Jimmie Johnson is within striking distance of Chase leader Matt Kenseth with JJ’s best tracks still to come. (Will Schneekloth/Getty Images)
CHARLOTTE, N.C. (AP) –These are strange times in NASCAR, where everything has turned upside down in the blink of an eye.
Michael Waltrip Racing is fighting for its survival in the wake of a race-fixing scandal and a driver who woke up two Mondays ago in the Chase for the Sprint Cup championship is now looking for a job. Sponsors are taking a stand, too – against a team over ethics, maybe even against NASCAR for the perception that all teams are not treated equally.
A single-car team based in Colorado suddenly has the most desired seat in the garage, and when the music stops, a pair of respected veterans and the Nationwide Series championship leader may be left standing without rides because the youth movement has clearly taken over.
Maybe everything went haywire when Tony Stewart broke his leg Aug. 5. That’s when co-owner Gene Haas went rogue, seizing the opportunity while Stewart was incapacitated to finalize a deal to hire the seemingly untouchable Kurt Busch.
Nothing else has made much sense since then.
Busch, whose talent had taken tiny Furniture Row Motorsports to the verge of a Chase berth, was suddenly headed back to a dream job. With Stewart sidelined for the rest of the season, defending Sprint Cup champion Brad Keselowski stuck in a slump and perpetual contender Denny Hamlin out of Chase contention, the field was open to roughly 10 drivers suddenly vying for a golden ticket into NASCAR’s version of the playoffs.
As Furniture Row walked the fine line of courting a new driver – the team flew Juan Pablo Montoya to Colorado for a shop tour – while making last-minute preparations for Busch’s Chase push, Michael Waltrip Racing was readying its fleet for the homestretch. MWR had a legitimate title contender in Clint Bowyer, ranked second or third in the standings for 10 consecutive weeks, and Martin Truex Jr. was on the Chase bubble.
So everything seemed somewhat normal headed into Richmond, where the Sept. 7 race would end with the top 12 drivers advancing into the Chase and Montoya probably taking the Furniture Row job.
Then came the late-race shenanigans by MWR to get Truex the final Chase berth. That’s when things really spun out of control.
NASCAR came down hard with sanctions, including Truex’s removal from the Chase field in favor of Stewart teammate Ryan Newman.
Longtime Waltrip sponsor NAPA Auto Sports, citing its belief in “fair play,” then said it would pull its multimillion-dollar sponsorship from MWR at the end of the year. The NAPA decision could force MWR to lay off up to 100 employees and fold its No. 56 car.
So Truex went from driving his guts out in an effort to make the Chase to an unwitting participant in a team scandal to being potentially out of work eight weeks from now.
Bowyer, one of the most popular drivers in the garage, is now feeling the ire of fans for his role in the Richmond scandal and his promising season has fallen apart after two mediocre races to start the Chase, maybe because of all the pressure. He’s 10th in the standings, essentially out of title contention, and sponsor 5-Hour Energy said it will decide after the season if it will continue its relationship with MWR.
Then 5-Hour President Scott Henderson took a peculiar stance Sunday at New Hampshire, where he seemed to question NASCAR chairman Brian France’s decision not to punish Penske Racing the same way it did MWR for trying to manipulate the Richmond race to get Joey Logano into the Chase, and perhaps for expanding the Chase field to 13 drivers to accommodate Jeff Gordon. Bowyer and Gordon had an issue late last season that took Bowyer out of title contention.
“There’s a lot of talk about integrity,” Henderson said. “When the guy who’s in charge can say, `I can do whatever I want and I’m going to do it and I just did,’ I wonder about integrity. I want to make sure we can win in this sport, OK?”
Should 5-Hour bail at the end of the year, Bowyer will be in far worse shape than Truex. At least Truex has some time to look for a job. In December, there won’t be any jobs to be had.
And speaking of jobs, there’s really only one seat open right now – the Furniture Row vacancy that Montoya turned down.
Sometime after Richmond, Penske Racing picked up the phone and lured Montoya back to IndyCar. Maybe they wanted the former Indianapolis 500 winner to complement their open-wheel organization, or maybe the Penske folks wanted to clear the path to Colorado for longtime company man Sam Hornish Jr.
Currently leading the Nationwide championship race, Hornish is at another crossroads in his career. Penske is full at the Cup level with Keselowski and Logano, and it appears the team wants Hornish’s Nationwide seat for 19-year-old Ryan Blaney, who grabbed his first career victory Saturday night at Kentucky.
Whatever Penske’s motives were for hiring Montoya, Furniture Row didn’t seem to have an overwhelming interest in Hornish and headed back to the drawing board last week with designs on hiring a young driver. It’s the same path Harry Scott, the new owner of Phoenix Racing, and Brandon Davis, owner of Swan Racing, want to go with their teams.
That doesn’t leave much hope for 46-year-old Jeff Burton, a 21-race winner, or former Cup champion Bobby Labonte, who turned 49 this year.
Both are looking for jobs. They may soon be joined by Truex and Hornish – and everyone is left speculating how this will all shake out.
Only two races into the 10-event Chase for the Sprint Cup championship, it already appears that the title might come down to a battle between Joe Gibbs Racing and five-time champ Jimmie Johnson. JGR teammates Matt Kenseth and Kyle Busch have finished 1-2 in each of the first two Chase races, while Johnson has posted a pair of top-fives. As a result, there is already a bit of a gap between that trio and fourth-place Carl Edwards, who is 36 points out of the lead and 18 points behind third-place Johnson.
