Posts Tagged ‘Motorsports’

Kurt winds back to back spring races at Atlanta winning  the Kobalt Tools 500 with a dominate car all day.

The victory was great for Busch and new crew, chief Steve Addington, who used to be crew chief for Kurts younger brother Kyle Busch last season. It was a bitter sweet victory, all people are going to be talking about and remember is the late race incident between known rivals,  Carl Edwards and Brad Keselowski.

Only two laps remaining Edwards clearly turned Keselowski on purpose, sending him upside down in the frontstretch. Keselowski’s car spun around backwards sending his car airborne into the fronstretch wall upside down. A wreck that should never had happened, this isn’t short track racing were the speeds aren’t so high. Edwards was black flag parked for the rest of the race and had to go to the NASCAR trailer immediately after climbing out of his car.

Fortunately Keselowski was not injured in the incident, but clearly and understandably upset. Edwards told reporters he intentional spun Keselowski but didn’t intend for it to go that bad.

Earlier in the race Edwards and Keselowski got together entering turn one were Edwards said Keselowski never gives him room. After Edwards watched the replay, he made it sound that Keselowski getting into him wasn’t as blatant as he initially thought it was.

With the late race incident, it sent the race into overtime. Taking two green white checkered restarts to finish the race.

Kurt Busch got a great restart on the first green white checkered attempt, but was slowed by another caution on the first lap with a multi car accidents going into turn three. Jamie McMurry went into turn three hard getting loose and creating a Hugh pile up.

On the second restart, Busch got a great jump. This time, the they were able to  completed two laps safely, this is the first win for Busch and his Penske team.

“I’m just so happy to bring this car home to victory lane,” Busch said. “Even with all the restarts at the end, I felt like we had the car to beat.”

Busch led 129 of the race’s 341 laps. Only Kahne at 144 led more

Kevin Harvick, who finished ninth, kept the point lead. Kenseth is second, Greg Biffle third, Jimmie Johnson fourth and Clint Bowyer fifth.

Some of the top teams had some serious tire issues. A lot of blown out tires and punctures during the race.

Caution No. 8 came out when Denny Hamlin’s left-front tire blew, forcing the field to slow at lap 288. A couple of laps after the restart, the caution came out again,  the cars of Elliott Sadler and Max Papis made contact.

Johnson pitted during that caution so that his team could repair damage Johnson’s car received when he and Ryan Newman bumped.

On lap 158 the right front tire blew on Joey  car , causing significant damage to the front of the Logano’s Toyota and bringing out the day’s sixth caution.

Lap 114 Mark Martin slid along the frontstretch when his car lost its left rear tire. Martin kept the car off the wall, but his Chevrolet later was damaged severely in the caution that resulted from the first green white checkered attempt.

Martin did not finish and ended up 33rd.

The Edwards Keselowski first incident caused the first multi-car caution flag of the day on lap 40.

A blown tire sent David Ragan into the third-turn wall on lap 35, causing the second caution of the race. The event had barely started when a tire problem sent Robby Gordon into the first-turn wall.

RESULTS: KOBALT TOOL 500

Speed tv contributed to this report

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After skipping NASCAR’s short West Coast swing, Wood Brothers Racing and driver Bill Elliott will return to the Sprint Cup fray this weekend at Atlanta Motor Speedway.

Elliott, of course, is a hero in his native Georgia, where he earned the nickname “Awesome Bill from Dawsonville” for some of his exploits in the 1980s, which including winning a Sprint Cup championship and the old “Winston Million.”

Just as they did last year, the Wood Brothers are only running a partial Sprint Cup schedule. But in each of the races they run, Elliott’s iconic No. 21 Ford Fusion will powered by the new FR9 Ford engine.

The FR9′s main claim to fame is not additional horsepower — these days, NASCAR keeps teams in such a tight mechanical box that no manufacturer can get a meaningful horsepower advantage. But what it does have is a lower center of gravity and an improved cooling system, both of which should contribute to better handling on the track.

All the other Fords at Atlanta — four cars each from Roush Fenway Racing and Richard Petty Motorsports, plus three more from Front Row Motorsports with Yates Racing and one from Latitude 43 Motorsports — will be powered by the old Ford engine, code-named “452.”

Sunday’s race will mark only the second event for the FR9 at a non-restrictor plate track. David Ragan ran it successfully in 2009′s season-ending race at Homestead-Miami Speedway.

By the second half of 2010, the plan is for all the Ford teams to use the new engine. But for now, it’s just the Wood Brothers, who will use it in every race this season. And that arrangement seems to please everyone involved.

“With us running a limited schedule, in the unlikely event something goes wrong, it doesn’t kill us in the points because we’re not really worried about points,” said Len Wood, co-owner of the Wood Brothers team.

For Ford, having the Wood Brothers willing to run the new engine gives the automaker critically needed real-world testing. “They can run them on the endurance dyno all they want, but until you put that thing on the race track under the real deal with tear offs flying around and getting on your grille and heating it up more than you want, or with pit stops where it gets over-revved here or there, it’s never the real deal until you’re really out there,” said Wood.

It also gives Ford the luxury of a gradual engine roll-out schedule — and the other teams the ability to spread out the cost involved.

“There are a couple of reasons for the slow rollout. The first reason is you’ve got to get your race package complete,” said David Simon, a Ford engineer who worked closely with Doug Yates to develop the new engine. “You can’t go out there with an engine that isn’t fully developed, not at this level.”

