Kyle Busch on the pole for Sprint Cup in Las Vegas.
February 29, 2008
Kyle Busch carried his hot start to the season into his hometown Friday, winning the pole at Las Vegas Motor Speedway.
Busch ran a fast lap of 182.352 mph in his Toyota Camry to take the top starting spot for Sunday’s race. The 22-year-old is having a fabulous start to the season — he hasn’t finished lower than fourth in six races spanning three series — and returned to Las Vegas this week as the Sprint Cup Series points leader.
It’s the first time in his career that Busch has been on top of the standings, and he’s also leading the Truck Series standings. He’s second to Tony Stewart, his teammate at Joe Gibbs Racing, in the Nationwide Series standings.
While Busch is enjoying the perks of being on top of his sport, he’s downplaying his hold on the standings. Busch has a six-point advantage over Ryan Newman.
“It’s cool, it’s fun and it’s great and all, but we’re two weeks in. We need it two weeks to go,” Busch said. “There’s a lot of stuff, a lot of laps and a lot of corners to go through and a lot of pit stops and everything else.
“Hopefully we can keep it and ride this wave for however long it lasts. I’m a pretty good surfer, so it shouldn’t be too hard.”
Carl Edwards, winner of Monday’s rain-postponed race in California, qualified second with a lap of 181.586 in his Ford. Mark Martin qualified third in a Chevrolet, followed by Jeff Gordon in a Chevy and Mike Skinner, who replaced Jacques Villeneuve in a Bill Davis Racing Toyota. Greg Biffle was sixth, followed by Scott Riggs, Dale Earnhardt Jr., Kurt Busch and Elliott Sadler.
The qualifying session marked the first time NASCAR grouped together all the drivers not locked into the field to make their runs at the same time of the day, and Patrick Carpentier bumped A.J. Allmendinger from the field as the last driver to make his attempt.
Carpentier, one of the six Dodge drivers who wrecked in Friday’s practice session, qualified for his first start of the season. He’ll start 12th.
Although Allmendinger missed the race for the third time this season, Toyota still placed 10 cars in the field, the most the manufacturer has qualified since entering the Cup Series.
Also failing to qualify was Johnny Sauter, who was behind the wheel of the Wood Brothers’ No. 21 Ford because Jon Wood passed on racing it this weekend because of the pressure of getting his family’s car into the field. Sauter wrecked on his qualifying lap.
Busch, meanwhile, will be searching for his first win of the season on Sunday after near-misses in the first two events. He dominated the Daytona 500 but faded to fourth late in the event and was also fourth in California.
He has finished second to Stewart in both Nationwide races, and was second in the season-opening Daytona truck race before finally scoring his first win of the season with a truck victory in California.
Now he wants a Cup win.
“It’s great to be on the pole at my home track, but it would be even greater to be standing over there in Victory Lane after 400 miles,” he said after qualifying.
Hookscenter.com wire report.
Paul Tracy without ride for 2008 IRL Season.
February 29, 2008
Canadian driver Paul Tracy, the biggest name in the soon-to-be-gone Champ Car World Series, is without a ride for 2008.
A spokesman for Gerald Forsythe, co-owner of Champ Car and owner of Forsythe Championship Racing, said on Thursday the team will no longer race Indy Cars and will instead compete only in the developmental Atlantic Series.
That apparently leaves former series champion Tracy, who was hoping to move to the Indy Racing League in the long-awaited unification of America’s two open-wheel series, looking for a ride.
“It kind of leaves me hung out,” Tracy said in a telephone interview with the Associated Press. “I just got the information, too. … Now I have some legal issues to jump through with this. I need to step back with my management and sort through my contract, which has a buyout.”
Neil Micklewright, vice president of operations for the Forsythe team, said in a statement the team had been unable to secure the necessary sponsorship to be able to compete in the IRL IndyCar Series this season.
The 39-year-old Tracy said that once he was free from contractual obligations with Forsythe, he wants to sign with another team as quickly as possible.
