Looking to Daytona

Not a big deal at all. Used to happen all the time, especially at Bristol.

I've heard a couple of media people say that Jr is going to become an owner/driver for JR Motorsports. I don't think he'll do that at all.

I think that the longer they go without getting a deal done for Jr to stay at DEI, the more likely it is that he'll go somewhere else. I also think that this story is only going to get bigger and bigger as we go further into the season without a deal being done.

 

Phoenix

It seemed like Fox had quite a bit of actual news to report on, but my mom was over on Saturday, talking about some things that are not very good, so I missed 95% of the pre-race. For these notes, I added a timestamp, ala The Sports Guy, as I'd forgotten about Notepad's handy feature. Press F5 and you have a timestamp.

7:38 PM 4/21/2007
Robin Yount gives the command to start engines? Robin Yount? I liked Yount just fine when he played baseball, but is he promoting a book or something? Seems like an odd choice, so I wonder what the rationale was.

7:40 PM 4/21/2007
DW predicts wrecks on starts and restarts. I'm going to follow this and see if his prediction is true.

7:45 PM 4/21/2007
A shot of Kurt Warner in somebody's pit stall. I've always liked Kurt Warner. Up until they lost that Super Bowl, he was just unstoppable leading The Greatest Show on Turf. I'm still not sure what happened to him. I think maybe the thumb was a problem, and he got a case of the yips after the SB, and his coaches lost confidence in him. But, everything I've ever read about him winds up with people saying, "Yeah, he really is that good of a guy." Would that we all had that kind of testimony.

7:48 PM 4/21/2007
Mike Joy: "Nighttime is the right time." For fighting, I assume, Mike. Thanks for the cliche.

7:48 PM 4/21/2007
Here's the start. Do we have a wreck? No. DW's prediction is 0 for 1.

7:55 PM 4/21/2007
Jared on what everybody knows Subway for: The other thing everybody knows about Subway is how expensive it is. I love Subway, but it is so much more expensive than I think it should be.

8:01 PM 4/21/2007
When I first saw the COT, I thought it was ugly. I have to say that the looks of the car are growing on me. Hamlin's black car, with that black spoiler, looks particularly sharp.

8:06 PM 4/21/2007
Truck series advert. Before Jack Roush talked him into driving the #6 car in 2006, Mark Martin's plans were to drive the full truck series. But, he's back driving a cup car on a part-time basis, and he's only driven one truck race this year. What does it say about the truck series that Mark Martin decided he wanted to drive a partial cup schedule rather than a full truck schedule? Either the trucks aren't as fun to drive as he thought, or else the level of competition was such that he thought he'd be bored driving a truck. Any other options I'm missing?

8:08 PM 4/21/2007
Caution for debris. What, was Dale Jr about to go a lap down? :smilewinkgrin:

8:10 PM 4/21/2007
Cingular question: Will Kahne's start turnaround today? I vote No.

Here's another restart with no wreck. 0 for 2 on that prediction.

8:17 PM 4/21/2007
One of the tators just said that we always seem to have accidents on the restart. Right. We're 0-3 so far. The old saying is that "Cautions breed cautions", but I've always thought that's more perception than reality.

8:36 PM 4/21/2007
They're talking about how hard it is to pass here. I can tell you from simracing that at Phoenix, it's nearly impossible to pass on the outside. You have to be quite a bit faster to pass on the outside, especially in T1 and T2. It's very hard to find the grip up there that you need.

8:37 PM 4/21/2007
Phoenix is a good track for Jr. It was his win here in 2003 that I thought put him on the map as a championship contender in 2004. And, if not for an ill-advised attempt to win at Atlanta in 2004, Jr. would have won the 2004 Nextel Cup. Which would have been far better than the actual winner, Kurt Busch.

8:39 PM 4/21/2007
Speaking of manufacturer's, I'm glad to see the tators validating my theory on why Chevy is doing so much better than anybody else. In his race rewind column, David Poole said,

Exactly right.

8:41 PM 4/21/2007
Mike Joy mentioned that there hasn't been a car with a wing since the early 70s Superbird. Fans are funny sometimes. A fan on the simracing board I'm a member of talked about how the muscle cars from that time looked. The guy was sort of waxing eloquently about how the cars looked so much better then than they do now. A long-time fan of the sport made mention of how, at the time, most people thought the Superbird looked stupid with that wing on the back.

8:50 PM 4/21/2007
Hamlin getting his penalty. Fox got a great shot of Hamlin pulling away from Harvick. Well done to the guys in the truck.

8:51 PM 4/21/2007
DW talking about braking. What DW described is how I learned to drive, which is using the right foot on both the accelerator and the brake. One of the weird things is, I brake with the right foot on the brake. In sim-racing, I'm a left-foot braker. I've tried to brake with the left foot in my real car, but it just doesn't feel right. I just think I'm very weird sometimes. Most of the time even.

