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NASCAR: Fryer's Five
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By Jenna Fryer
October 12, 2010
So much for payback from David Reutimann costing Kyle Busch a championship.
When the dust settled Sunday in California, it turned out that incident at Kansas probably won’t matter much. Instead, it was yet another Joe Gibbs Racing reliability issue that crippled Busch’s championship chances.
His engine blew with 45 laps remaining, sending Busch to a 35th-place finish. It dropped him two more spots in the standings to ninth, and with six races remaining in the Chase for the Sprint Cup championship, Busch waved the white flag.
“On to another year,” Busch said. “It’s over.”
He’s right. It is over for Busch, who is now 187 points behind leader Jimmie Johnson.
And now JGR must check and recheck its equipment and make sure that Denny Hamlin isn’t headed toward the same fate.
Reliability has been a pesky issue that’s popped up at the wrong time for JGR over the last several years. Busch broke a part in the 2008 Chase opener, when he was the No. 1 seed, then followed up with a blown engine at Dover, prompting him to declare his title hopes cooked just two races in.
Last year it was Hamlin who had problems, as engine failures at Charlotte and Talladega crippled his title bid.
Hamlin is JGR’s only viable opportunity to win a title, and despite a decent Chase, he’s not been good enough the last two weeks to keep pace with Johnson. Hamlin lost the points lead to the four-time defending champion after Kansas, and his deficit increased to 36 points after an eighth-place finish to Johnson’s third Sunday at Auto Club Speedway.
And now it’s on to Charlotte, where despite having strong cars, Hamlin never seems to seal a solid finish. His career-best finish was eighth, in his 2005 debut, and he’s only grabbed two other top-10s since and none since 2007.
Compare that to Johnson, who has finished higher than Hamlin the last two races, and Hamlin could be facing an even bigger deficit come Sunday morning. Remember, Johnson is a six-time winner at Charlotte and has 13 top-10s in 18 career starts.
Hamlin is going to have to be better in the remaining six races, but more importantly, his JGR equipment is going to have to be flawless. That’s something the organization better be taking a hard look at this week.
What went down in California:
1. Tony Stewart’s season took a turn for the better
Smoke won the race, his second victory of the season, and completed his first good run of the Chase.
Since running out of gas on the last lap while leading the opener at New Hampshire, Stewart has been up and down. He had an off day at Dover and despite finishing fourth at Kansas, he really needs wins to get back into the title race.
So California at least put him back in decent position. He moved up five spots in the standings to fifth, and is now 107 points out.
“This is what they pay me to do,” he said. “I’m supposed to do this every week, or at least try. It’s a situation where we were at, and as many points as we were out and have been out since day one, we have the flexibility to just look forward and not worry about if we take a gamble and it doesn’t work.
“I don’t care between 10th and 12th in points, it doesn’t matter to me. Neither one of them are acceptable. If that’s what we get, that’s what we’ll take, but it’s worth taking the gamble to make ourselves better.”
Stewart will now cap a strong few days with a sponsor announcement scheduled for Tuesday at Stewart-Haas Racing. It’s assumed he’s worked a deal with Mobil 1 to replace Old Spice. Although teammate Ryan Newman needs sponsorship help, too, Newman is not scheduled to appear at the news conference.
Mobil 1 is leaving Penske Racing at the end of the season because Shell/Pennzoil has signed on to sponsor Kurt Busch beginning next year. That opened the door for Mobil 1 to move elsewhere, and the company isn’t eligible to sign up for any of Hendrick Motorsports’ openings because that team already has a deal with Quaker State.
Stewart-Haas uses Hendrick engines, but isn’t restricted to using Quaker State.
Announcing any sponsorship deal will be a huge burden off of Stewart’s back. His role as an owner has been filled with courting companies, and Stewart has likely found it to be a difficult task in this economic climate.
2. Clint Bowyer believes he got another raw deal from NASCAR
Bowyer seemed poised to grab his second victory of the Chase until a caution for debris with 17 laps remaining erased his lead.
He was furious with the call by NASCAR, even calling it a “mystery caution,” after he had to settle for a second-place finish.
“That piece of debris was out there the whole run,” Bowyer said. “It’s a shame [NASCAR threw the caution], but I guess it made a better race out of it.”
Bowyer, who lost the lead on the restart and wound up finishing second, is feeling picked on by NASCAR, which docked him 150 points after his race-winning car at New Hampshire failed inspection. That penalty ended his championship push, and Bowyer is now racing to save face and prove New Hampshire wasn’t a fluke.