“I want to be part of the new series,” said Tracy, who won the 2003 CART championship, Champ Car’s predecessor. “I’m a race car driver and I love open-wheel racing. I want to be in a competitive situation, to be able to win races and run for the championship.”
Tracy could have one more ride in the Forsythe Champ Car.
Micklewright said the team would participate in the April 20 Toyota Grand Prix of Long Beach, which will be the final race run with Champ Car equipment. But Micklewright added that the team’s drivers for that race would be announced later.
The IRL teams will race in Japan that week and officials were unable to move either race date. Instead, they agreed to run both races, having the Champ Car series, using a skeleton staff, run what would have been its season opener. Points earned at Long Beach will count toward the IRL championship.
As both open-wheel series struggled to draw fans and attract sponsors, Champ Car has lost many of its biggest stars in recent years to the IRL, European racing and NASCAR. Most recently, four-time series champion Sebastien Bourdais of France left at the end of 2007 to drive in Formula One.
Other than Tracy, who leads all active drivers in the series with 31 victories, the biggest name remaining in Champ Car is 19-year-old Graham Rahal, son of former Indianapolis 500 winner and three-time CART champion Bobby Rahal.
Rahal, who was Bourdais’ teammate, will move to the IRL with eight-time series champions Newman/Haas/Lanigan Racing.
The Atlantic Series was part of the Champ Car World Series but was not included in the unification agreement with the IRL that was signed by Forsythe, Champ Car co-owner Kevin Kalkhoven and Tony George, founder of the Indy Racing League.
Kalkhoven said on Wednesday that the Atlantics are now co-owned by him and Forsythe and will run an independent 12-race schedule. But Kalkhoven and Jimmy Vasser, another former open-wheel champion, will move their team, KV Racing, to the IRL’s IndyCar Series in 2008, along with all of the other former Champ Car teams with the exception of Forsythe.
Meanwhile, the IRL announced that it will hold special test sessions for the Champ Car teams that are making the move to the IndyCar Series on March 19-20 on the road circuit at Sebring International Raceway and March 24-25 on the oval at Homestead.
The season-opening race is on March 29 at the Homestead track.
Eight to 12 cars from Champ Car are expected to be added to the grid for the opener.
The deal to unify includes George’s offer to the former Champ Car teams of a free Honda engine leasing program, two Dallara chassis and $1.2 million in team incentives that are also offered to the ongoing IRL teams.
Hookscenter.com wire report.
IRL and Champ Cars look to win fans back to open wheel racing.
February 29, 2008
Step 1 is complete, and the long overdue open-wheel unification is over.
Tony George and Kevin Kalkhoven should be commended for finally ending the madness that nearly killed American Indy Car racing.
“It was last fall on the anniversary of my grandfather’s death that I was thinking to myself it really had been 30 years ago since the sport of open-wheel racing had been truly unified,” George recalled. “Last month when the calendar turned over to 2008, I was wondering if it was possible this could ever happen.
“Lo and behold, I got a phone call that just made me feel really warm. I felt like this was going perhaps going to be the best year of my 48 to have a chance to do something that’s very important to me and very close to me, and that is to help bring about the unification of open-wheel racing.”
The phone call came from Kalkhoven, and despite several failed attempts to mend fences, this time it actually worked out.
But as both sides admitted in Wednesday’s news conference to officially announce the creation of a single open-wheel series, the heavy lifting is about to begin.
“I’ve said many times that unification itself isn’t some sort of magic bullet to be able to get us forward,” Kalkhoven said. “It’s going to take an awful lot of hard work, and that has already begun.”
Let’s hope so.
This season will be a hodgepodge to say the least, with three former Champ Car events — Long Beach, Edmonton and Australia — wedged into the existing IRL schedule.
The Champ Car teams planning to make the switch, which could be as many as nine operations and up to 12 drivers, will have to change engine and chassis packages pretty much on the fly. And the league, which promised free Dallara chassis and Honda engines to those teams, will need to scramble to find available and competitive equipment.
