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Prep Roundup
Columnists Brian Meadows Brad NormanMembersLocal Connection› Iredell County Young Athletes Association› South Iredell Athletics Association › SHS athletics › WIHS athletics › NIHS athletics › SIHS athletics › LNHS athletics Syndicate RSSAP NASCAR NASCAR Features A look at this year's schedule A look at this year's drivers Differences between stock car and open-wheel racing NASCAR Research & Development Petty Enterprises splitter testing Aerodynamic testing in Concord's wind tunnel Top 10 moments in Daytona history Site StatisticsThis page has been viewed 800736 timesPage rendered in 0.2010 seconds Total Stories: 2136 Total Comments: 34 Most Recent Entry: 08/15/2008 01:53 pm Most Recent Comment on: 04/17/2008 11:54 pm Most Recent Visitor on: 05/22/2012 09:26 am |
• Racing
2007 Sep-17
500th race for Gordonby Mike Mulhern Gordon, a four-time tour champ gunning for five, may have been a distant six seconds behind runaway winner Clint Bowyer, out of the Richard Childress camp, but Gordon is still the tour’s most consistently powerful driver. “Starting 18th got us behind, but the effort today was great, and I couldn’t be happier,” Gordon said. “We weren’t quite good enough for Bowyer, but I just wasn’t very good on short runs early so we made adjustments, but those adjustments then hurt us on long runs. “But how can you complain about second? This is a great way to get the chase started. “And I think everybody is happy for Clint. This just shows that anyone can win this championship.” Yesterday was all Bowyer: “We’ve got a legitimate shot at this. It opens your eyes. It opens a lot of people’s eyes. “It was frustrating, being the only guys in the chase without a win. But nobody can say that any more.” “This shows we’re solidly in this thing,” crew chief Gil Martin said. “He drove like a veteran. “We just can’t put any pressure on ourselves. This is the way we have to go into every week now.” Part of the line on Bowyer his first year and a half on the tour has been, not surprisingly, for any new driver, difficulty in developing a good game plan for an entire three-hour or four-hour race, difficulty in understanding the strategic ebb-and-flow of a NASCAR Sunday. This time, though, Bowyer didn’t have to worry about any of that. He just blew everybody away, right from the start. “We’ve never had a dominant car like this before, and that’s why I was amped up at the end of the race - I didn’t want to make a mistake,” Bowyer said. However his Childress teammates, Kevin Harvick and Jeff Burton, both struggled. “We just couldn’t come back from two flat tires,” Harvick said. Burton left away without comment. Bowyer may have made it look easy, but NASCAR’s second-season, the playoffs, opened with a mind-numbing 21/2-hour run that cast more doubt on the car-of-tomorrow, which continues to have some significant handling issues, making passing difficult. Crew chiefs yesterday morning, even before the start, cranked up their complaints about the new model, after nearly two months of virtual silence on the topic after NASCAR officials told them en masse essentially to keep their criticism to themselves: “Don’t air our dirty laundry,” is how one top crew chief put it. Yet when crew chiefs were asked to go on the record with their complaints they generally shied away from it yesterday. Gordon in particular is worrying about handling problems at next weekend’s tour stop in Dover. Engineers want more clearance under the funny splitter nose, in order to make the new cars turn better. Some crew chiefs now say NASCAR needs to go even further and come up with an entirely different nose piece. Kyle Busch, despite running fourth, with a good shot at something even better, was again vocal about the car-of-tomorrow: “They’re always evil. “We’re still trying to make it better. I guess it just doesn’t fit my driving style. But I’m trying to get accustomed to it ... and we’re trying to get it accustomed to me.” Meanwhile tour leader Jimmie Johnson was simply relieved: “Last year we left here 39th, and this year we’re leaving with a sixth, so we’re pleased. “Clint is a lot of fun to be around, so we’re really happy for him. He has been aggressive when he needs to, and smart when he needs to. I watched him win in a Busch car at Phoenix. And here it came all together for him. “Look at how long that last run was (108 laps around the flat one-mile, after the final yellow). When you’ve got a tenth of a second on the field, that adds up.” Johnson’s crew chief Chad Knaus wasn’t complaining about the car, but he wasn’t pleased with his own performance: “We set goals to finish in the top-five, and we’re a little disappointed with sixth. But the guys did a good job, Jimmie did a good job ... I just didn’t do a very good job of adjusting the car. “Still, it feels good to come out of here a lot better than we have the past couple of years in the chase.” Matt Kenseth is looking like a magician. For a guy whose cars haven’t been that fast this season, he keeps pulling off decent, if not all that impressive runs, and yesterday’s seventh was yet another workman’s finish. “I wish we would have finished a little better, but we ran a lot better so I’m pretty happy,” Kenseth said. “But we need to run better than that obviously, to contend for a championship. “Our speed was pretty good, it’s just these cars (the car-of-tomorrow), compared to the old conventional cars, are just so much harder to pass. You can run a tenth or two better than the guy in front of you, but you can’t really go anywhere. And once you get to him, it’s just so hard to pass.” Carl Edwards, the other Jack Roush Ford man in the title picture, finished 12th. “With a backup car that’s pretty good,” Edwards said. “Overall, it’s not the kind of weekend we wanted. We need to run better. But it’s nobody’s fault but my own for wrecking the primary. “If this is as bad as it gets, we’re going to be great. It’s about making the most of a day when it’s not the greatest.” Bookmarkz |
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