Green Flag 3.20.08: Hard Sell on Fuel Cells
Posted by Jim Carson on 03.20.2008
At least they aren't complaining about tires as much this week.
Greetings, race fans and March Madness maniacs. Finishing the column with GO TIGERS doesn't cut it this week. This is Clemson's first visit to the Big Dance floor since 1998, so it's certainly more important. I've got us getting past a pair of V schools before losing to Kansas. That would really be a happy Easter!
Not much time this week, but it was Bristol, so it deserves some text.
FUELING A CHILDRESS SWEEP
Richard Childress Racing pulled off a 1-2-3 sweep at the Food City 500 with Jeff Burton, Happy Harvick and Clint Bowyer. It's always wonderful when Burton is in the mix for the win, because we get plenty of cameos of her wife Kim on top of the pit box about to have a coronary. Anyway, it's the first time that one camp has swept the podium since 2005 (Roushketeers did it four times that year; the Jack in the Hat had a pretty good season in '05) and the first time it's been done by a Chevy team since the Hendrick guys in the Daytona 500 in 1997 (Gordon, Texas Terry and the recently missing-in-action Ricky Craven).
Let's just say the Joe Gibbs Racing team won't be joining this category unless the coach upgrades his fuel cells. Baloney Stewart, out front for more than half the laps at , lost the lead to teammate Hurricane Hamlin (still couldn't figure out what caused that, but a fuel cell hiccup might be part of it). Hamlin looked good on the green-white-checkered before a fuel pickup snafu knocked his engine dead just long enough for the three RCR guys and two others to pass him heading toward the white flag.
ESPN.com reported that the Hurricane thinks a potential flaw in the design of the JGR fuel cells may be to blame for the loss, and that it's happened before: "Anytime we get low on fuel, especially with a banked racetrack like Bristol, all of our fuel drains in the cell to where we don't get any in the engine. Once we do take off, all we're using is fuel in the lines. There's a bubble in there and the car stalls." Hamlin's also picking on transmissions, figuring that's what hampered him at Atlanta and then Shrub at Bristol. Everybody's got an excuse, don't they? In each race weekend you have one winner and 40-42 teams with all sorts of reasons why they didn't win, or weren't in position to win, or couldn't stay in the top five or top 10 or whatever their goals were for the week.
We didn't hear many excuses from Aric Almirola after his career-best eighth-place finish in only his seventh Cup start. Of course, this probably means the #01 team (the DEI group that's on the wrong side of the 35th Parallel) will offer plenty of excuses.
And please excuse me for skipping over Dale Jarrett this week. He still has one more competitive outing to go, at the race formerly known as the Winston, so he'll get his just due from the Green Flag in late May. Of course, by then he could pull a Mark Martin or a Warren Johnson and stretch his retirement tour out to five years.
QUICK LAPS
- Don't look now, but there's an actual points race in Supercross. When Ricky Carmichael retired and James Stewart hurt his knee, the 2008 championship was handed to Chad Reed. Then when Reed won five of the first six events and was second to the not-yet-injured Stewart in the other, the engraver started drilling the C, H and probably the A in the nameplate on the big trophy. But in the five races since then, Reed only has one win, while Kevin Windham has two (when Windham won at Houston, it ended a three-year string of only Reed, Stewart or RC at the top of the podium). The last two weeks have seen Reed lose the lead at the Daytona swamp on the last lap with a flooded engine or whatever, and last week Reed take a spill while about to take the lead and wind up seventh. Kudos to Josh Hill for his first career main event win, but Windham was second and moved to within 17 points of Reed's lead. Points in AMA pro racing go 25-22-20-18-16 and then by 1 from there, so two Windham wins and two fifths by Reed would mean a new leader. Reed's still the favorite, because only Stewart has passed him on the track at full strength this year, but it's no longer a foregone conclusion.
- Lame Stat of the Week: By anchoring the winning GT1-class Corvette entry at the 12 Hours of Sebring last weekend, Johnny O'Connell became a seven-time class winner at the historic Florida airport road course, breaking the event's all-time record. Uh, Johnny, there were only THREE cars in GT1, and the participation in that slower division hasn't been that great since the American Le Mans Series was formed 10 years ago. There were the same number of cars on the lead lap at the checkered flag in the featured LMP1/LMP2 class (well, until the second-place finishing Fernandez Racing team failed tech and was DQed). And now Captain Penske has wins in the Daytona 500 and the Sebring 12 within a month of each other. It's too bad Indianapolis isn't in Florida.
- We're heading into an early holiday weekend, which means the first Sprint Cup off-weekend on the schedule. There is a Buschenwide race at PseudoNashville, and Malaysia presents a chance to see if the Ferrari Formula One team has taken up permanent residence in the tank.
