Around Iredell Sports

2007 Sep-25

Edwards ends ahead

NASCAR driver Carl Edwards celebrates in victory lane after winning the NASCAR Dodge Dealers 400 auto race at Dover International Speedway in Dover, Del., on Sunday. AP photo.

By Mike Mulhern
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DOVER, Del. - Jack Roush finally got his men - Matt Kenseth and Carl Edwards - back in the championship game Sunday, and it was the perfect day for that, an afternoon when title challengers Denny Hamlin, Kevin Harvick, Jimmie Johnson, Kurt Busch, Martin Truex Jr., Tony Stewart and Jeff Gordon all had some major trouble.

Edwards survived the slugfest and carnage, endured half a dozen yellows in the final miles, and outsprinted Greg Biffle, Dale Earnhardt Jr., and former teammate Mark Martin to win the Dodge Dealers 400 at Dover International Speedway. It was Edwards’ third win of the year.

However NASCAR officials announced Sunday night that Edwards’ car “failed post-race height inspection. Too low in the right rear. Exceeding NASCAR’s tolerances, which are half-an-inch,” according to spokesman Ramsey Poston.

Dale Earnhardt Jr. was fined 100 points for a car-of-tomorrow violation at Darlington in May and his crew chief was suspended. But Poston said “This is not considered a car-of-tomorrow-type penalty. This is a height violation, not one where we believe the structure of the body has been manipulated.

“We are going to take the car back to the (Mooresville, N.C.) R&D center and announce any penalties sometime this week.”

Poston said the races results were still “unofficial.” But it is highly unlikely that NASCAR would take away the win.

“I wouldn’t speculate on what the penalties might be, but you have a pretty good idea of what we have done in the past,” Poston said.

NASCAR’s Cup tour director John Darby pointed to Johnny Sauter’s car violation at Loudon three months ago as the most recent similar incident. Sauter’s car was too low and he was penalized 25 points and his crew chief was fined $25,000 and put on probation for 10 weeks.

But NASCAR has taken a harder line on most car-of-tomorrow violations. For example, Jeff Gordon and Jimmie Johnson were each penalized 100 points and their crew chiefs were each fined $100,000 and suspended for six races for body violations discovered pre-race at Sonoma in June.

Kenseth and Edwards dominated the 41/2-hour race in front of a crowd of 137,000. But in a heartbreaker, Kenseth, who led half the race, more laps than anyone else, had rare engine trouble in the final miles, blowing up with 26 miles left. He finished 35th.

Car owner Roush: “I really have a problem with us breaking that engine. Unless everyone else has a problem, that’s going to be something that’s hard to overcome.”

However anyone looking to handicap this year’s title race may need some aspirin, because for the second straight week there was a surprise.

In fact there were many surprises…. and all bad, except for Edwards. “This place has great potential for disaster ... and for a while it looked like Russian Roulette out there,” Edwards said.

“A lot of guys had bad luck, so this was a good points day. But I had a problem with my throttle sticking ... and this is a bad place to have a throttle stick. When you lift off the throttle and the thing keeps going, that’s a little bit unnerving. We worked on that to where I could drive it.

“We’re in great shape in the chase. A lot of guys had bad luck, but I’m sure we’ll have our share of it, too.”

Edwards is running away with the Busch series championship and trying to become the first man to win both Busch and Cup championships in the same season.

For most of the race, most of the other title contenders were nowhere to be found. But somehow many of them wound up survivors. Johnson pulled out a 14th, Truex a 13th, Clint Bowyer a 12th, Gordon an 11th, Stewart a ninth, Jeff Burton a seventh, and Kyle Busch a fifth.

And Gordon, in yet another twist, goes to Kansas Speedway this week as the new tour leader, despite never being a factor.

“It was certainly eventful,” Gordon said. “It wasn’t pretty, but we survived. And that’s what this race is all about. We certainly didn’t have the car. And it was a crazy Dover day ... and somehow we came out of it with the points lead.”

But Gordon doesn’t have much breathing room. He’s only got a two-point lead against Stewart, three points more than Edwards, four points more than Johnson, 10 points more than Kyle Busch, and 18 points more than Bowyer.

In more trouble are Truex, 46 points behind; Burton, 75 points down; Harvick, 115 down; and Kenseth, 116 down. And in serious title trouble are Kurt Busch 151 down and Hamlin 158 down.

Drivers complained again, louder yet, about the ill-handling characteristics of the car-of-tomorrow. “I don’t see how we’re going to get it done with this car,” Gordon said. “And we haven’t even got to the 11/2-mile tracks.”

“The cars don’t have any downforce on the front,” Earnhardt said. “The car-of-tomorrow and the concrete surface made it difficult to race today.”

Privately drivers used much more descriptive adjectives about the car-of-tomorrow.

“I’m certainly happy with the car-of-tomorrow today,” Roush, an early critic, said with a laugh. “Early on we certainly didn’t have the information we needed to use it. And NASCAR didn’t close the barn door on testing it. And it was clear I was asleep at the switch.

“But now the aero-signatures of all the cars are very similar. So if we can figure out what we need, we will have no problem replicating the cars.

“Whether we’ll have the kind of shows to celebrate, I don’t know. But the drivers are safer in these cars now.”

Edwards and Kenseth were so strong that with 50 miles to go they had put most of their rivals at least a lap down.

“Some things you just can’t do much about,” Kenseth said with a shrug after finishing 35th. “We had more power than we’ve had lately. And this is the first one we’ve blown in two years, so I can’t complain. And we finally had a car that handled well.”

“Looks like we dropped a valve,” Robbie Reiser, Kenseth’s crew chief, said. “But we had a great car here; the guys have come a long way with the car-of-tomorrow.”

Kenseth hadn’t lost an engine since February 2005.

With 17 miles to go, after Kenseth’s engine soured, it was Ford’s Edwards vs. Chevy’s Martin, now with Dale Earnhardt Inc.

Moments later the biggest crash of the day turned the track into a mess when Kurt Busch slammed the outside wall. Johnson, Truex, Scott Riggs, Kasey Kahne, Ryan Newman, Jeff Green, Bobby Labonte, J. J. Yeley and Reed Sorenson were all involved in the accident, which completely blocked the track and led NASCAR to red-flag the race for cleanup.

“Something broke on the car, whether it was a tire that went down or what I don’t know,” Busch said. “Now a lot of hard work needs to be done.”

Goodyear engineers checked Busch’s tire and reported it was not cut.

The race was slowed by 13 cautions for 66 laps and two red flags. Still there were six men still on the lead lap at the end.

One yellow came out with 37 miles to go when John Andretti slipped up into Tony Raines. To extract Andretti from his car, safety workers cut the roof open; Andretti was treated and released from the infield medical center. NASCAR then put out the red flag for five minutes with 30 laps to go to allow for cleanup.

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