A win at California, while crew chief Shane Wilson and car chief Chad Haney serve their four-race suspensions, would have gone a long way toward giving the team a boost.
“I’m happy to get things turned around after the last two weeks we had,” he said. “I’m frustrated. I want to redeem myself. We’re a race-winning team, and we need to go out and prove that that last one wasn’t a hoax.”
Bowyer also wants to pull himself out of 12th in the standings, win races and help his Richard Childress Racing teammates compete for the title.
“All we can do with the 33 car is just go out, have fun, try to be competitive, do our best every week,” interim crew chief Scott Miller said. “We can take a few more chances, maybe run some developmental parts and some different things like that. I know the engine shop has some engines coming that we might get to try some different things. We’re really out of the running for the championship. You hate to say that, but you’ve got to be realistic about it.
“So all we can do is go have fun and learn something for next year and try to win us another race.”
3. Greg Biffle’s title hopes ended in California
He was the first of the Chase drivers to fall out of Sunday’s race, the victim of a blown engine a mere 40 laps into the event.
A week after his win at Kansas revived his title hopes, the engine issue at California sealed his fate. Biffle dropped two spots in the standings to 10th place, and he’s 215 points behind leader Johnson.
“The guys have been working really hard on the durability, and something broke in the bottom end of the engine,” Biffle said. “It came out the bottom, but there was no indication. I don’t really know what happened. We had good oil pressure, the temperature seemed to be good. It was just unexpected.
“It’s unfortunate for us. This was our opportunity to get back in the Chase and it doesn’t look like it’s going to happen.”
Biffle seemed resigned to his fate, confident his Roush Fenway Racing team worked hard to give him good cars.
“It’s disappointing, but what can you do? It broke,” he said. “Everybody is giving this program 110 percent, so you can’t blame anybody. We were trying hard to win the title, and it isn’t going to happen this year.”
4. Teammates Carl Edwards and Matt Kenseth didn’t fare any better, either
Not long after Biffle went out, Edwards had his own issue.
He spent 14 laps in the pits while his team tried to fix a distributor in the ignition box, and it led to a 34th-place finish. Edwards dropped three spots in the standings to seventh, and he’s 162 points behind Johnson.
“I could tell it was going away, and then finally it just quit,” Edwards said. “It didn’t blow up the engine, it ran well, we just had a part failure in there, and that’s the way racing goes.”
Same for Kenseth, who actually had a good car for most of Sunday’s race. But he, too, suffered a late engine problem and finished 30th. Kenseth has been unable to make up any ground in the Chase, and remains in 11th in the standings. He’s 241 points out.
“That probably took all three of us out for a legitimate shot in one race, so that’s really disappointing,” Kenseth said. “I’ve already made my mistakes and had us in a hole anyway, so we certainly couldn’t afford any bad finishes. You know that you’re not gonna be able to win [the championship] from where we’re at, barring a miracle, so we’ll just keep trying to build on it this year.”
Kenseth indicated the focus will be on racing for wins the rest of the season, but Edwards seemed reluctant to concede.
“You’ve got to run well enough to absorb these kind of days,” Edwards said. “We’ve run really well. We’ve got six races left and we’re 162 points back, so over six races that’s not a lot of points per race. I think we can do it. We just have to keep digging.”
5. Kurt Busch had yet another bad Chase finish
The 2004 champion was running in the top 10 with seven laps remaining when his race blew up. David Ragan turned Busch into the wall, and the damage to his Dodge dropped him to a 21st-place finish.
“That shows just how fast things can change out there,” he said. “With 20 to go, it looked like we were going to come out of here with a solid top-10 finish, but it was not to be.”
Busch is sixth in the standings, but 140 points behind Johnson.
Before heading out to California, Busch liked his chances in the Chase. But he figured he’d have to average a seventh-place finish or better in each of the remaining races. That notion was shot at California.
Busch also felt like his team was only running at “a B-minus now.”
He’s hopeful for a strong run at Charlotte, where he won the All-Star race and the Coca-Cola 600 in May. He’s out to become the first driver to sweep all three Cup races in the same season at Charlotte, and that might be what it takes to get him back into title contention.
“I would have assumed that Jimmie Johnson had two or three sweeps at the Charlotte track over the years,” he said. “To have my shot at it here in 2010, we’re definitely going to give it all we got. The best part about it is if we do that, that only helps us for our chances for the championship this season.”
• NASCAR News Archive Index:
2010, 2009
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