Racing back to Kentucky after traffic nightmares
September 30, 2011
SPARTA, Ky. (AP)—Kentucky Speedway gets its first chance to redeem itself this weekend from the traffic nightmare that ruined its inaugural Sprint Cup Series race.
Fans spent hours in non-moving traffic before the July 9 race. Thousands never even made it into the speedway.
Track owner Speedway Motorsports Inc. and the Kentucky Transportation Cabinet pledged $11 million in improvements and some of the work has already been done. The track hosts NASCAR’s Truck Series on Saturday night and the IndyCar Series on Sunday.
The crowds won’t come close to the 107,000-plus that descended on the speedway in July, but track officials know this weekend is the first step toward proving it can overcome that debacle.
EGR hires John Probst as technical director
September 30, 2011
CONCORD, N.C. (AP)—John Probst was hired Friday as technical director to oversee all engineering for the NASCAR operation at Earnhardt Ganassi Racing with Felix Sabates.
Probst will work closely with team competition director Steve Hmiel (pronounced Meal). Probst previously spent five years with Team Red Bull as technical director of their two-car NASCAR Sprint Cup Series operation.
Probst worked for more than a decade at Ford Motor Company, predominantly in their motor sports division. He also held posts at Ford Electronics Racing and Jackie Stewart’s Formula One program.
“You owe it to your team, partners and the fans to bring in good people whenever you have the opportunity,” owner Chip Ganassi said. “So when John became available we jumped at the opportunity to bring him on board.”
Johnson believes 6th championship in reach
September 30, 2011
DOVER, Del. (AP)—Go ahead. Count out Jimmie Johnson.
After all, he’s had an atypical-Johnson season.
His wins have dried up, his spot in the Sprint Cup standings is worthy of a double-take, and a run of dominance that staked his claim as one of NASCAR’s all-time great champions has vanished.
The V stands for vulnerable more than victories this season when it comes to the No. 48.
No championship run lasts forever, and one year it will be Johnson’s time to surrender his five-year run atop the Cup standings.
Just don’t be so sure it’ll be this season.
Tony Stewart has stolen the spotlight and grabbed the points lead with wins in the first two Chase races. Brad Keselowski has gone from wild-card to championship contender. Kevin Harvick is always a threat.
Johnson is still in the mix for six straight championships and can start to make a serious move in the standings at one his favorite tracks, Dover International Speedway. He’s tamed the Monster Mile like few other drivers in the sport ever have. He has six career victories on the concrete track and won the race here last September. Johnson has a sparkling 9.6 average finish in 19 career Cup starts at Dover.
The rush to finally anoint a new champ might stall if Johnson can capture another checkered flag on Sunday.
“I don’t think we’re looking for the walk-off home run by any means right now,” Johnson said. “It’s just finishing where we should.”
Johnson hasn’t finished where he expected to place in the first two Chase races, one reason why he’s lurking in 10th place and 29 points behind Stewart. That gap is far from insurmountable—even with the revamped system—for a driver like Johnson and his Hendrick Motorsports team.
Johnson spent Friday taking questions about “sense of urgency” and “pressure,” terms and feelings he hasn’t had experienced much of this early in the Chase since he won his first championship in 2006. Johnson acknowledged he’s feeling his share of pressure to start delivering better results over the final eight races.
“Pressure is everywhere,” he said. “These final 10 races, take that whole pressure scale and multiply it by some crazy number. Pressure is everywhere for every team.”
Obviously, Johnson feels that way. He wouldn’t be one of the more decorated active athletes if he didn’t put pressure on himself to succeed—and then deliver a championship run like no other driver in NASCAR history.
The reality is, there’s less pressure on Johnson to win than on any of the other 11 Chase drivers.
He has his championships and his place in history. Johnson will always be a threat to contend at Hendrick, and he and doesn’t have to worry about a now-or-never attitude to win a title before his career is over. He’s not Mark Martin in the 2009 Chase.
Like if the New York Yankees or Los Angeles Lakers lose, it’s OK. They’ll be back.
Johnson’s legacy won’t be affected one bit if he fails to win the championship this season.
That doesn’t mean he won’t work like a mad man to hang onto his crown for another year.
“We’re doing all we can, I promise you,” Johnson said. “Everybody at Hendrick Motorsports is giving us all that they have. My No. 48 team is committed and focused on doing the best job they can, and I am as well.”
