Looking to Daytona

[swaimj]

I was thinking more of Kurt Busch. He didn't really fade either, he was penalized when he got caught by the caution flag and he did not have time to get back up front.

I think it is an issue for NASCAR that Chevy is dominating, but the reason does seem to be that they have the stronger teams.

Jr. is right, that driver's used to relieve each other pretty commonly "back in the day". Nowadays, it's rare for a driver to get relief because they all have better cooling devices in the car. "Back in the day", at the end of the race at Bristol I think half the cars might have relief drivers. Maybe those few laps will help Jr decide whether to move to Hendrick or to Childress when he leaves DEI :laugh:

 

[ccrobinson]

Not a big deal at all. Used to happen all the time, especially at Bristol.

I've heard a couple of media people say that Jr is going to become an owner/driver for JR Motorsports. I don't think he'll do that at all.

I think that the longer they go without getting a deal done for Jr to stay at DEI, the more likely it is that he'll go somewhere else. I also think that this story is only going to get bigger and bigger as we go further into the season without a deal being done.

 

[ccrobinson]

Phoenix

It seemed like Fox had quite a bit of actual news to report on, but my mom was over on Saturday, talking about some things that are not very good, so I missed 95% of the pre-race. For these notes, I added a timestamp, ala The Sports Guy, as I'd forgotten about Notepad's handy feature. Press F5 and you have a timestamp.

7:38 PM 4/21/2007
Robin Yount gives the command to start engines? Robin Yount? I liked Yount just fine when he played baseball, but is he promoting a book or something? Seems like an odd choice, so I wonder what the rationale was.

7:40 PM 4/21/2007
DW predicts wrecks on starts and restarts. I'm going to follow this and see if his prediction is true.

7:45 PM 4/21/2007
A shot of Kurt Warner in somebody's pit stall. I've always liked Kurt Warner. Up until they lost that Super Bowl, he was just unstoppable leading The Greatest Show on Turf. I'm still not sure what happened to him. I think maybe the thumb was a problem, and he got a case of the yips after the SB, and his coaches lost confidence in him. But, everything I've ever read about him winds up with people saying, "Yeah, he really is that good of a guy." Would that we all had that kind of testimony.

7:48 PM 4/21/2007
Mike Joy: "Nighttime is the right time." For fighting, I assume, Mike. Thanks for the cliche.

7:48 PM 4/21/2007
Here's the start. Do we have a wreck? No. DW's prediction is 0 for 1.

7:55 PM 4/21/2007
Jared on what everybody knows Subway for: The other thing everybody knows about Subway is how expensive it is. I love Subway, but it is so much more expensive than I think it should be.

8:01 PM 4/21/2007
When I first saw the COT, I thought it was ugly. I have to say that the looks of the car are growing on me. Hamlin's black car, with that black spoiler, looks particularly sharp.

8:06 PM 4/21/2007
Truck series advert. Before Jack Roush talked him into driving the #6 car in 2006, Mark Martin's plans were to drive the full truck series. But, he's back driving a cup car on a part-time basis, and he's only driven one truck race this year. What does it say about the truck series that Mark Martin decided he wanted to drive a partial cup schedule rather than a full truck schedule? Either the trucks aren't as fun to drive as he thought, or else the level of competition was such that he thought he'd be bored driving a truck. Any other options I'm missing?

8:08 PM 4/21/2007
Caution for debris. What, was Dale Jr about to go a lap down? :smilewinkgrin:

8:10 PM 4/21/2007
Cingular question: Will Kahne's start turnaround today? I vote No.

Here's another restart with no wreck. 0 for 2 on that prediction.

8:17 PM 4/21/2007
One of the tators just said that we always seem to have accidents on the restart. Right. We're 0-3 so far. The old saying is that "Cautions breed cautions", but I've always thought that's more perception than reality.

8:36 PM 4/21/2007
They're talking about how hard it is to pass here. I can tell you from simracing that at Phoenix, it's nearly impossible to pass on the outside. You have to be quite a bit faster to pass on the outside, especially in T1 and T2. It's very hard to find the grip up there that you need.

