I can't really say why. With Dover, I guess I've just adjusted to the racetrack itself over the years.

"We've been in the top-10 in the Busch car the past two or three years, but the last time I was there in a Winston Cup car was in the No. 1 last year. In that car during the fall race, I ran so strong. I qualified up front and ran in the top-five all day long until we had some lug nuts come loose, which caused us not to finish well."

"I think my relationship with Dover was one that I used to not do very well," said Wallace. "So finally I started using the mindset that 'I can't wait to get up there and I really like the track.' I started using reverse psychology and I'm not say that it was the reason I started doing better. Maybe it was that I started understanding the track better; knowing what to get out of my car, but regardless, my runs improved."

Although Wallace and the #23 team did not test at Dover recently, his BDR teammate Scott Wimmer did and Wallace is hoping that he can benefit from the knowledge gained by the highly touted youngster.

"Scott's growth with Bill Davis Racing is vital to myself and Ward [Burton]," said Wallace. "Whatever he and his crew come up with might be from a different viewpoint, so we are going to be really interested in to look at his data, so we can all take it and us more successful. Scott doesn't have number of laps there that some of the veteran drivers do, so he might have a way of seeing things differently and not having the past influence the present."