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Road Rage, Road Course Style

An Opinion


June 29, 2011

By Chuck Abrams

Chuck Abrams



























If you are a fan of road racing, this was your weekend. The Nationwide Series and Grand-Am cars were at Road America, F1 was in Valencia, Spain and the Sprint Cup cars were at Sonoma/Infineon/Sears Point.

The Grand-Am race was exciting and had a spectacular wreck with a driver losing his brakes and going through the tire barrier, over the catch fence, down the hill -- and into the trees. Fortunately, the driver was OK.

The Nationwide race went to three Green-White-Checker finishes and had an unlikely winner in Reed Sorenson. The race featured Michael McDowell and Jacques Villeneuve leading a lot of laps with the latter doing his best Montoya impression while on the track.

Many drivers took a chance and stayed on the course for the entire series of restarts. That is a lot of gas that you need to save on a four-mile course when you are getting about four miles per gallon. During the final sprint to the finish, Justin Allgaier had the lead and looked to be the winner when the caution flew -- again. Behind him ran Reed Sorenson and Ron Fellows.

One of the most important rules in NASCAR is that under caution, you must maintain pace with the pace car. Meaning that if you run off the course or run out of gas, too bad. And that is just what happened to Allgaier, handing the lead over to… Ron Fellows??

When the caution flag flew, Sorenson slowed down immediately. For some reason, Fellows, who had trouble on restarts throughout the race, did not slow down and passed Sorenson. NASCAR took plenty of time reviewing the tape before declaring Sorenson the winner.

On Sunday, the Cup boys took to the Sonoma hills that had a lot of interesting twists. Joey Logano sat on the pole for starters. As usual, there were lots of drivers leaning on each other and that caused a few mishaps, most notably Dale Earnhardt, Jr., who hates Sonoma, ending up with a DNF and dropping from third to seventh in the points.

Jeff Gordon had a poor start to the race and was junk for most of it. For some reason, his car came to life in the closing laps and he drove through the field to finish second. Had the race gone a few more laps, Gordon may have run Kurt Busch down.

Kurt Busch had a stout car all weekend and made the most of it with his first win of the season.

Juan Pablo Montoya and Marcos Ambrose were expected to be challengers for the win but never really made a push for the victory.

Montoya was running in the top-five before he totally lost his head and started driving through drivers instead of around them. After spinning out the very good racecar of Kasey Kahne, Montoya bruised his way up to Brad Keselowski and just about wore his bumper off. Evidently, Juan has never watched Brad race for as soon as Montoya tried to bully his way past the Blue Deuce, Brad returned the favor and raced Montoya as he was racing everyone else.

Montoya finished 17th due to his driving style even though he maintains that many of the drivers out there did not know how to road race.

The best shot of the day goes to the Brian Vickers/Tony Stewart battle.

Earlier in the race, Stewart dumped Vickers, claiming Vickers was blocking him in one of the few passing zones. Later on in the closing laps, Smoke passed Vickers and Brian returned the favor sending his car spinning and putting the No. 14 into the tire barrier with the rear end sitting on top of a stack of tires.

With racing at Sonoma starting to resemble a Martinsville race, what is not to love about road racing any more?

Let me know your thoughts.

Drive fast, turn left and keep the shiny side up.








Feel free to send Chuck your thoughts on this and other race topics at Insider Racing News.
You Can Read Other Articles By Chuck Abrams

The thoughts and ideas expressed by this writer or any other writer on Insider Racing News, are not necessarily the views of the staff and/or management of IRN.

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