March 28, 2012
By Chuck Abrams
It never rains in southern California?
Thanks to all of you who responded to my Bristol story last week.
The crowd was pretty much split on A) Cup racing at Bristol sucks now, please bring back the old track and B) Cup racing at Bristol is better now, tell all those yahoos to quit whining about the racing equivalent of a moving train wreck.
Fiery stuff folks!
I can’t wait to hear what ya thought of a rain shortened race at California.
The race only featured a few drivers who actually led significant laps, one of those being race winner Tony Stewart. Stewart fought his way to get up front and did a decent job of staying there once he got there. And when the rain started, his team made the right call not to pit. Otherwise, that might have been Kyle Busch or Dale Jr. in Victory Lane. And gosh knows having Junior in Victory Lane in a race shortened by rain would have elicited howls of “foul!” from Junior haters.
As it was, the new Smoke is the Smoke everyone loves right now. He won it all last year and is starting the season off just fine. If he heats up later this summer like he has done in the past, he will be hard to beat -- at least for the first 26 races which we know doesn’t really mean all that much. He’ll get a nice seed and have to prove it all over again.
And in case ya didn’t notice, that is Michael Waltrip Racing with two drivers in the top 10 in points. It’ll take a heck of a bad finish at Martinsville for them to drop out this week so MWR can probably revel in the glory for another week.
And yes, Greg Biffle is still in the points lead. Anyone else wondering when the bad gremlin Biffle will show up?
Everyone who missed short track racing at Bristol will get their fill this week at Martinsville. Jeff Gordon is the second best driver there over the past 10 years and guess who is number one? That fine dodging Jimmie Johnson, that is who!
Martinsville is not historically great for Biffle so this might be the week his lead is wiped out. Biffle has no wins at the half-mile track and several of the drivers chasing him do. So he better get up the wheel and stay there if he has any chance of keeping the lead this week.
And speaking of the fine dodging Johnson, what do you think of the rescinded penalties?
For me, I have no problem with the penalties being overturned. The C-posts were the same as they had been run before, they had always passed tech and frankly, sure did not seem to be posing any kind of an advantage based on Johnson’s record as of late. Add in the fact the posts were not put under the claw at Daytona and were called out in a “visual test”, you have to wonder why they passed previous visual tests and not this one? NASCAR obviously has some ‘splainin’ to do. You can bet that won’t happen again.
Crew Chief Chad Knaus’ job is to put together winning cars and he has been doing a pretty good job of that. Does he push the envelope? Sure he does, and that is what he is paid to do. If you think the venerated Junior Johnson wasn’t doing the same thing, you’re nuts. If you really want to see NASCAR teams at their best and not have this fall into racing spec cars (called IROC), then you should be thankful for guys like Chad Knaus.
Innovation has many father’s, but failure is an orphan.
That’s my take. What’s yours?
Lemme know your thoughts.
Drive fast, turn left and keep the shiny side up.
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