“The interest level is clearly high at this point in time,” said Brian Barnhart, the IRL director of race operations. “You could see anywhere from eight to 12 cars on the grid beginning with the Homestead event. That’s absolutely the best-case scenario we could be looking for.”
To make that transition as smooth as possible, the IRL has assigned several of its teams to incoming Champ Car operations.
“Newman-Haas will be assigned to Rahal Letterman,” said George, a match that will pair up N-H driver Graham Rahal with his father Bobby’s IRL team. “They have some common interests there and we wanted to align those team teams.
“The KV guys will be aligned with Target/Chip Ganassi, so it will be a smooth transition from that point.”
But the decision that will ultimately decide the fate of the new unified series will be the schedule, which, according to George and Kalkhoven, will be developed from a clean sheet of paper in 2009.
Anchored by the Indianapolis 500 with several historic and popular tent poles throughout like Long Beach, Australia and Mexico City, the new series has a chance to create an exciting and eclectic schedule that could re-capture the interest of open-wheel fans.
“The Indianapolis 500, with all of its stature, and Long Beach will be two anchor points of what will be an incredibly interesting series,” Kalkhoven said.
While Champ Car’s direction was toward more road courses and street circuits, the IRL charted a course that was oval-track-heavy, an emphasis George is hoping to continue in the next evolution of the series.
“It’s important to me to have a variety of ovals on the schedule,” George said. “But international opportunities are out there. We need to look at building a schedule that makes sense from every perspective.”
Speculation is a 20- to 22-race schedule will be the end result in 2009, and if George and Kalkhoven are smart, the high-speed oval racing that became the IRL’s trademark will comprise a majority of the slate.
The incredible high-speed side-by-side racing at superspeedway ovals like Chicagoland Speedway, Texas Motor Speedway, Kentucky Speedway and Richmond International Raceway made the IRL one of the most exciting series in all of motorsports.
Building on that excitement and the oval-track tradition of Indy Car racing should be the foundation of the next era of the series. Only after a core of oval races are in place should the most popular road course and street circuit events be added, which would create one of the premier circuits in motorsports.
The first step has been taken and open-wheel teams can all come out of the storm clouds and race under one umbrella. Now it’s up to George, Kalkhoven and Co. to not just keep Indy Car racing alive, but make it thrive.
“Having one series is for the best, not only for the drivers and the teams, but for the fans,” said Helio Castroneves, who now has a chance to once again be known for his driving talent rather than his dancing skills. “It’s about time.”
Hookscenter.com wire report (Pistone).
Champ Cars farewell race will count in IRL Standings.
February 29, 2008
While the Champ Car World Series is no more, there will be one more Champ Car race.
Indy Racing League founder Tony George and Kevin Kalkhoven, owner of the now-defunct Champ Car series, revealed some details Wednesday of the unification of America’s two open-wheel series, including the fact that the April 20 Toyota Grand Prix of Long Beach will be run by Champ Car teams with their old equipment while their new IndyCar Series brethren are in Japan.
Points earned at Long Beach will count toward the IndyCar Series championship.
“It’s going to be a celebration of Champ Car and, I hope of the IRL,” said Kalkhoven.
George said running two races on the same weekend in different parts of the world presents a huge challenge.
“But I think the efforts of some very capable people and the scenario that allows Champ Car to showcase for one final time the (Panoz) DP-01s, the drivers and teams that are familiar with that equipment, to go out and put on a great show, really make Long Beach a great event,” he said.
The unusual plan was made necessary when neither Long Beach nor the traditional IRL race at Motegi, Japan, set for April 19, would agree to change their dates.
At one point in the negotiations, Kalkhoven said that there could be no deal without the Motegi date being moved. But the eventual answer was to have the IRL regulars run in Japan and to reprise the Champ Car series for one more race.
“Our teams have agreed to this and it’s going to be something special,” Kalkhoven said.
The long-sought after unification was announced last Friday, but George said there are many details still to be taken care of before the unified series begins its season at Homestead-Miami Speedway on March 29.
