The list of drivers who’ve won in their 400th career start, including Sunday reads like a Who’s Who of Who’s Mattered within this sport. Four of them are Hall of Famers: Richard Petty, Lee Petty, David Pearson, and Dale Earnhardt, Sr. paired with the sport’s most successful independent, Dave Marcis. It’s a number that, however …
It’s hard to find fault in a season that produced four wins and a runner-up points finish, but there were oh so many factors that really should have made this one the year for Elliott Sadler and the No. 2 team.
Any of his six wins looked awful good, but the high point of the season for Ricky Stenhouse Jr. came on a night where the No. 6 team didn’t visit victory lane.
The latest “new” Bristol is still not the Bristol of old. But between the buzz, the wrecks and a decent crowd, the August night race resembled its former self for the first time since the pre-Chase era.
*ONE: NASCAR’s Silence On Restarts Troubling*
In one of those rare instances at Bristol where the FOX crew seemed fully on top of the race, instead of their on-air personalities or a select handful of drivers, a well-presented set of replays demonstrated that Matt Kenseth in fact beat leader Brad Keselowski to the restart line on at least one occasion while coming close to doing the same on another. The video made it crystal clear. Yet there was no penalty that ever came down from NASCAR, although it never affected the end result (Keselowski held off Kenseth and won the race).
Two races into the season is hardly enough time to make a lasting prediction for the remainder of a long regular season that will stretch till September. But no matter how early in the season, Sunday was a very big day for the No. 11 team and driver Denny Hamlin. Two races in, Hamlin sits atop the point standings; in six previous full-time seasons, he’s averaged 20th in points by now. It was a second straight convincing showing that had the No. 11 among the class of the field, demonstrating that the learning curve between driver and new crew chief Darian Grubb may well be a short one.
Matt Kenseth drifted high on the final restart to pick up teammate Greg Biffle, who never made a move on his teammate down the stretch. While Biffle and Dale Earnhardt Jr. battled for second, Kenseth drove to his second Daytona 500 victory in four years.
Coming off a strong 2010 campaign that saw him score his first career ARCA win and finish top 5 in points, Mikey Kile certainly wasn’t planning to all but take the 2011 season off. Sponsorship troubles kept the Louisiana native off track for all but five Nationwide Series starts, his last coming during the summer stretch at Iowa.
That being said, he may as well have from an ARCA standpoint. With a double-edged assault of Tim George Jr. and eventual 2011 champion Ty Dillon, Richard Childress Racing combined to win seven poles and eight of the 19 ARCA Racing Series events run last year, utterly dominating the series in a display that was the polar opposite of 2010, where three competitors entered the final race at Rockingham with a shot at the title.
Reed Sorenson returned to victory lane for the first time since 2007, handed the trophy after it was determined that Ron Fellows, who crossed the finish line first under the lap 56 yellow, passed Sorenson under yellow only because the No. 32 car had slowed to caution speed.
Elliott Sadler made the move down to the Nationwide Series for the first time since 1998, trying to get his career back on-track after a stretch of underwhelming seasons in Cup.
ONE: Is Brad Keselowski the Juan Pablo Montoya of the 2011 Chase?
Even as the big guns were busy at work for 400 miles at Kansas, it was a surprisingly solid day for those at the back end of the garage.
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