Motor Sports Weekly News

Story and photo by: Drew Hierwarter

In the late stages of the Pocono 500 on Sunday, Tony Stewart and crew chief Darian Grubb realized that they would have to conserve fuel if they were going to make it to the finish. And so, on Grubb’s advice, Tony switched into fuel miser mode and began running as much as five mph slower than he had been most of the day. He started the race running as hard as he could but by the end he was letting off the gas at the flag stand and coasting to the corners, never touching the brakes. He had the luxury of a six-plus second lead over second place Carl Edwards that he allowed to degrade to just 2 seconds at the finish.  

 

After qualifying was washed out by rain on Friday, Stewart was supposed to start from the pole position thanks to his being number one in owner points. But a crash during practice on Saturday required the use of the back-up car and (by NASCAR rules) that put Tony shotgun on the field, starting 43^rd on Sunday. But he ran hard and by lap 22 he had moved into the top twenty. That proved to everyone that Stewart was fast and would be a factor at the end of the race.

 

For most of the race, the only real excitement was NASCAR’s new double file restarts. Carl Edwards led more than half of the race’s 200 laps and the only driver other than Stewart to lead any significant number of laps was Jimmie Johnson who led 31. The double file restart was enthusiastically welcomed by almost everyone in the garage and the stands. And it did indeed add some periods of interest in a race that was, for the most part, lacking in any other close competition.

 

This was the first time an owner/driver has won a Cup race since Ricky Rudd did it at Martinsville in 1988. Ever since then life in the NASCAR big time has been a struggle for the independent owner/driver teams. But Stewart has been fortunate to have the resources necessary to hire some of the best people in the business. When he bought into the Haas-CNC team last July he began to turn an also-ran into what has become essentially a satellite team of Hendrick Motorsports. Stewart-Haas buys their chassis and engines from Hendrick and receives engineering support from them as well. So really, going into the 2009 season the question wasn’t if these guys would win, but when.

 

“There’s only one first and it doesn’t matter how many races you win, there’s only one first time that you go to Victory Lane with a new organization . . . So it is special.” -Tony Stewart.

 

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On Saturday night many people were shocked and horrified by Kyle Busch’s guitar smashing antics in victory lane after winning the Nationwide Series race at Nashville. In case you’ve been in motorsports isolation all weekend, Kyle Busch had promised his crew that if he ever won a race at Nashville, every man on the team would get a piece of the special Gibson guitar they give to winners there.

 

True to his word, he did his best Pete Townshend impression and smashed the cherished instrument on the ground several times and then threw the remains to the crew. The reaction was predictable. Message boards and chat rooms were alive with opinions from all sides. On Sunday all of the commentators on the pre-race shows had something to say about the incident and most were unfavorable. But probably the best take on this was by Speed TV’s Dave Despain. The self-professed “TV Wind Bag” feels that Kyle Busch is certainly the most interesting personality to come along in NASCAR racing for a long time. Love him or hate him, he makes things interesting both on and off the track.

 

For years fans and media types have been complaining about the bland, sterile, corporate friendly persona that NASCAR drivers have been putting forth. Many expressed the wish that drivers would occasionally show some personality. Now we have someone in Kyle Busch who is unpredictable, who says and does what he feels, and certainly doesn’t fit the typical mold and they are complaining about that.  

 

Be careful what you wish for.

 

 

This entry was posted on Monday, June 8th, 2009 at 8:00 am and is filed under Nationwide Series, Sprint Cup, Toyota, Nextel Cup, NASCAR. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.