Rain and Smack Highlight the Weekend.
By: Drew Hierwarter
It seems the biggest stories coming out of the NASCAR Sprint Cup race at Pocono this weekend were all about the smack talk. From Joey Logano accusing Delana Harvick of ; “. . . wearing the firesuit in the family.” To Tony Stewart saying “. . .that’s the worst driving I’ve ever seen in a professional series.” It was all about the smack.
Even Kasey Kahne hinted that all is not sweetness and light back at the Richard Petty Motorsports shops. When he was asked about the on-track incident between he and teammate A.J. Allmendinger that triggered a multi-car wreck, he said; “I don’t talk to A.J. much anyway so I don’t know why I’d talk to him about this.”
Like it or not, all of this bad mouthing is good for the sport. It generates excitement and gets fans interested because now they all want to see what will happen next. Will Joey Logano retaliate against Harvick at the next race in
We’ll all just have to tune and see. And that’s exactly what NASCAR and TNT are hoping for.
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It’s a shame the weather played such a huge role in the NHRA event near
The cooling temperatures and clean track combined for almost ideal conditions. Performing in front of near empty grandstands didn’t deter any of the teams from bringing their best efforts to the starting line.
In Top Fuel, Larry Dixon turned in two of the best runs of the year with a 3.78 in his semifinal win over Doug Kalitta, followed by a 3.773 to Tony Schumacher’s losing 3.823. The win put
Funny Car driver Matt Hagen stopped Robert Hight’s hot streak at 15 rounds and three straight wins and set a new national E.T. record in the process. He backed up his semi-final 4.022 over Ashley Force, with a 4.069 in the final to put down Robert Hight.
Mike Edwards continued his domination of the Pro Stock ranks winning his sixth out of ten races this year. The final was one of the best races in the class as he and opponent Jason Line had almost identical reaction times. But it was Edwards who got to the finish line first by just four-thousandths, 6.594 to 6.599.
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And finally this; yours truly was genuinely surprised that a veteran drag racer like Mike Dunn did not know the origin of the term “holeshot”. ESPN played a feature in which Top Fuel driver David Grubnik explained what a holeshot is. Basically it means one driver having a significantly better reaction time then the other and leaving the line first. However, at the end of the piece neither Grubnik nor Dunn could explain where the term came from.
You have to go back to the sixties when many drag racers referred to leaving the starting line as; “coming out of the hole”. Therefore, winning the race by getting a good reaction time became known as winning by a “holeshot”. There you have it Mike and David, with apologies to Paul Harvey, now you know the rest of the story!