Cool as always, Johnson brushed off speculation that there is any tension brewing between him and crew chief Chad Knaus. When Johnson struggled last week at New Hampshire, he chirped over the radio that Knaus’ cheerleading was “annoying,” and ordered him to stop.
Johnson said that kind of interaction has been part of their relationship since they were paired together in 2002. When the typical top-five finishes aren’t there, those terse conversations become magnified.
Johnson said it was such a non-issue, the two hadn’t bothered to talk about it this week at the shop.
“It wasn’t our finest moment on Sunday, but it’s what we deal with,” he said. “It’s been part of what we’ve been dealing with for 10 years.”
Other championship contenders hope it’s a crack in what’s been a flawless program and a sure sign new champ is on the way.
“I’d like to think we’re the guys that can end it,” Kyle Busch said.
Keselowski cautioned it was too early to discount Johnson, but “I don’t think it looks all that good.”
Maybe.
Johnson has a combined 26 career victories at the eight remaining Chase tracks. He leads all drivers with 19 career Chase wins—Stewart and Carl Edwards are a distant second with eight.
Hard to top those numbers.
“This is a big weekend for them,” said Johnson’s teammate, Jeff Gordon. “This is a track that he really gets around well, that team does well here so they can get themselves right back in it in a hurry.”
Johnson’s only victory this season was at Talladega—he had won no less than five each year of his championship run—and he’s never run a full season without at least three wins. So something clearly isn’t clicking this year with Johnson-Knaus-Hendrick.
Something was off with Stewart’s program until he got straightened out five races ago and become the hottest driver in the sport.
So there’s time for Johnson to figure out what’s wrong.
It’s just running out.
Dan Gelston can be reached at http://www.twitter.com/apgelston
Dillon brothers to race each other in Kentucky
September 30, 2011
SPARTA, Ky. (AP)—Austin and Ty Dillon will be squaring off against each other for the first time at the national level in the Trucks Series race at Kentucky Speedway.
Ty Dillon will be making his Trucks debut in Saturday night’s race. Older brother Austin is in his second full season and holds a two-point lead over James Buescher in the Trucks Series standings.
The Dillons are the grandson’s of NASCAR team owner Richard Childress. They said their grandfather would be flying in from the Sprint Cup race at Dover to watch them.
They said they’ve always admired how brothers Kurt and Kyle Busch made it to the top of NASCAR.
Stewart in hunt for 3rd straight Chase win
September 30, 2011
DOVER, Del. (AP)—Tony Stewart can start 3 for 3 in the Chase. He’s also aiming for his third career Cup championship.
Stewart is off to a fantastic start in the Chase for the Sprint Cup championship, with wins at Chicagoland Speedway and New Hampshire Motor Speedway. He’s only the second driver in the eight-year history of the Chase to go 2 for 2.
The odds are against him winning his third straight race. Dover International Speedway has been one of Stewart’s worst tracks for years.
He says he’s proven he can win, even with distractions swirling around him. But he refused to say what those distractions were other than his weekly obligations with the media.
Stewart is chasing history. He could become the first owner-driver to win the Cup since Alan Kulwicki in 1992.
Dan Gelston can be reached at http://www.twitter.com/apgelston
Loeb retires from Rally France, Sordo leads
September 30, 2011
STRASBOURG, France (AP)—Reigning world champion Sebastien Loeb retired duringthe third stage of the Rally France on Friday, giving his rivals a chance to cuthis lead in the overall standings.
Daniel Sordo of Spain won the eighth stage, finishing a second ahead ofPetter Solberg of Norway after the opening day and put a Mini in the lead of aworld championship rally for the first time.
“I’m really, really happy,” Sordo told the WRC website. “We have beenworking so hard for this and now we’re in a good place. To be leading Citroen athome is very nice.”
Sebastien Ogier of France was in third place, 2.8 seconds behind Sordo, andcould cut teammate Loeb’s overall lead to one point if he wins the rally andSunday’s power stage.
Loeb was leading after two stages but then developed oil pressure problems.The seven-time world champion will not restart on Saturday and will not scoreany points.
Mikko Hirvonen of Finland could overtake Loeb in the overall standings butwas in sixth place, 1 minute, 20.6 seconds off the pace.
“We never had a problem with the car so it’s a shame it happened for Seb(Loeb),” Ogier told the WRC website. “I have a good opportunity to come back(in the championship) but for sure there are still a lot of stages to go.”
The last time Loeb failed to finish a round of the world championship was inJune 2009 when he crashed out of the Acropolis Rally.
