Green Flag 3.13.08: Thundering into Thunder Valley
Posted by Jim Carson on 03.13.2008
Here's the most important points race in NASCAR. And let's hope the Bristol weather will be better than what the bikes had in Daytona.
If you're looking for a lot of Kyle Busch talk, you're reading the wrong column. Yes, Shrub deserves his props, and not just for giving the Toyota Camry its first Sprint/Winstonextel Cup win and putting a foreign make in victory lane for the first time since 99.9 percent of 411mania readers were born. He's been the #1 story in NASCAR this year; keep in mind that he has won two of three Craftsman Truck races in 2008 and came within a blown tire in the Buschenwide race of pulling an unprecedented Fri-Sat-Sun sweep at Atlanta.
But there's a more serious issue at stake this weekend at Bristol.
THE LAST TIME J.J. YELEY WAS IN THE SPOTLIGHT THIS MUCH, HE WAS IN SPRINT CARS
For the first five Cup races of 2008, NASCAR refers back to the 2007 owner points to determine who's locked into each week's field and who has to get in on their own. So let's count along: 1-Daytona, 2-Rockingham (sorry...flashback to better times).
Starting over. 1-Daytona, 2-California, 3-Vegas, 4-Atlanta, 5-Bristol...yep. So starting with the following race in two weeks at Martinsville, the top 35 teams in the 2008 standings will be exempt, and the others will have some nervous times. The egg salad or scrambled eggs or egg beaters or whatever over Easter weekend won't taste too good for about a dozen crews, and especially for those from 36th-39th or so.
For the sake of simplicity in the top 40 in points has his driver and owner points the same, because there haven't been any DNQs in that list through four races. From 41st on down, there have been some missed races, and in the case of the #84 (All-Americandinger's temporary firing in favor of Mike Skinner) and #21 (Awesome Bill, Johnny Sauter and sick sub Jon Wood), some driver changes. But even though it is theoretically possible for 46th-place Patrick Carpentier to Que-back his way into the exempt zone, we really only need to worry about three or four spots. 45-Kyle Petty, 49-Ken Schrader, 78-Joe Nemechek, 84-Allmenskinner, 21-Awesome Bill, 34-John Andretti and 10-Carpentier (heh heh!) will have to time their way in for the foreseeable future.
And mathematically, everyone from 16th-place Clint Bowyer on down could conceivably fall out of the guaranteed area. But that's not gonna happen; everyone down to the better-get-sponsored-soon Yates mates is safe, at least for a few more weeks. Realistically, the interesting section of the standings is right here:
Those top two names are the real eye-openers. Maybe you'd expect the Mikeymobiles or another clearly-not-top-level team like #70 Haas CNC to struggle. Seeing the four exempters fall below the Mendoza line (#77, #22, #40 and #01, plus the biker hippie in 40th) is no major shock. Maybe Yay Yay Jeley's bunch from the Joe Gibbs Racing satellite team called Hall of Fame Racing isn't getting all of the best stuff from the coach. But there are representatives from the all-powerful Hendrick and Roush teams in the danger zone, and no one is more disappointed and surprised than Casey Mears and Jamie McMurray.
If you want a track where things can get jumbled up in a hurry, especially among the middle-of-the-pack guys in Sprint Cup, you couldn't pick a better place than Bristol. It could be in the middle of the race and Mears or McMurray could be cruising along in contention for the lead, and 30 seconds later either or both could be in the wall, on the hook and praying that Hornish, Blaney or Dario Speedwagon aren't all going to finish well. Gee, you think Dario and Ashley are sleeping well this week? Franchitti's got to have the best race of his career, in a type of short-track racing that he's never done, at a place where rookies get chewed up and spit out on a regular basis (see Juan Pablo Montoya last March).
Through Atlanta, five non-exempt teams have qualified for all four races and are above the 35th Parallel: past champion and expected breezer Kurt Busch, the three Michael Waltrip Racing cars, with #00 Reutimann in the best shape, and #83 Brian Vickers. ZOINKS! Vickers is ninth in points, above the top-12 cutoff which apparently means something to the unwashed masses speculating for September, while the other numbered Red Bull can didn't even make a race until Skinner qualified at Atlanta. Holy Bobby Labonte-Kyle Petty, Batman!
BTW, Petty Enterprises is rumored to be petitioning to NASCAR to switch the #43 and #45 owner points, so that the hippie will be guaranteed a starting spot while Bobby L (14th now) can use champions' provisionals. Switching teams' points has been done before, but it backfired on #4 Morgan-McClure when it swapped with James Finch's #09 last year; Mike Wallace put the #09 in the top 10 in the Daytona 500 and only attempted one more race before Bristol, but still had more points than the #4. So after the swap, two spring races had qualifying rained out, and the rain rulebook sets last few rows of the grid via team attempts. Even though the #4 had attempted every race with Wawd Buhton, the #09 hadn't, so Wawd was left out of two races by the rulebook and the #4 never recovered, to the point where it missed half the remaining races, lost its sponsor and is now dormant.