Among those details are finding enough Dallara chassis to accommodate the Champ Car teams that plan to make the move to the IRL, and firming up the dates for the former Champ Car races at Edmonton, Alberta, and Surfers Paradise in Queensland, Australia. Those will be the only additions to the 16-race IndyCar schedule for 2008, with other Champ Car events under consideration for 2009 and beyond.
“We have to put our teams together to work on coming up with a good plan to integrate teams into one series, to integrate some events where we have the opportunity to fill some slots,” George said. “We’ve got a lot of challenges that go along with doing all those things, but I think we’re going to successfully overcome those.”
Kalkhoven said he and Champ Car co-owner Gerald Forsythe will also keep alive the developmental Atlantic Series, which will run a 12-race schedule in 2008.
Kalkhoven called the agreement a huge step forward for open-wheel racing in North America.
“Tony and I have actually talked on and off (about unification) for four years,” he said. “It’s been a long and hard road to be able to get here, but we are here.
“I think the winners today are the fans, the teams, the drivers and the potential that we have to be able to grow the sport over the next few years.
“I’ve said many times that unification itself isn’t some sort of magic bullet to be able to get us forward,” Kalkhoven added. “It’s going to take an awful lot of hard work, and that has already begun.”
Hookscenter.com wire report.
Tony Stewart looks for first NASCAR win in Las Vegas.
February 29, 2008
This week: Another top Sprint Cup driver looking for his first Vegas win, Stewart has four top-five finishes and six top-10s in nine starts there. He finished second in 2000, third in 2004 and had back-to-back fifth-place finishes in 2002 and 2003.
Last week: Stewart had quite a day at Fontana on Monday — a seventh-place finish in the Cup race followed by a victory in the Nationwide Series race. “It wasn’t a big deal — that was easy,” Stewart said of running two races back-to-back. “These cars (Nationwide) drove so much better than the ones we drove this morning — it was a lot more fun to drive these, obviously, because they handle so good compared to the Sprint Cup cars. We need a little work right now, in all honesty (on the Toyota engines in the Cup cars). They had some problems earlier in the week, and so they tamed them down for this week to make sure they would live and they did. I would rather make it live than take a chance on it being fast and not making it to the end here. That’s part of the learning curve and part of the growing pains when you change like this — trying to find what you have to do, and some days you’re not going to have it perfect. We’ll get it there — it’s just going to take a couple weeks.”
Etc.: Stewart clinched the 1997 Indy Racing League championship at Las Vegas Motor Speedway when he was competing for Team Menard. One year earlier, Stewart suffered the most serious injury of his career when he had a broken pelvis in a turn 2 crash at LVMS in the IRL race — the first-ever event at the track.
Hookscenter.com wire report.
Kyle Busch looks for some home cooking in Las Vegas.
February 29, 2008
This week: ”Hometown Hero” Busch returns to Las Vegas atop both the Sprint Cup and NASCAR Craftsman Series and is second in the Nationwide Series. Busch has no wins, two top-five and three top-10 finishes in his four previous Cup starts at Las Vegas Motor Speedway and is primed to take Toyota to its first-ever victory in a Sprint Cup points race. Busch finished second here in 2005 and third in 2006. He was ninth in this race last March. … Busch realizes it’s a little early in the season to get excited about being the points leader of any series. “It doesn’t mean much right now,” Busch said. “If the championship was paid for — ‘woo hoo, yay for us’ — but we’ve still got 33 weeks left in this deal. We’ll take it now and hopefully hold onto it for a while and keep battling with the 24 (Jeff Gordon), 48 (Jimmie Johnson) — we know they’ll come back strong in the points. There are going to be some other contenders, too.”
Last week: Busch had an impressive fourth-place finish in Monday’s rain-delayed finish at California Speedway. “It’s a good championship points day,” he said. “It was pretty cool out there to run the way we did in our Interstate Batteries Toyota. Unfortunately we didn’t have quite the car to get up there and contend with those boys at the end, but overall a good day and that’s all we can ask for. We had a great race car, but not quite as good as those guys at the end. The 24 (Jeff Gordon), 48 (Jimmie Johnson) and 99 (Carl Edwards) were real strong; we knew that from the beginning and in practice.”
