Chase Shake up at Lowes, and Schumacher Nearly Clinches at Richmond.
By: Drew Hierwarter
It’s racing’s version of the home game. Most of the race teams that compete in the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series are based within a few miles of Charlotte’s Lowes Motor Speedway. The driver’s and crews can come to the track for practice, qualifying, and the race, and still sleep in their own beds every night. No airplanes, no motels, no rush to the airport after the race. And for many it means that the wife and kiddies can come out to the track and see what daddy does to earn a living. It gives the races at Lowes a different atmosphere. Add in the fact that the race is run on Saturday night, under the lights, just like the short track racing that most of these guys grew up with, and the weekend becomes special. Dare I say, even fun?
It wasn’t much fun for several of the teams involved in the Chase for the Championship. Carl Edwards suffered ignition problems that relegated him to a 33rd place finish, and dropped him two spots in the points to fourth, 168 points out. Dale Earnhardt, Jr. ran over some debris and cut a tire ending his night early. He’s now 354 points behind leader Jimmie Johnson and realistically out of contention. And Johnson himself, considered by most to be the master of Lowes, could only manage a sixth place finish in a car that they never could get right all night. But thanks to equally unimpressive performances by his closest rivals, Edwards and Greg Biffle (7th), he was able to hang on to the points lead.
The one guy who did seem to have a lot of fun was race winner Jeff Burton. After crew chief Scott Miller called for a gas and go pit stop on lap 298, Burton took over the lead from a fading Greg Biffle and never looked back for the final 57 laps. The win was Burton’s second of the year and moved him up two spots into second, only 69 points behind Johnson with five races left in the season.
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Can anybody stop Tony Schumacher? The driver for the U.S. Army Top Fuel team has now won 14 events this year and appeared in 10 straight final rounds, (Every one since the NHRA went to 1,000 foot distance) and he has won nine of them. And not only did he win the race at Virginia Motorsports Park near Richmond on Sunday, but he came within a whisker of clinching the top fuel championship with two more races still to go in the season. And as if all that wasn’t enough, on Friday during the opening round of qualifying he became the first driver to break into the 3.7 second bracket with a run of 3.771 in the nearly ideal weather conditions that contributed to near record runs for many of the competitors. In fact Schumacher made five runs in the 3.7s including the first three rounds of eliminations on Sunday. The team now leads the Top Fuel “Countdown to the Championship” by 212 points and all they have to do at the next event in Las Vegas is qualify, and a sixth championship is their’s.
Cruz Pedregon finally won his first NHRA Funny Car trophy since Las Vegas in the spring of 2006! He did it by beating Tony Bartone, Tommy Johnson, Jr, and points leader Tim Wilkerson, before facing Jack Beckman in the final. The win moved Pedregon from sixth to third in points.
Dave Connolly beat his Cagnazzi Racing teammate, Jeg Coughlin to win the Pro Stock title at Richmond. “It was definitely a do-or-die situation for us,” said Connolly. “If we didn’t win today, obviously we didn’t have any hopes of winning the championship. Even though we are still four rounds back on Jeg Coughlin, which is still a tough task with just two races left, we still have a title shot.” The win moved Connolly to third in the standings, 77 points out of first.
Weather and track conditions at Richmond were near perfect all weekend and the elapsed times and speeds showed it. Schumacher was not the only Top Fuel car in the 3.7s as Hillary Will and Doug Herbert also went that quickly. In the first round of Funny Car eliminations, Robert Hight almost became the first driver to record a sub-4 second, 1,000 foot pass in that division when he clocked a 4.005 run against his boss, John Force. And this race had the first ever all 6.5 second Pro Stock field in NHRA history!