Road Course Specialists in NASCAR, Are They Worth It?
By: Drew Hierwarter
The NASCAR Sprint Cup Series takes its act to Infineon Raceway, the road course in Northern California, this weekend. And, as usual, some teams will replace their regular driver with a “road course specialist”. A ringer, if you will. This is a phenomenon that happens every year at this time and will happen again in August when the series runs at the only other road course on the schedule, Watkins Glen in upstate New York. On the surface one can possibly understand why team owners do this. The stereotypical stock car racer who has spent his entire career turning left on oval tracks is ill equipped (or supposedly so) to handle the rigors of upshifting and downshifting, using heel-and-toe techniques, all while turning to the right. Nothing could be farther from the truth.
If you look at the records, none of these so-called “specialists” have ever won a NASCAR Sprint Cup race. Not a single one. You have to go back to the sixties, when Dan Gurney practically owned Riverside Raceway in California and won five NASCAR races in seven starts, to find any sort of success by a non-NASCAR regular on a road course. But when you consider the more recent races at Infineon and Watkins Glen, the record of the road course ringers is dismal. Guys like Ron Fellows, Scott Pruett, Boris Said, Dorsey Schroeder, Tommy Kendall and a few others have all been brought in to run road courses while the team’s regular oval track guy sits it out. And what have these teams got to show for this? Not much.
Ron Fellows is a championship caliber Trans Am driver who has had a lot of success in several forms of road racing including the 24 Hours of Daytona, the Sebring 12 Hour, and the 24 Hours of Le Mans. In eleven years he has run seventeen NASCAR races and only has 3 top five, and 5 top ten finishes to show for it. Dorsey Schroeder has six starts in nine years and has no top fives or top tens. It’s the same story for Tommy Kendall who has only a single finish of eighth as his best in fourteen NASCAR races over a ten year period.
Road racers Boris Said and Scott Pruett have each run more NASCAR races than just the road courses, (Pruett running 28 races in 2000 for car owner Cal Wells). But between the two of them they have a total of 69 starts with only seventeen top ten finishes.
So what about the NASCAR regulars? What about those guys who supposedly can only turn left? Well, obviously if the ringers aren’t winning these races then the NASCAR regulars must be. And right about now you should be thinking about Juan Pablo Montoya’s win last year at Infineon. While it’s true that the majority of his career has been spent on road courses, his win last year was as a full time NASCAR driver. So you really can’t count him as one of the ringers. It’s also true that no team is thinking about replacing drivers like Jeff Gordon, who has five wins at Infineon and three at Watkins Glen, or Tony Stewart who has four wins at the Glen. But for example, this week at Infineon three regular cup drivers will have to move over and let somebody else in the seat. Scott Pruett will be in for Reed Sorenson, Ron Fellows for Regan Smith, and Max Papis will sub for Scott Riggs.
Of course, we’ll never know how Sorenson, Smith, and Riggs would have done had they been allowed to race, but it will be interesting to see how the three “specialists” finish in their place. I can’t help but wonder why some teams continue to bring in the ringers when the records just don’t support it.