Etc.: Busch drove to victory in Saturday’s truck race and finished second to Tony Stewart in the Nationwide Series race, held Monday afternoon at the conclusion of the Cup race.
Hookscenter.com wire report.
Joe Gibbs Racing teammates look to end feud.
February 28, 2008
Though his aggressive and freewheeling style sometimes might seem inspired by the cinematic tribute to reckless driving, Kyle Busch actually hasn’t watched Smokey and the Bandit.
Busch, born in 1985, eight years after the film’s release, bought the DVD recently but not because he wanted to see Burt Reynolds comedy.
It was because he knew Tony Stewart would.
“We were talking about our favorite cars and what we wanted, and Tony was like, ‘The Firebird from Smokey and the Bandit! The black one with the bird on the hood and (stuff) like that!’ ” Busch said. “I was picking up movies for my motor home, and I ran across Smokey and the Bandit and thought of him for a second. So I grabbed it.”
Busch and his new teammate at Joe Gibbs Racing won’t be starring in a buddy picture anytime soon, but his gift to the two-time champion is symbolic of a burgeoning friendship on and off the track that would have seemed unlikely just two years ago.
After several clashes early in the 2006 season, their feud hit a flash point at Las Vegas Motor Speedway when Busch accused Stewart of trying to kill him.
As NASCAR returns to Vegas this weekend, there might not be two teammates working more harmoniously than Busch and Stewart. They’ve finished 1-2 in the first two Nationwide Series races, and Busch is ranked first in the Sprint Cup standings with Stewart third.
Coupled with Gibbs’ switch to Toyota this season, Stewart, 36, wasn’t certain he’d mesh so well with Busch, 22, who joined the team after five years with Hendrick Motorsports.
“My first reaction was this is going to be a train wreck, but the more I hang around the kid, the more I like him,” Stewart said. “I’m proud to have him as a teammate and a competitor. He’s just happy-go-lucky about everything and always laughing about something. We need someone like that around. That kid loves to race more than anyone I know.”
The pair has bonded over a single-minded devotion to their craft. Busch has entered every race in NASCAR’s three national touring circuits this year and owns a late-model team. In addition to owning sprint cars on the United States Auto Club and World of Outlaws circuits, Stewart occupies his free time with running the Eldora Speedway in Ohio.
“We’ve got sort of the same racer’s mentality that I think can bring us together,” Busch said. “He’s down-to-earth, and we talk a lot and get along well. That’s a plus.”
Though he shies away from being tagged a leader, Stewart said he’s assuming a greater role in lending an ear for advice to teammates Busch and Denny Hamlin, much the way Bobby Labonte did during Stewart’s tumultuous early seasons in NASCAR.
“I’m not sure I’m qualified to lead anybody,” Stewart said. “I guess I’ve tried to do things that Bobby did when I started. I remember the impact of a phone call … and how much that meant.”
Gibbs President J.D. Gibbs said Stewart had no reservations when approached about the team hiring Busch last year.
“I know they respect each other’s abilities, and as the friendship develops, too, that’s going to be a big plus for us,” Gibbs said. “All they think about is racing. … And Tony understands if Kyle’s successful, he’s successful.”
That was most evident at the Daytona 500. Busch and Stewart dominated as drafting partners and led 102 of 200 laps, though the finish — Busch didn’t have enough momentum to push Stewart to a final-lap victory — was disappointing.
“There was some frustration between the both of us,” Busch said. “I wish he would have stayed behind and pushed me, but I understand why he went a different way. … Everything has cooled down between us. It was two years ago at Vegas we were trying to wreck each other, and we haven’t had a spat since then.”
Even with their differences settled, there still is much to learn — such as knowing Stewart already had several copies of Smokey and the Bandit.
“But I’ve got one I can put in my time capsule now,” Stewart laughed. “I’m going to mark Kyle’s and keep it for a special occasion.”
Hookscenter.com wire report (Ryan).