Anyway, I'm rooting for Blaney to get above the 35th Parallel, and while it'd be amusing to see a Hendrick or Roush car drop below it, I suppose Mayfield would be a more likely candidate. More importantly, the crash-and-burn of Sam Hornish MUST continue. Oh wait, he's never been to Bristol in a Wingboxcar either (it's possible he raced in a Buschenwide car last year, and if so, it's probable he crashed). He and Franchitti are looking at restless nights.
NOT-SO-QUICK LAPS
- It seems a number of Sprint Cup teams and drivers were not too pleased with the Goodyear tires at Atlanta, because their cars were sliding around more than in the past, and second-place Baloney Stewart was the unofficial spokesman of the group: "It's the most pathetic racing tire I've ever been on in my professional career. (Goodyear) exited out of Formula One, they exited out of the IRL, they exited out of CART, they exited out of the World of Outlaws, and there's a reason for that. It's because Goodyear can't build a tire that's worth a crap. ... If they can't do any better than that, they ought to just pull out of this sport and save us all a bunch of headaches. I guarantee Hoosier or Firestone or somebody could do a better job than they're doing right now."
Ooookay, Tony. You are entitled to express your opinion about the tires for the Atlanta race, so there's nothing wrong with the first sentence in that quote. Goodyear had to err on the side of safety (and prevention of right-front blowouts), and if you think the racing suffered, you can proclaim it. But you went way below the belt comparing Goodyear's former efforts in the pointy cars to the company's attempts to provide the rubber for the Wingboxcars. And no, Hoosier or Firestone wouldn't automatically have a better or "racier" tire than Goodyear, because no one had ever tried to manufacture tires for a vehicle like the Wingboxcar before. This is another reason that NASCAR should have used the Wingboxcars on a mile-and-a-half cookie-cutter track at least once last year. I don't think Baloney deserves any penalty from NASCAR, but there could be a reprimand or something from Home Depot or someone else that helps pay the #20 bills.
The biggest problem at Atlanta was that NASCAR and Goodyear made a late change in selection for the tires for that race, finalizing the decision less than a week before the teams departed for the track just south of the Georgia capital. That wasted all of the teams' data from various test sessions and sent everybody in cold (and not just because there were snow flurries a few hours before qualifying). These types of decisions have to be made further in advance, as evidenced by the fact that Goodyear has now selected the tires for the Texas weekend, which is the first weekend of April.
- If you turned away from the AMA Daytona 200 road race or the AMA Supercross event at Daytona with two corners left on the final lap, you missed who won. Josh Hayes actually took the checkered flag in the road race, the only U.S. motorcycle event that involves pit stops, but seven hours later the tech inspectors didn't like something about Hayes' engine and disqualified him, handing the victory to Chazz Davies whom no one outside the factory-backed Attack Kawasaki team had ever heard of.
But the real disaster was in Supercross, which at Daytona is held in the infield grass and imported dirt mounds between the frontstretch dogleg and pit road on the NASCAR track. The problem this year, which was admitted by course designer and recently-retired rider Ricky Carmichael, was "what if it rains?" On Friday night, it did more than rain; it drenched everyone. At one point a rookie named Cole Siebler slipped off course, and the entire back half of his bike was stuck in the mud and devoured, with the front wheel pointing straight up! The entire field made two laps while Siebler was still trying to wiggle his bike out of that hole. But inexplicably they kept racing, despite the dangers (and lack of fan appeal because no one's tripling jumps and ripping through the whoops) and the fact that you couldn't tell who was who because the mud covered all the bikes and all the rider uniforms with their sponsors; the race was thankfully shortened from 30 laps to 12. That was about half a lap too long for runaway series points leader Chad Reed, because after splashing through all that mud and submerging his tailpipes in all those puddles, his engine lost the fire with two turns left before the finish line. It was a neat story to see Kevin Windham win for the first time at Daytona after eight previous appearances in Supercross, but this race should have never been run under those conditions.
- Here's one for the blue-hairs. Red Farmer, a hero to any race fan over age 40 in Alabama (hell, he might have been in the 1954 race won by a Jaguar), won a crate-engine Late Model race last weekend on the dirt track across the street from Talladega Superspeedway. Red doesn't let anyone know his real age, but the best estimate is a spry 74. I guarantee that if he lives that long, Ken Schrader will win a dirt race at that age.
That's it for this week. The Green Flag drops on the Formula One season in Australia this weekend, and the commentary will make up for the probably-lousy racing action. Then of course there's Boogity Boogity Bristol!