8:37 PM 4/21/2007
Phoenix is a good track for Jr. It was his win here in 2003 that I thought put him on the map as a championship contender in 2004. And, if not for an ill-advised attempt to win at Atlanta in 2004, Jr. would have won the 2004 Nextel Cup. Which would have been far better than the actual winner, Kurt Busch.

8:39 PM 4/21/2007
Speaking of manufacturer's, I'm glad to see the tators validating my theory on why Chevy is doing so much better than anybody else. In his race rewind column, David Poole said,

A lot of people want to start crying about a competitive advantage for Chevrolet, particularly in the “car of tomorrow” races. I have little sympathy for such arguments.

Every race team and every manufacturer had the same opportunity to start work on the development of the COT and many chose to postpone it thinking NASCAR would change its mind.

That’s their loss.

Exactly right.

8:41 PM 4/21/2007
Mike Joy mentioned that there hasn't been a car with a wing since the early 70s Superbird. Fans are funny sometimes. A fan on the simracing board I'm a member of talked about how the muscle cars from that time looked. The guy was sort of waxing eloquently about how the cars looked so much better then than they do now. A long-time fan of the sport made mention of how, at the time, most people thought the Superbird looked stupid with that wing on the back.

8:50 PM 4/21/2007
Hamlin getting his penalty. Fox got a great shot of Hamlin pulling away from Harvick. Well done to the guys in the truck.

8:51 PM 4/21/2007
DW talking about braking. What DW described is how I learned to drive, which is using the right foot on both the accelerator and the brake. One of the weird things is, I brake with the right foot on the brake. In sim-racing, I'm a left-foot braker. I've tried to brake with the left foot in my real car, but it just doesn't feel right. I just think I'm very weird sometimes. Most of the time even.

9:08 PM 4/21/2007
So far, this is a pretty good race.

9:15 PM 4/21/2007
Yet another restart with no wrecks. DW's prediction of wrecks on restarts has been flat wrong.

9:20 PM 4/21/2007
The spirit of Benny Parsons gets into Larry McReynolds when he talks about the rotors glowing cherry red.

9:21 PM 4/21/2007
I thought one of the advantage of the new cars is that the cars wouldn't be so dependent on the fenders being perfect? That they could get away with a little bumping and rubbing. With Jeff Gordon's problems after bumping Harvick, maybe that's not true.

9:31 PM 4/21/2007
I criticize the tators from time to time, but let's give them their due. DW correctly diagnosed an ill-handling car solely because all 4 rotors on the #29 were glowing red. Nicely done, DW.

10:24 PM 4/21/2007
Dale Jr short-pits and DW says that he never likes short-pitting and I completely agree with him. It almost never works out and when I short pit in simracing, the caution invariably comes out and messes up my race.

Larry Mac goes on his weekly praise of pit road selection, which I think is too overstated as having a big impact. It's far more important that Jeff Gordon was running upfront rather than having a certain spot on pit road.

Once the checkered flag fell, I turned the channel. I didn't know about the flag-waving until I saw thatsracin.com this morning. It was a nice gesture.

The racing with the COT has been pretty good.

I want to close with this from Poole's column.

There is a growing sentiment, even voiced by NASCAR officials, that late start times for races have contributed to the sport’s recent decline in TV ratings. It’s about time someone (a) acknowledged there is a problem and (b) realized that part of the problem is the alienation of NASCAR’s core fan base in recent years.

 

[swaimj]

Congrats to Jeff Gordon for tying Dale Earnhardt in wins. Paying tribute to Earnhardt as he did so was a classy move. Earnhardt, Jr. congratulating Gordon was classy as well. As well as Gordon is running and as well as he runs at Talledega, I predict that he will pass Earnhardt this coming weekend.

 

[PastorSBC1303]

Very classy move by Gordon to honor Earnhardt like that.

How many wins do yall think Gordon will end his career with?

 

[swaimj]

I think he'll get to 100 and then it will be very tempting to try to pass Pearson.

 

[ccrobinson]

He'll be 36 in August. It's reasonable to say that he'll be racing for at least another 10 years. If he wins at 3 races a year, which would be under his career average, but a great pace nonetheless, he'll finish at 106 wins. If 200 wins were within reach, he would drive as long as it would take to get there.

Winning 4 more championships in that 10 year time frame seems like a foregone conclusion for him.

So, I think he'll retire with 106 wins and 8 championships, 2 marks that won't be surpassed.