9:08 PM 4/21/2007
So far, this is a pretty good race.

9:15 PM 4/21/2007
Yet another restart with no wrecks. DW's prediction of wrecks on restarts has been flat wrong.

9:20 PM 4/21/2007
The spirit of Benny Parsons gets into Larry McReynolds when he talks about the rotors glowing cherry red.

9:21 PM 4/21/2007
I thought one of the advantage of the new cars is that the cars wouldn't be so dependent on the fenders being perfect? That they could get away with a little bumping and rubbing. With Jeff Gordon's problems after bumping Harvick, maybe that's not true.

9:31 PM 4/21/2007
I criticize the tators from time to time, but let's give them their due. DW correctly diagnosed an ill-handling car solely because all 4 rotors on the #29 were glowing red. Nicely done, DW.

10:24 PM 4/21/2007
Dale Jr short-pits and DW says that he never likes short-pitting and I completely agree with him. It almost never works out and when I short pit in simracing, the caution invariably comes out and messes up my race.

Larry Mac goes on his weekly praise of pit road selection, which I think is too overstated as having a big impact. It's far more important that Jeff Gordon was running upfront rather than having a certain spot on pit road.

Once the checkered flag fell, I turned the channel. I didn't know about the flag-waving until I saw thatsracin.com this morning. It was a nice gesture.

The racing with the COT has been pretty good.

I want to close with this from Poole's column.

 

He'll be 36 in August. It's reasonable to say that he'll be racing for at least another 10 years. If he wins at 3 races a year, which would be under his career average, but a great pace nonetheless, he'll finish at 106 wins. If 200 wins were within reach, he would drive as long as it would take to get there.

Winning 4 more championships in that 10 year time frame seems like a foregone conclusion for him.

So, I think he'll retire with 106 wins and 8 championships, 2 marks that won't be surpassed.

Edited to add:
No doubt he's getting to 100. Tying and passing Earnhardt has been a foregone conclusion for several years. It was never a question of if, but when.

 

3 things that I think kept Earnhardt from winning at least 1 more championship.

#1 - Talladega wreck in '96.
I know both T. Labonte and Gordon were very good down the stretch in '96 and would have been hard to beat, but I believe that if not for that wreck, Earnhardt would have won #8 in '96.

#2 - Andy Petree left RCR.
Andy's absence really showed in '97 and '98. Larry Mac was a good crew chief for Davey Allison, but he and Earnhardt just never clicked together like say, Earnhardt/Shelmerdine and Earnhardt/Petree did. At the time, I had a feeling it wasn't going to work out as well as many thought. It reminded me too much of the "Dream Team" assembled by Hendrick for DW in 1987 that had but 1 win. Larry Mac did so many things that just angered me as an Earnhardt fan, and showed he just wasn't a good fit at RCR. For instance, he tried to win a race at Pocono in 1997 on fuel-mileage, outsmarted himself and wound up getting Earnhardt involved in a wreck he should have been nowhere near.

Earnhardt winning a race on fuel-mileage? Heresy! :laugh:

Andy Petree was very innovative, though not to the degree of Ray Evernham. Andy was a huge reason why Harry Gant dominated the month of September in 1991. Plus, Andy's rear-end camber idea was adopted by Tim Brewer and led to Bill Elliott winning 4 in a row in 1992.

#3 - Last lap of the '01 Daytona 500.
The pieces were definitely in place to win. If Kevin Harvick could win 2 races in that car, what could have Dale Earnhardt done?

As hard as they are to win, Gordon has everything necessary to win 4 more championships and I think he will. I've already got the barf bags prepared for the coming years when the articles are written declaring Gordon the best ever.

 

The Silver Fox won his last race in Dale's car, but that car was the #2 car when Earnhardt was a rookie in 1979 driving for Rod Osterlund.

 

That win in the Rebel 500 was Pearson's last win at Darlington and his last career win. It was indeed in Hoss Ellington's car.

 

It may be sour grapes, but I still agree with Tony nonetheless.

Jim Hunter, VP of corp. communications for Nascar:

What's missing from Hunter's statement? Where did Hunter deny that they don't throw cautions to manipulate the race? Instead, we hear about how they're interested in safety. Tony anticipated that argument.


Tony Stewart:

One of the cautions on Saturday was for a plastic bag that had blown on the track. Where is the safety issue in that? Why did they throw the caution for that one, but didn't throw the caution for the plastic bag that forced Jamie McMurray into the pits with overheating? The debris cautions have become a running joke. I said it myself a couple of days ago:

Nascar has never understood their credibility problem. I thought they were on the right track after not throwing any debris cautions at Vegas, but maybe not.

It would be so cool to be able to see races of Pearson at his best. I've watched Back in the Day, but you don't see entire races, and it would be cool to watch a race of Pearson at his best to see how good he was. Writers that I respect say that he was that good, and I believe them because his career stats back it up, but it'd be nice to see it for myself as well.