Hirvonen had a rough day, going off the road in stage three, but managed tostay in the race.
“I just went off a few kilometers from the start,” Hirvonen said. “Therewas so much mud in the wheel, the whole car was vibrating so much that Icouldn’t see outside. The car was jumping, it was very difficult to drive.”
During the same stage, former Formula One world champion Kimi Raikkonen ofFinland collided with Henning Solberg and was forced to retire though theNorwegian was able to carry on.
“We were violently hit at the rear left of the car by Kimi Raikkonen whosecar literally flew over ours,” Solberg said. “I saw the underneath of the DS3.The Citroen ended its flight in the ditch.”
Johnson believes 6th championship in reach (PA SportsTicker)
September 30, 2011
By DAN GELSTON AP Sports Writer
DOVER, Del. (AP)—Go ahead. Count out Jimmie Johnson.
He’s having an atypical-Johnson season.
He has only one victory, is off to a slow start in the Chase for the Sprint Cup championship, and hasn’t been as dominant as previous years.
Tony Stewart has stolen the spotlight with wins in the first two Chase races, but Johnson is still in the mix for his six straight championship. Johnson can make a serious move in the standings at one of his favorite tracks, Dover International Speedway. He has six career victories on the Monster Mile and won the race here last September.
Johnson is lurking in 10th place, an unfamiliar position for one of NASCAR’s all-time great champions. But he’s only 29 points behind Stewart. That gap is far from insurmountable for a driver like Johnson.
Dan Gelston can be reached at http://www.twitter.com/apgelston
Johnson: No worse than third will do at Dover (Yahoo! Sports)
September 30, 2011
Third. That’s the benchmark Jimmie Johnson has set for where he needs to finish in Sunday’s AAA 400. Third or better.
Two races into the Chase, the five-time defending champion sits 10th in the standings, 29 points back of Tony Stewart. Position-wise, he’s never been lower. Points-wise, he has. Under the old points system used every year prior to this season, 29 points equates to about 107 points. In 2006, Johnson was 165 points back after the third race of that year’s Chase.
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“I don’t think we’re in a position where it’s win or nothing but we need a good top-three run here,” Johnson said Friday. “There’s still eight races left.”
Which is one more race than he had to make up ground with in 2006.
That year, Johnson started the Chase off 39th, 13th, 14th. He finished 24th the next week at Talladega (and actually made up nine points), then went 2nd, 1st, 2nd, 2nd, 9th to win the title by 56 points.
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Johnson said he can pull on the experience of that season, adding that he actually has less pressure on him now than back in 2006. Then, Johnson was a zero-time champion, best known for his failure to win a title that had eluded him in 2003 (when he finished second), 2004 (second again) and 2005 (fifth).
After the 2005 season, the question changed from when Johnson would win one to if he’d ever get over the hump.
“I’ve looked back at the first championship and how important that was and how much pressure there was on me to win that,” he said Friday. “I look back at that as the toughest year and digging the deepest.”
In actuality, Johnson hasn’t performed poorly in the first two races of this year’s Chase. He had a top-three run going at Chicagoland until he ran out of fuel and likely would have finished in the top 10 at New Hampshire if he hadn’t made contact with Kyle Busch.
As for the verbal spat he got into over the radio at New Hampshire with crew chief Chad Knaus, Johnson said that sort of thing is to be expected after 10 years of working together.
“When you work with someone as long as we have, for over 10 years now, there are hot spots and buttons that can be pushed that send someone over the edge,” Johnson explained. “We know what took place last weekend and he knows at times I can be frustrated with his cheerleading. That is what I said on the radio. So, it’s nothing new to us.
“I know a lot of people are reacting to it and think that it is something abnormal. … We talk about this stuff all the time. So, yes it wasn’t our finest moment on Sunday, but, it is what we deal with. It’s been part of what we’ve been dealing with for 10 years.”
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Jay Hart is the NASCAR editor for Yahoo! Sports. Send Jay a question or comment for potential use in a future column or webcast.
Nationwide Preview: Strong Chicago run has Scott primed for Dover (NASCAR.com)
September 30, 2011
When Brian Scott won the pole and finished third in the Nationwide Series race at Chicagoland Speedway two weeks ago, there was a sense of achievement among his entire Joe Gibbs Racing team.
And Scott also wondered, where has this been all year?
“We’ve had performances that were in that range,” Scott said. “There’s been a handful of finishes like that that we should’ve had already. We’ve had bizarre things happen, stupid things happen. … For us, it was a feeling of relief: ‘Gosh, we finally have a whole race where nothing stupid happens.’
