So, did everyone enjoy the 24 Hours of Richmond? Those of you who stayed up to watch the end got to see a roaring comeback by Jeff Gordon and a heartbreaker of a race for Kyle Busch. Mix that in with Denny Hamlin’s dominance one-upped by Clint Bowyer’s steal in a last ditch effort for bonus points, and the rain that pushed the race into the wee hours of the morning became an afterthought.
By Jeff Wolfe The saying goes that a little rain never hurt anybody. But a few drops at around 12:30 a.m. Sunday in Richmond, Va., …
I didn’t think we were going to be too bad in Atlanta when we unloaded, but the track just got slowed with the more rubber that got put down. Everyone was fighting the same thing with being a little free. We never really got it perfect and we definitely didn’t have the speed we needed for qualifying, either, and that hurt us. When we got in the race, I was off a little bit and there was so much green flag racing that there wasn’t a lot of an opportunity to pit and make adjustments. It was just a night where we never really hit it off and we struggled a little bit. We were definitely looking for a good run. After Michigan (finished third), we had bad luck at Bristol and then didn’t have great luck at Atlanta, either. It’s disappointing for sure.
_Doug Yates has been around racing his entire life. He’s the son of a legendary engine builder and has made a career out of making horsepower. He now heads up the operations at Roush Yates, a collaborative effort established in 2004 between two former engine building rivals who decided to team up and share their expertise._
_The result was an instant success, as Kurt Busch claimed the Cup Series title in the first year of the collaboration. The company has been expanding their reach beyond the upper levels of NASCAR and is now serving a broad variety of racing endeavors around the globe. Frontstretch sat down with Yates before the ADVOCARE 500 in Atlanta to talk about growing up in the sport, learning about business from a legendary father, and hopes for the future._
With a phone call this week, somebody wanted to know what was the longest distance I ever drove only to be rained out.
That would have to be one of the ASA races we ran in Atlanta. Woke up Sunday morning with the pouring rain like it was coming out of a bucket, and it stayed that way until we pulled out at 3:00 p.m. Rex Robbins asked if I was giving up on it clearing up. I said I wasn’t so much worried about that as the track filling up with water. This was back when Atlanta was a “pure” oval and a bit bowl-shaped like Dover. I loved it that way. We don’t have enough tracks like that nowadays…
With Tuesday’s announcement making official what everybody has known for the past two months, 2003 Winston Cup Champion Matt Kenseth has left Roush Fenway Racing, and will be moving to Joe Gibbs Racing. To say that Roush Fenway is a talent vacuum might not be much of an understatement. Over the course of the past five years, consider the drivers that they have lost: Mark Martin, Kurt Busch, and Matt Kenseth in the Cup Series alone. Sponsorship has taken a hit as well, adding to the list of Office Depot, UPS, AAA, DeWalt, Crown Royal, and Carhartt.
We’re getting close! The 10 race stretch to the champinonship known as “the Chase” is now only a week away, and Atlanta still left many more questions raised than answered. Hamlin’s back-to-back wins were almost a forethought to the wild card spot that were occupying headlines. However, Hamlin was indeed the driver in Victory Lane and is making some noise of his own heading to his home track in Richmond.
Hello, race fans. Welcome back to Couch Potato Tuesday, where race broadcast criticism is the name of the game. This past week, the Sprint Cup, Nationwide and Camping World Truck Series were each at Atlanta Motor Speedway for 1,000 miles of racing and wearing tires down to the cords. Speaking of wearing down to the cords, I’m pretty sure that Trevor Bayne did quite a bit of that on Sunday night if his practice laps Saturday were any indication. His car seemed to be more at home at Lebanon Valley than Atlanta.
Also of note, we’re getting into college football season again. Countdown prior to both the Nationwide and Sprint Cup races was affected by games running long. I have no idea why ESPN thinks that it is a good idea to allot three hours per game. They have to run exceptionally fast in order to finish in that amount of time. At this point, ESPN literally has the power to dictate terms to schools about when they start games (the Tuesday night MAC and Sun Belt Conference events are just one example of this.) I’d suggest moving the start times up, but I guess they’d probably wait until next year to execute any changes.
Color me impressed. Seven months ago at the start of the NASCAR Sprint Cup series season, if someone would have told me that Denny Hamlin would be the winningest driver on the season going into the final regular season race at Richmond, I would have laughed at them. I, along with many others in the NASCAR community, had written Denny Hamlin off as a serious title contender heading into 2012.
After all, it was Hamlin who entered this year reeling from a miserably disappointing 2011 season that saw the Virginian driver finish an unimpressive ninth in the standings with only five top-5 finishes on the year. 2011 (and the end of 2010 as well, of course) was so bad for Denny that he had to go see a sports psychologist to help reclaim all of his lost confidence. Not exactly the mindset known to be possessed by champions, to say the least.
But here we are, almost a full year later, and Denny Hamlin is on top of the NASCAR world once again.
By Jeff Wolfe There’s a lot that goes into winning a NASCAR Sprint Cup race. And what sometimes looks like a sure victory, can disappear …
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