Edited to add:
No doubt he's getting to 100. Tying and passing Earnhardt has been a foregone conclusion for several years. It was never a question of if, but when.

 

[PastorSBC1303]

I think he will make 100 wins easy, but I don't see him getting to 8 championships.

 

[swaimj]

When Earnhardt won his 7th, I thought he would certainly win 2-3 more. He seemed to have no competition. Gordon looks good for 6-8 total championships before his career is over.

 

[ccrobinson]

3 things that I think kept Earnhardt from winning at least 1 more championship.

#1 - Talladega wreck in '96.
I know both T. Labonte and Gordon were very good down the stretch in '96 and would have been hard to beat, but I believe that if not for that wreck, Earnhardt would have won #8 in '96.

#2 - Andy Petree left RCR.
Andy's absence really showed in '97 and '98. Larry Mac was a good crew chief for Davey Allison, but he and Earnhardt just never clicked together like say, Earnhardt/Shelmerdine and Earnhardt/Petree did. At the time, I had a feeling it wasn't going to work out as well as many thought. It reminded me too much of the "Dream Team" assembled by Hendrick for DW in 1987 that had but 1 win. Larry Mac did so many things that just angered me as an Earnhardt fan, and showed he just wasn't a good fit at RCR. For instance, he tried to win a race at Pocono in 1997 on fuel-mileage, outsmarted himself and wound up getting Earnhardt involved in a wreck he should have been nowhere near.

Earnhardt winning a race on fuel-mileage? Heresy! :laugh:

Andy Petree was very innovative, though not to the degree of Ray Evernham. Andy was a huge reason why Harry Gant dominated the month of September in 1991. Plus, Andy's rear-end camber idea was adopted by Tim Brewer and led to Bill Elliott winning 4 in a row in 1992.

#3 - Last lap of the '01 Daytona 500.
The pieces were definitely in place to win. If Kevin Harvick could win 2 races in that car, what could have Dale Earnhardt done?

As hard as they are to win, Gordon has everything necessary to win 4 more championships and I think he will. I've already got the barf bags prepared for the coming years when the articles are written declaring Gordon the best ever.

 

[Bob Alkire]

I think he'll get to 100 and then it will be very tempting to try to pass Pearson.

I don't know how many races he will win, but I have never seen a better NASCAR driver than David Pearson.

Won with many team he raced for. Didn't run the full schedule with the Wood brothers and still has over a 100 wins. Won his last race for RCR in Dale's number 3 at Darlington, I think.

 

[ccrobinson]

Won his last race for RCR in Dale's number 3 at Darlington, I think.

The Silver Fox won his last race in Dale's car, but that car was the #2 car when Earnhardt was a rookie in 1979 driving for Rod Osterlund.

 

[PastorSBC1303]

No doubt that Gordon will rightfully be in the discussion. But I do not think he is or will ever be the greatest driver ever. I would go with Pearson as well.

 

[Bob Alkire]

The Silver Fox won his last race in Dale's car, but that car was the #2 car when Earnhardt was a rookie in 1979 driving for Rod Osterlund.

Thanks for the correction. As a David Pearson fan, it is the one win that hurts, I just didn't care for Earnhardt's style. David was about as clean a driver as one could fine, even when he raced under the name Phillips( it could have been Philps ) in non NASCAR races. By the way, he had 574 starts and 105 wins, 301 top 5's and 366 top 10's.I don't know if this is correct but someone here said, in 1980 Pearson drivin for Hoss Ellington won the Rebel 500 at Darlington. I guess that makes me wrong on Dale's car, if he is correct.

I guess I still like the good guy in the white hat, telling my age I guess. With that said, Dale was great, but I would even put him in my top 3. I don't care for Gordon, but I believe he is a better NASCAR driver than Dale was along with David Pearson, Fireball Roberts, the King, Cale and DW.

 

[ccrobinson]

in 1980 Pearson drivin for Hoss Ellington won the Rebel 500 at Darlington

That win in the Rebel 500 was Pearson's last win at Darlington and his last career win. It was indeed in Hoss Ellington's car.