Kyle Busch looks for breakout year in Toyota in 2008.
February 27, 2008
He can be arrogant at times. He can get under your skin.
Kyle Busch walks the walk, talks the talk and makes Terrell Owens look like a wilting flower.
Busch, 22, is a mix of speed and machismo — with a schoolboy’s knack of getting into trouble and wriggling out of it.
Busch can place a race car where angels fear to tread, drive high, low and in between.
At California Speedway in Fontana over the weekend and Monday, Busch finished first in the NASCAR Craftsman Truck race, fourth in Sprint Cup and second in the Nationwide Series event.
If they’d have raced golf carts, Busch would have been in the hunt.
Busch is so off the charts, he has his Joe Gibbs Racing teammate Tony Stewart, a master of car control, tugging on his long locks to explain how Busch does it, and Darrell Waltrip, a three-time NASCAR champion and Fox Sports commentator, in a state of permanent disbelief.
It doesn’t seem to matter what Busch drives, he is on the edge — looking for openings and sliding the vehicle around, ducking below the white line while others hang on for dear life.
For certain, Busch is having fun at Gibbs this season after three years at Hendrick Motorsports, where he won four Cup races but never seemed to fit in.
As a teen, Busch won everything at Las Vegas Motor Speedway, his home track, including Legend and Late Model races. Kurt, his older brother, won the 2004 Nextel Cup championship, but Kyle always has been considered more gifted.
Whether he can corral his talent and win titles will be proven in time — but Busch won’t leave anything on the table, you can take that to the bank.
“It was pretty cool out there to run the way we did,” said Busch of his Cup performance at California in the No. 18 Interstate Batteries Toyota. “We didn’t have quite the car to get up there and compete with those boys at the end, but, overall, a good day.”
Busch will win races this season; it’s just a matter of time.
Like the late Tim Richmond, who died in 1989 and won 13 Cup races, he was born to run.
Hookscenter.com wire report.
Casey Mears reflects on his career in NASCAR.
February 27, 2008
With steady rain becoming the dominant story this past weekend at the newly named Auto Club Speedway at California, drivers and teams had very little to do but watch water puddles grow larger around their transporters.
With multi-colored Sprint Cup Chevrolets, Dodges, Fords and Toyotas sitting idle in garage stalls, Sprint Cup driver Casey Mears had plenty of time to reflect upon a variety of topics.
These days, his smile comes easily and there’s a definite spring in his step. Life is good for the Bakersfield, Calif., native, especially since his signature is etched on the roofline of a fleet of Hendrick Motorsports machines. Again in 2008, he’s with an elite list of teammates: Jimmie Johnson, Jeff Gordon, and the latest addition, Dale Earnhardt Jr.
Dressed in rain gear that sported his sponsor colors, the nephew of three-time Indianapolis 500 winner Rick Mears and son of off-road racer Roger Mears, addressed a handful of media members camped out waiting for a break in the weather.
“I had a great race in Daytona and was real happy with the way things came together. Unfortunately, I wasn’t happy with the ending,” Mears said. “We were running third there with six laps to go and made a move to try to win the race and it didn’t work out for us. The thing I’m very excited about is how well we ran, how fast the car was. We were in a position to win. It seems like all the tests and everywhere we’ve been, we’ve been pretty fast.”
Mears feels this might be his best year for multiple on-track successes, considering the resources he has under him with the Hendrick organization and the wealth of information his fellow teammates can offer. When it crunch time comes and he’s racing a teammate for the win, respect prevails. But he will race them hard.
“Our sport is unique with the way that we are a team, but at the same time we are looking for individual success too,” Mears said. “Where we work really well as a team is the days leading up to the racing event. The only thing you do with your teammate is maybe give them a little more room. You give them that extra inch that you wouldn’t give another competitor. But when it comes down to the end and comes down to winning the race, you treat them like you would anybody else.
“We usually go to each other’s cars at times throughout practice just checking to see how their cars are handling. The crew chiefs and engineers are constantly exchanging information, what changes worked for them, tire pressure changes, that scenario.”