“And, too, it was a feeling of accomplishment that we marked down the finish where we wanted it.”
The finish was his best of the season, his first with the powerhouse Gibbs team, and matched his best career result.
But it’s come after a bit of a disappointing season, as he’s had only five top-10 finishes with the team that has dominated the series in recent years. Scott and the No. 11 Toyota team will look to continue that momentum this weekend at Dover International Speedway, which hosts the OneMain Financial 200.
And could there be a better place for Scott? He has a victory in the Camping World Truck Series at Dover, in addition to having one of his 10 career top-10 finishes in the Nationwide Series at the 1-mile track.
“The next couple of race tracks we’re going to, I have a lot of confidence at,” Scott said. “I obviously have a very high level at Dover because I’ve won there and had good runs in both Nationwide and Truck there. And also, Kansas the week after that is a good track for me.
“To come off a race like Chicago and have a couple of good tracks in a row, I think we can really validate ourselves and our performance. We can make the whole team and everybody at Joe Gibbs Racing feel better about our program going into next year.”
Scott and the team, led by crew chief Kevin Kidd, have already begun working on 2012, knowing they’re out of this year’s title hunt. Scott is ninth in the points standings—and has been ninth or 10th since May.
“We started doing that about halfway through the season, knowing how disastrous our first half was,” Scott said. “We said, ‘OK, at a certain point we’ve got to realize we’re out of the championship hunt. There’s only a certain amount of good we can do this year, regardless of what happens. We need to start focusing on 2012 now.’
“We’ve tried to R&D stuff in practice, stuff we might not do in the championship battle because you give up practice time. It’s really paid off. We’ve hit on some things that have been really exciting to drive here lately.”
Truck Preview: Carmichael isn’t giving up on NASCAR (NASCAR.com)
September 30, 2011
This season has been difficult for Ricky Carmichael, but the 31-year-old believes he can still turn his NASCAR fortunes for the better.
As an American Motorcyclist Association driver, Ricky Carmichael was anointed as the GOAT or “Greatest Of All Time.”
Now in his third season in the Camping World Truck Series, the 15-time AMA champion is struggling just to be competitive.
After showing flashes of promise in his first two years in NASCAR’s No. 3 division, Carmichael seemed primed for a breakout 2011 campaign. Paired with longtime sponsor Monster Energy and a Turner Motorsports organization that is on the rise, Carmichael expected this season to be big.
It has been big—mostly on disappointment.
Entering Saturday’s Kentucky 225 at Kentucky Speedway, Carmichael is a dismal 18th in the driver standings, next-to-last among drivers who have started every race this season.
The 31-year-old has been plagued by all manner of misfortune ranging from accidents to broken parts to sheer lack of speed.
It all adds up to a frustrating season for a much-heralded racer who is a lot more accustomed to winning than running mid-pack.
“We’re definitely further behind this year than where we had wanted to be. There’s no doubt about it,” said Carmichael, who has one pole (Atlanta) but only four top-10s and no top-fives in 19 starts. “It’s frustrating. If I knew all the answers, we wouldn’t be having the year that we’re having.”
Team owner Steve Turner clearly sees the need for improvement. Turner Motorsports announced on Tuesday that, effective immediately, the organization would swap its road crews for Carmichael’s No. 4 team and the No. 32 team that features rotating drivers.
The change pairs Carmichael with crew chief Doug George this weekend as crew chief Mark Rette moves over to the No. 32 team.
“As we look ahead to next season, we’re in the process of evaluating both programs,” Turner said of the No. 4 and 32 teams.
Carmichael, the all-time wins leader in AMA history, knows he has to pick it up if he wants to reach his goals in NASCAR. And even though he remains plugged into the professional motorcycling scene, the Florida native insists there’s no turning back.
“I know what it takes to win, I know how the bikes need to be and what’s happening in that deal, but as far as my racing days are concerned, those days are long gone,” said Carmichael, who retired from full-time professional motocross racing at the end of 2006. “I’m fortunate I got out of there with the success that I did and the safety that I have.”
Carmichael still hasn’t given up on achieving a high level of success in NASCAR, too, and he believes he has the talent and time to turn his fortunes around.
“In a nutshell, this year has been a year definitely to forget,” he said. “There’s no doubt about it. But you’ve got to be confident in your abilities and know what you can do, and keep driving forward, and maybe things will click.”
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