 

[swaimj]

Did anyone else read Tony Stewart's comments about NASCAR? Two comments on his comments:
I think this is really sour grapes on Tony's part. He lost to Jeff Gordon fair and square at Pheonix. He got himself in trouble the week before by racing Montoya and then HE crashed and wrecked the leader. I hope he gets royally and soundly booed on Sunday at Talledega. For raw talent, he is a great driver, but his attitude stinks.

After Texas, where he wrecked with Montoya, he said he might retire. I gotta feeling that NASCAR is going to encourage that decision any way they can if Stewart keeps complaining.

Oh, and as for the Earnhardt/Pearson comparison, I'd hate to have to choose between the two as to who was the greater driver based purely on skill. Both seemed to have a sixth sense when behind the wheel of a car. They say Earnhardt could "see" the draft at Talledega, but it was Pearson who once pulled down out of the draft in a race at Talledega. Half a lap later the entire front of the field crashed. Pearson drove through the smoking heaps and went on to win the race easily.

 

[ccrobinson]

It may be sour grapes, but I still agree with Tony nonetheless.

Jim Hunter, VP of corp. communications for Nascar:

“NASCAR has been running races since 1948 and ... the safety of the drivers is our first priority. It has always been that way and will continue to be that way.”

What's missing from Hunter's statement? Where did Hunter deny that they don't throw cautions to manipulate the race? Instead, we hear about how they're interested in safety. Tony anticipated that argument.


Tony Stewart:

“They don’t mind us running around with crap on the track in practice, but as soon as there is one piece of rubber off a tire on the track they’re all more than willing to throw the caution to bunch everybody up and keep guys on the lead lap,” Stewart said.

One of the cautions on Saturday was for a plastic bag that had blown on the track. Where is the safety issue in that? Why did they throw the caution for that one, but didn't throw the caution for the plastic bag that forced Jamie McMurray into the pits with overheating? The debris cautions have become a running joke. I said it myself a couple of days ago:

8:08 PM 4/21/2007
Caution for debris. What, was Dale Jr about to go a lap down? :smilewinkgrin:

Nascar has never understood their credibility problem. I thought they were on the right track after not throwing any debris cautions at Vegas, but maybe not.

Oh, and as for the Earnhardt/Pearson comparison, I'd hate to have to choose between the two as to who was the greater driver based purely on skill.

It would be so cool to be able to see races of Pearson at his best. I've watched Back in the Day, but you don't see entire races, and it would be cool to watch a race of Pearson at his best to see how good he was. Writers that I respect say that he was that good, and I believe them because his career stats back it up, but it'd be nice to see it for myself as well.

 

[PastorSBC1303]

It may be sour grapes, but I still agree with Tony nonetheless.

I agree. It very well maybe sour grapes, but it is getting ridiculous. Don't the drivers have a right to be able to voice their opinion without it being sour grapes?

After Texas, where he wrecked with Montoya, he said he might retire. I gotta feeling that NASCAR is going to encourage that decision any way they can if Stewart keeps complaining.

Very unlikely. Do you really think NASCAR wants to see one of its most talented drivers retire in the prime of his career?

They may get frustrated at times with him, but I am sure they are also loving all the attention he has brought to NASCAR as well.

 

[Bob Alkire]

It would be so cool to be able to see races of Pearson at his best. I've watched Back in the Day, but you don't see entire races, and it would be cool to watch a race of Pearson at his best to see how good he was. Writers that I respect say that he was that good, and I believe them because his career stats back it up, but it'd be nice to see it for myself as well.

I for one thinks the best of David Pearson was the years before he went to the Wood brothers. In a four year span of time driving a Dodge for Cotton ( I think), he won his only 3 championships. If my mind hasn't left me all the way, I think I recall, from there own he never raced a full season, while with the Wood brothers. How many championships could he have won? But the money for winning the championship wasn't all that hot, either.

 

[swaimj]

Tony can say whatever he likes. It's his radio show. However, he is attacking the basic credibility of the sport. More accomplished drivers that Stewart have been told privately to shut up in the past and they did so. A.J. Foyt comes to mind. Others were banished from the sport like Curtis Turner. Look this weekend for a whole host of drivers to come out and support NASCAR's credibility. Look for Tony to back down from this comment this weekend just like he backed down from his comment about retiring. But if Tony keeps running well and then losing the race, look for him to whine.