Of all the Hendrick drivers, Mears is closer to Johnson because of a long-standing friendship from the days of racing go-karts on their native California short tracks. “I’ve known Jimmie Johnson since I was 12 years old,” Mears says. “I consider him one of my best friends in the world. Through him I met Jeff and became great friends. I met Dale Jr. as soon as I moved back to North Carolina about seven years ago. We’re not real close but very friendly obviously. We’ve been buddies for a long time. We’ve got a very unique situation over at Hendrick Motorsports right now and it’s a lot of fun.”
Now a resident of North Carolina, Mears feels his native state of California always has been important to the growth of Sprint Cup racing. Both Johnson and Gordon are natives of California, as well as David Gilliland, Robby Gordon, crew chief Doug Richert and several crew members who work in Sprint Cup, the Nationwide Series and Craftsman Truck Series.
“There’s a lot of influence from California, a lot of good racing happens here (in California),” Mears said. “I love coming here. I think it’s great to come back and see a lot of the fans that have been here for years. You had Ontario (Motor Speedway), Riverside (International Raceway) and Ascot Park (Speedway). There’s a lot of good racing that’s gone on in California for a lot of years and I think it’s just kind of slipped away for a while in the general public’s eyes. I think this is a great racing state, and I love to come back and see friends and family.”
Once the Auto Club 500 finally got under way late Sunday afternoon, Mears seemed to be a victim of a wet spot on the track on the 20th lap and crashed among several cars. No matter how hard NASCAR tried, the rain and water coming up through the track just simply wouldn’t go away.
Hookscenter.com wire report (White).
Nascar drop the umbrella in Fontana last weekend.
February 26, 2008
The Auto Club 500 at Auto Club Speedway of Southern California — that’s a mouthful — is finally history.
Hallelujah.
The seemingly endless nightmare that was Sunday’s eventually aborted attempted running of the event impacted even those of us not forced to sit through the ordeal live and in rainsuits.
I mean, geez, has it ever been more difficult to tape a race? Even my 8-year-old couldn’t keep up with it, and usually he’s my ace tape-the-race guy.
Alas, before I complain too much, I’ll just stop. I wasn’t assigned to cover the race live for NASCAR.COM, as we rotate the writers who attend events to keep everyone fresh.
Fresh, but not necessarily dry. Get that one, Mark Aumann and Raygan Swan?
Those pour souls and tens of thousands others sat through Sunday’s never-ending nightmare on location at the track formerly known as California Speedway. Well, attendance may have dropped off to merely thousands after probably 16 to 18 hours of unsuccessfully dueling with the raindrops (as well as pre-race and post-race traffic), but you get the idea. It had to be pure misery for them.
The rest of us were trying to watch the “action” on television. Little did anyone know that aside from two spectacular and possibly unnecessary accidents that took out the likes of Denny Hamlin, Casey Mears and a pair of Juniors in Dale Earnhardt Jr. and Sam Hornish Jr., the most exciting action to watch would result from speedway workers manning circular saws.
Yes, the 2008 running of the Auto Club 500, which at least was completed Monday, was a bungled mess and cost NASCAR some of the valuable momentum it had built through Speedweeks and a competitive, exciting season-opening Daytona 500 one week earlier.
But could it have been avoided? Or should this one be chalked up to Mother Nature still being in charge — and when she decides to mess with us, there’s little or nothing any of us mere earthlings can do about it?
What went wrong
You can’t blame NASCAR for trying to get the Sprint Cup Series race in on Sunday. The Nationwide Series event already had been postponed from Saturday — first to Sunday and then, as the Cup event dragged on and continued to fight weather- and track-induced delays — to Monday. NASCAR was trying (in vain, as it turned out) to avoid running both events on the same day.
But in the long run, NASCAR tried way too hard.
To recap, the race didn’t start until roughly three hours after it was scheduled to begin — and even then, there were legitimate questions about the wisdom of giving it a go. Just 16 laps into the event, driver Denny Hamlin lost control of his No. 11 Toyota and slammed into the Turn 3 wall.
