Around Iredell Sports

2007 Oct-02

Strange race in Kansas

Greg Biffle (16) crosses the finish line under caution to win the NASCAR Nextel Cup Lifelock 400 auto race at Kansas Speedway on Sunday in Kansas City, Kan. Also crossing are Matt Kenseth (17) and Casey Mears (25). AP photo.

By Mike Mulhern
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KANSAS CITY, Kan. - The Wizard of Oz was set in Kansas for a reason, as Sunday’s weather-wracked LifeLock 400 might explain.

Kansas Speedway, a relatively benign stop for NASCAR its first six years on the Cup tour, may have just come of age, with a six-hour marathon of plot twists and turns that finally ended well after sundown with Greg Biffle and new crew chief Greg Erwin celebrating their first win of the season and their first together at Jack Roush’s.

But after fighting through all the action on the track, narrowly escaping one near-disaster after another, Biffle had to keep fighting in victory when Jimmie Johnson and Clint Bowyer contested NASCAR’s unusual calls in the final moments.

The 1 1/2-mile Kansas Speedway track was certainly no yellow brick road for the championship contenders, who again had another rough afternoon, Tony Stewart in particular.

If you thought that the finish here was confusing, you’re right. Everyone here certainly was asking questions, even the winner, and particularly runner-up Bowyer and third-place Johnson, and maybe even NASCAR officials, who did their best to give this sellout crowd of some 112,000 something to talk about.

It was easily the most bizarre race of the season.

Biffle himself was surprised at the vigorous complaints from Johnson, Gordon and Bowyer, who all finished right behind him.

“I was shocked, completely shocked. But their opinion really doesn’t count, as far as I know,” Biffle said. “I think it’s NASCAR’s.

“One thing is, there’s so much debris on the backstretch people don’t realize. It was going to take them probably 15 minutes to clean up. They had rubber-tire carcass and debris all the way down the entire straightaway (from Juan Pablo Montoya’s blown tires, which triggered the race-ending caution).

“And one other thing they don’t know is NASCAR came to my car out in the grass and said, ‘Will it run?’ And I said, ‘Yes.’ And they said ‘Don’t touch it. We want six guys to push it back.’

“They’re probably thinking ‘Oh, it ran out of gas. It won’t run.’ I coasted across the line, everybody went by me, I turned off in the grass, and then we pushed it to Victory Lane.

“That’s not the case. There’s more to it than that. They told me not to start it: ‘Get away from the car, six guys, don’t touch the quarterpanels.’

“The car runs right now. They need to understand the car still runs. I was unbuckling and coasting to save my gas because I knew the race was over, the field was frozen, the caution’s out. And I didn’t know they were going to go by me.”

Nevertheless Gordon, a four-time Cup champion looking a fifth title this season, said that Bowyer should have been declared the winner, instead of Biffle.

“Clint Bowyer is the winner of this race, in my opinion,” Gordon said. “No offense to Greg Biffle — he drove the car to the win. But you have to cross the start-finish line at pace-car speed at least.

“You have to maintain speed (under the caution). We know that. He slowed down. We don’t know (if) he was out of gas. They don’t freeze the field; you have to maintain a reasonable pace. And that is in NASCAR’s judgment if that was a reasonable pace.

“Everybody was slowing down trying to figure out what he (Biffle) was doing. We were almost at a stop to run his pace, and the pace car was driving away. So we all just started going by him.

“Clint Bowyer won the race. He is the one who maintained the pace. But if I were Clint, I wouldn’t put up too much fight. I would let NASCAR make the decision. I definitely would argue it and give them my point, and see where they went with it from there.

“But, let me tell you what: He (Biffle) didn’t win the race.”

Johnson, the tour leader heading to Talladega, agreed: “The biggest question mark is what goes on with Greg Biffle. He clearly ran out of gas….

“And it was clear to everyone that he couldn’t do it. If he could have, he would have stayed on the bumper of the pace car to the finish line.”

Bowyer seemed dazed and confused: “I don’t know where we finished. I thought you had to finish under your own power across the finish line. We maintained the pace-car speed. I don’t know what the deal is.”

NASCAR officials curtly dismissed all those complaints, saying that it was a judgment call.

NASCAR officials said that Biffle was the winner because he was the leader on the track when the final caution came out and that yellow “froze” the field and “there can be no passing under the caution,” in the words of spokesman Ramsey Poston.

Poston said that whether a driver is “maintaining adequate speed” is a judgment call to be made by NASCAR officials in the control tower. And Poston said that in NASCAR’s view, Biffle was maintaining adequate speed.

It was a perfectly chaotic ending to a perfectly chaotic day.

The lack of lights here forced NASCAR officials to make some quick decisions in the final hour of the six-hour race, and during the final miles drivers were racing with their helmet visors wide open, just to see, and spotters were unable to pick out their own cars.

When Montoya blew two tires and brought out the 12th and race-ending caution on lap 208 of the scheduled 267-lap race, NASCAR quickly decided to call it a night.

But officials added to the chaos by then letting drivers run around under yellow to lap 210. NASCAR could have made the ending much neater and cleaner if officials had not kept the field running. NASCAR offered no immediate explanation why.

Then, when Biffle pulled low to the apron and then on to the infield grass, well short of the finish line, before taking the checkered flag, Bowyer and Johnson scooted by and crossed the line first and second. Then they staked their claims.

When monsoon rains hit the track just after the halfway mark, Stewart was sitting pretty. A fuel-mileage gamble had him in the lead at the red flag.

But more than two hours later, when the rains stopped and the track dried and NASCAR got the field moving again, the Stewart case became moot. And to add insult to injury, he got caught up in two incidents that sent him home with a dismal 39th place finish and 117 points behind tour leader Johnson.

After the rain, NASCAR managed to get in another hour of action before darkness descended.

Gordon was more worried about the championship-points battle than anything else. He would have left town more than 100 points down to the leader if NASCAR hadn’t restarted the race at 6:10 p.m., local time, after more than two hours under the red flag.

He was relieved that NASCAR did get things going again.

“I think NASCAR recognized what is going on in the Chase and what a disaster that was going to be,” Gordon said. “As long as there is daylight, they are going to race. I am sure some guys disagree with that, but from where I was sitting there was only one call and that was to go back racing.”

But what happened in the final hour was some ruthless madness at the wheel. Johnson said that the restarts were wild because “things were jumbled up for a while. The craziness on track came when we went back to green and you had a lot of guys on the tail end of the lead lap (ahead of the leaders). And we had such a small window of time that everybody just started driving really aggressively.”

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