Motor Sports Weekly News

By: Drew Hierwarter

Sunday’s NASCAR Sprint Cup race from Infineon Raceway in Sonomoa, California just may have been the best one ever on the wine country road course. Many people were predicting that NASCAR’s new double file restart rule would cause general mayhem when the field reached the tight, up hill turn two. But most of the problems came on other parts of the course and for reasons that had nothing to do with the restarts.

Late in the race Jimmie Johnson punted Kurt Busch into the fence in the lower part of the esses when both of them tried to occupy the same place at the same time. Road race specialist Boris Said hit just about everything but the lottery. Mark Martin, Kyle Busch, David Ragan, Carl Edwards, Jeff Burton, Bobby Labonte, Scott Speed, Sam Hornish, and Dale Earnhardt Jr, all suffered from incidents that not only damaged their race cars but relegated each of them to sub-par finishes.

What the double file restarts did do was keep the racing exciting and the fans on their feet. Especially during the last 20 laps when no fewer than four of those were needed, including a green-white-checkered restart that took the race into extra laps. And on each of those restarts, eventual winner Kasey Kahne had to fend off a charge from Tony Stewart who in turn was defending himself from road race experts, Juan Pablo Montoya and Marcos Ambrose. Ambrose fought his way to a third place finish after starting last due to a Saturday engine change.

Kahne and Stewart, both of whom have a back ground on dirt tracks racing midgets and sprint cars, held them all off, and for Khane, it was his first ever win on a road course. Other road race “ringers”, as they are called, (Specialists who are brought in for the two road races only) didn’t fare very well once again. Patrick Carpentier, driving Michael Waltrip’s NAPA Toyota, was the best of the bunch with an eleventh place finish. He was followed by Max Papis in 12^th, Boris Said in 24^th, Ron Fellows in 27^th, and P.J. Jones 43^rd and last. NASCAR team owners continue to use these guys even though no road race regular has won a NASCAR race since Mark Donahue won at Riverside in 1973.

The strangest turn of the race came in victory lane with the presence of “The King”, Richard Petty. For his entire career Petty has been an outspoken tee-totaller. Even to the point of turning down several lucrative sponsorship offers down through the years from alcoholic beverage companies. He also refused to display NASCAR’s “Bud Pole Award” decal on any of his race cars and because of that was never eligible to participate in Daytona’s annual “Bud Shootout” for pole winning cars. And that was okay with him. He felt that strongly about alcoholic beverages.

But, as the titular figure head of the newly formed team that has risen from the ashes of Gillett-Evernham and Petty Enterprises there he was, raising a glass of wine, pretending to toast his driver who just won in a car that is resplendent in “Budweiser” logos. Apparently the current economic situation in big league auto racing has necessarily made long standing principles unsustainable.