At first the accident was blamed on a blown tire, but then it was determined all four of his tires were up. Hamlin said he hit a wet spot on the track that was like “black ice.” Furthermore, he said there was so much debris from all the “speedy dry” that had been put down that he couldn’t even see out of his windshield to try to figure out where the wet spots might be. The speedy dry was laid down not to combat the rain or water seepage, but because the No. 55 Toyota of driver Michael Waltrip had spewed oil all over the track during the parade lap before the green flag was dropped.
“I think there are 42 other drivers that would agree that we should not be racing on that racetrack right now,” Hamlin told reporters afterward.
If he wasn’t one of them then, Casey Mears was five laps later when he hit yet another wet spot that sent him into a wild spin that ultimately collected the cars of his famous Hendrick Motorsports teammate (Earnhardt), Sorensen and Hornish. That accident ended with Mears’ No. 5 Chevrolet turned on its side and Hornish’s No. 77 Dodge in flames after running into it.
It also concerned NASCAR officials to the point that they finally admitted what Hamlin and others already knew: they had a water seepage problem. There were “weepers” in the house, and this was in reference not only to all those folks who paid for high-priced tickets and saw their envisioned day of fun in the sun getting washed away before their eyes.
This isn’t the first track to suffer from weepers, and it won’t be the last. It also has been an issue in between grooves at tracks such as Indianapolis, Texas and Martinsville. But this time it seemed particularly bad, plus continuing rain promised to make it worse, not better, as the night wore on and drastically cooler temperatures prevailed.
Water was weeping from seams in the track, particularly in the turns. So NASCAR did what only NASCAR might have done: it implored track officials to come out with the saws to cut channels in the track and help the weepers drain.
This process took one hour and seven minutes and, quite frankly, looked futile from the start no matter how many drivers or talking heads on television claimed that it seemed “the right thing to do.”
America sleeps
Earnhardt was more sympathetic toward Mears than he was toward the governing body that seemed to be trying to get the event going at all costs.
“I think we were too excited. We got going a little too soon. The racetrack was a little dirty and everybody was losing grip and there were a lot of wet spots out there,” Earnhardt told reporters. “Once you slip up, sometimes you don’t save it enough. And Casey [Mears] got up there and into some water or dirt or something and ended up out of the groove.
“And way out of the groove is just terrible. It’s like a dirt track up there. There was a lot of speedy dry and he just lost it. I didn’t have anywhere I could go to miss him.”
Veteran driver Mark Martin added: “This is really a tough deal. We just can’t seem to get racing here.”
The Mears accident brought out the dreaded red flag that froze the field for that one hour and seven minutes. But at about 8 p.m. Eastern Standard Time, NASCAR tried to go racing again. This time the race lasted about 20 laps before rain interrupted again, bringing out the third caution of the day from Laps 41-47.
Still more heavy rain came later, bringing out another excruciatingly long red-flag delay that made the earlier one look like child’s play. Yet NASCAR stubbornly refused to call it a night until it was nearly 11 p.m. local California time, or nearly 2 a.m. Eastern — about 11 hours after the scheduled start. All the jet dryers and all the king’s men could not have kept the track from continuing to weep after all that rain.
And while the track wept, most of America slept.
Even the most ardent of the sport’s followers couldn’t stay with it that long, once again making everyone wonder, in the end, why in the France family’s name do they keep coming to Fontana not once but twice a year?
In the fall, heat will be the issue if it’s not raining again. Last Labor Day weekend the heat got so intense it appeared to cause track president Gillian Zucker to hallucinate, as she apparently mistook several thousand empty seats for paying customers during her post-race analysis of the event to the media.
And to think that it was unpredictable weather and empty seats that led to NASCAR moving the second date of its season out of Rockingham, N.C., in the first place.
Weepers, jeepers. The mere thought of making another trip to the place now called Auto Club Speedway is enough to make some of us cry — or at least hope we’re not on the schedule to cover the next race there live.
Hookscenter.com wire report (Menzer).