Numbers Game 09/03/2012
by Garrett Horton 0 Chase hopeful Joey Logano needs a win at Richmond to make this year’s Chase. It will be tough given Logano’s history …
by Garrett Horton 0 Chase hopeful Joey Logano needs a win at Richmond to make this year’s Chase. It will be tough given Logano’s history …
A green-white-checker finish saw Denny Hamlin grab the lead and hold off Jeff Gordon to take his series leading fourth win of the season.
If not for a badly-timed tire problem for Jamie McMurray, Martin Truex Jr. wouldn’t be getting my shoutout — because he’d have won the race. Instead, Truex had to settle for fourth after a wild restart. Adding insult to injury, Truex, who has flown under the media’s radar all year long despite being a fixture in the top 10 in points, garnered relatively little television attention compared with the night’s other race leaders.
Tony Stewart and Matt Kenseth: two racing horses of clearly different colors. One loves Indiana and everything in it; the other is obsessed with the Green Bay Packers. “Smoke” will take his temper to your mouth, then buy you a beer; the “quiet champ” of 2003 has the most sarcastic sense of humor nobody ever hears about. One is a self-described bachelor, winning a title on the heels of dumping his girlfriend last September; Kenseth, in contrast, has had two children within the last three years.
Until now, they’ve been tied together by nothing more than a helmet throw, an angry Smoke retaliating for some ill-advised contact that knocked both drivers from a chance of winning Bristol in August. In a few days, perhaps an announcement will leave them loosely connected; Kenseth is poised to take over Stewart’s former No. 20 car, the Home Depot Toyota at Joe Gibbs Racing starting in 2013. But as Atlanta’s competition failed to break the “bad news” cycle, these men dominate the NASCAR headlines for another reason no one wants to talk about.
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 …
Kyle Busch’s Nationwide team has already won a race but prior to Saturday they had not won a pole. The team owner took care of …
Tony Stewart is coming off of a weekend where he made headlines for what he did and said outside of the race car. This weekend …
So we’re five days following Bristol and everybody is still atwitter about Tony Stewart going hammer-throw with his helmet at Matt Kenseth. While it was …
First off, a comment from *Steven Sturm* says I goofed on SCCA flag procedures last week, saying,
One mistake: with yellow flags, there is no passing until you pass the
incident, not the next flag station.
OK, Steven, I guess you’re speaking from experience and have some knowledge of the subject. However, I wasn’t sure about that when I wrote it, and I got my information from a video on one of the SCCA regions’ website. Maybe it differs by region. I ended that column with the note that we had a lot of fun in those days.
*After Bristol Motor Speedway made changes to the track over the summer, the track promoted racing closer to what fans saw prior to 2007. But did the track live up to the hype?*
Summer: Oh yeah. The helmet throw was enough for that to be a reality.
Kevin: I think it did. I wasn’t able to look away for both the Cup and Nationwide races, and in that regard I think the races were at least successful.
Mike N.: Closer to racing before the repave? No. Closer to before they put concrete down? Yes. It was different than we’ve seen there in the last 20 years. Prior to the concrete, they used to diamond the corners kind of like they did Saturday night. It was great racing.