Speed Tv Contributed to this report

I know the old saying is nice guys finish last, but it looks like Jammie McMurry is trying to change that.

Jammie McMurry lands McDonald’s for a sponsor to help fill the sponsorship void, the possibility of racing nearly half the season without sponsorship was no laughing matter to McMurray and his Earnhardt Ganassi Racing team.

With McDonald’s coming on board for about a third of the Sprint Cup season, there are only a handful of races left for Earnhardt Ganassi to fill. The possibility of racing nearly half the season without sponsorship was no laughing matter to McMurray and his Earnhardt Ganassi Racing team.

“I was worried,” McMurray said Friday at Las Vegas Motor Speedway. “We didn’t have a full-time sponsor, a full year sold. But after winning the 500, team manager Tony Glover leaned over and looked at me in victory lane and he said he thought we were pretty safe and we could run the whole season.

“I felt pretty good at that point. It takes a lot of money to run a race team. I was definitely concerned with what was going to happen, although I will say they felt comfortable if the McDonald’s sponsorship wasn’t here, they had enough one-race or two-race things to run the entire season.”

Bass Pro Shops was only sponsoring the team for half the season, the team needed sponsorship to fill out the rest of the year. Winning the daytona 500 sure didn’t hurt in attracting McDonald’s.

“These sponsorship deals don’t just come off of a race,” McMurray said. “It takes a long time to not only sell the sponsor, but for the sponsor to go back and sell it to the board.

“It’s not something that winning the Daytona 500 did all of a sudden to bring the next sponsorship to our team. They’ve been working very hard on that to get sponsorship sold, although it certainly doesn’t hurt to win.”

Earnhardt Ganassi was in negotiations with McDonald’s well before the Daytona 500.

“We’ve been working with them for a long time,” EGR President Steve Lauletta said. “Obviously it was great to send them a note from victory
lane in Daytona saying, ‘How great is this?’

“It doesn’t hurt to win a race like that to push things along, but we were pretty well down the road before that.”

“It’s just a huge next step in terms of validation of what we’re doing on the track and off the track to have a brand like McDonald’s come on board to join Target and Bass Pro,” Lauletta said. “It says to everybody in our shop and hopefully people watching the sport that we’re a team on the move.”

Speed TV contributed to this report

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Everyone could see the pothole between turns 1 and 2 at Daytona International Speedway during the Daytona 500. What wasn’t so clear was whether or not the damage to the track was preventable.
There were two red flag periods during the Daytona 500 totaling over two and one half hours. (Photo: Getty Images For NASCAR) » More Photos

NASCAR and DIS workers eventually patched the hole, which grew to about 18-inches by 30-inches, after two race stoppages that lasted more than two hours, 25 minutes.

The track was last repaved in 1978, but DIS President Robin Braig said the age of the asphalt wasn’t the problem.

“It’s not unusually long [to not repave] at all because we’re in Florida,” Braig said. “We have the best temperature here. We keep such great care of our track. We walk it. We walked it [Sunday] morning. We walk it before every event.

“We know every inch. We saw no indications. We had two races [Saturday] on that track and we walked it again. This is something we couldn’t see.”

NASCAR spokesman Ramsey Poston said that the sanctioning body did not have any indication that the heavy rains nor the cool temperatures had compromised the track during any of the other Speedweek races.

“There was no indication in any of the racing prior to the Daytona 500 that there were any issues with the track,” Poston said. “It was very unfortunate. There were no warning signs for this.”

NASCAR’s sanctioning agreement states that it can require a track to make any fixes necessary.

“Obviously their engineers are here, they’re going to make an assessment and we’ll be there with them and try to gain as much knowledge about the track as we can to see if it is a spot problem or a larger problem,” Poston said.

In all likelihood, the track will not be repaved before the NASCAR events on Independence Day weekend. Sister track Talladega
Superspeedway required five months to be repaved, and Daytona still has motorcycle racing scheduled through the first week of March before it could even start the process. There also needs to be ample time for tire testing because repaving would likely require a different tire specification from Goodyear.

Drivers are split on whether or not to repave the track, which would create higher speeds and also put handling at less of a premium.

“If you ask driver opinion, there’s clearly no consensus on repaving,” Poston said. “In fact, there’s probably closer to a consensus not to repave. But NASCAR’s role and the track’s role is to take in the safety and the maintenance of the track and those factors. They’re going to spend this week looking at it.

“The more laps you put down on the track, the more seasons it gets, the better the racing is. Some drivers, crew chiefs and spotters said yesterday may have been the best all-around racing we have ever had at that track. So the assessment needs to be whether there are patches in the track that need to be addressed or they need to repave the whole thing.”

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To bad there were so many cautions in this race I think it could have been a real good race. I kinda got tired of listing to DW  complain about the drivers. Seems to me he forgets what it was like  when he first got started in racing.

All in all I think Danica did a great job finishing 6th, she stayed out of trouble for the most part and didn’t cause any wrecks. I would have liked to see someone go to  the high side with her and try to make a run on the leaders. It didn’t look like she could pull up on the car in front of her to draft, but I thought maybe if someone could get up behind her they might have a chance.

Well for the most part I thought it was a good start for her, but wish the media would just let it die a little and let her drive.

Thanks for reading.

ARCA REMAX results

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