At first glance, this doesn’t appear to be a fair fight. Johnson has not won in the 10 races since he took the checkered flag at Daytona in early July, while Kenseth and Busch have combined to win half of those 10 (three for Kenseth and two for Busch). Momentum and powerful engines are definitely on the side of the Gibbs drivers right now. As Busch confidently declared after Sunday’s race, “There’s a reason why we think we [JGR] are the best, and we’re showing it.”
But it is still way too early to write off Johnson. Because the fact is, when he was winning five consecutive championships from 2006-2010, he never held the points lead two races into the Chase. He has always come from behind, taking advantage of a series of tracks later in the Chase at which his team nearly always performs well.
Johnson’s first big opportunity comes next Sunday at Dover. Johnson was won seven times in 23 career starts at the Monster Mile, and his career average finish of 9.0 at the track is second-best among all active Sprint Cup drivers. Kenseth and Busch, meanwhile, have two victories each at Dover with a career average finish near 13th place.
There will be an even greater discrepancy a week later at Kansas, where Johnson has the best average finish (7.64) of all active drivers. Kenseth (14.8) ranks 13th at the track, and Busch (22.42) is a dismal 31st. Looking further down the schedule, Johnson has the best average finish at Martinsville and Phoenix and the second-best at Charlotte and Texas (though Kenseth holds the top spot at Texas).
Jeff Gordon stated after Sunday’s race that, “If Kenseth keeps doing what he’s doing, it’s not going to matter what anybody else does.” Which is true if Kenseth wins all 10 races in the Chase, but obviously he’s not going to do that. And Busch has not yet proved that he can endure the pressure of a championship run.
Johnson, on the other hand, has traditionally excelled over the final two months of the season. When he won his first championship, in 2006, he was eighth in the standings after the second race of the Chase. He finished with six straight top-10s, including a victory and four runner-ups. That was followed by six top-fives with four wins over the final eight races of 2007, six top-10s with two wins in 2008, seven top-10s with three wins in 2009, and an amazing run of nine consecutive top-10s to close out 2010.
So even though Joe Gibbs Racing appears to have the edge at the moment, Johnson doesn’t sound overly concerned. “We’re in a good spot,” he said after the New Hampshire race. “We haven’t given up too many points [to Kenseth], and we’re going to one of my best race tracks next week in Dover.
“I know there are very good opportunities for us ahead. We have blinders on. Focus on what we need to do and not let the outside opinions or what goes on be a distraction for us. If we put together our best races [the rest of the way], we’ll be in contention for the championship.”
Power Rankings
1. Matt Kenseth (1st previously) — Kenseth, who won only a single race when he captured the championship in 2003 under the old pre-Chase points system, already has seven victories this season. Not only is that a career-best, it is nearly as many wins as he posted over the previous five seasons combined (eight). The move from Roush Fenway Racing to Joe Gibbs Racing seemed somewhat risky when it was announced last season, but it has absolutely revitalized Kenseth’s career.
2. Kyle Busch (2nd) — Despite posting two consecutive second-place finishes to start the Chase, Busch has dropped 11 points further behind Kenseth in the standings. After so many years of fading almost immediately once the Chase starts, it must be frustrating for Busch to finally be running well, and yet still be losing ground to the points leader.
3. Jimmie Johnson (5th) — Johnson is making some small steps in the right direction, with back-to-back top-five finishes after an absolutely dreadful stretch heading into the Chase. Before the playoffs began, Johnson had gone six weeks without cracking the top-five.
4. Greg Biffle (unranked) — Biffle is constantly being underrated, which is why he wasn’t even in last week’s Power Rankings. But his third-place finish at New Hampshire moved him back into the championship race, albeit as a long shot. And still on the horizon are Kansas, Texas and Homestead, three tracks at which he’s won a total of eight times.
5. Carl Edwards (7th) — Edwards keeps lurking, doing just enough to stay in the hunt for the title. Though he hasn’t been great lately, he has been steady enough to finish no worse than 11th in six of the past eight races. But it’s going to take a win or two and a bunch of top-fives for him to have a shot at the championship.
6. Kurt Busch (3rd) — The surprise story of the season might finally be losing some steam. Busch’s 13th-place finish at New Hampshire snapped a string of three consecutive top-fives and dropped him 40 points off the pace. And up next is Dover, where he has only eight top-10s in 26 career starts.
7. Kevin Harvick (4th) — Harvick’s championship hopes took a big hit with a 20th-place finish at New Hampshire. Though he is still within 39 points of Kenseth, he has only three top-10s in the past nine races and hasn’t won in nearly four months.
8. Jeff Gordon (6th) — Gordon held the lead two-thirds of the way through Sunday’s race before he barely overshot his stall during a pit stop, forcing him to back up and lose valuable seconds. By the time he returned to the track, he had fallen all the way to 22nd place, and wound up finishing 15th.
9. Ryan Newman (9th) — Newman had a pit issue on the same stop that Gordon had his problem, though Newman’s wasn’t the driver’s fault. Newman said his car was loose, but on the ensuing pit stop, his crew went the wrong way with the chassis adjustment, making the handling even more unstable. Newman dropped to 25th before scrambling back for a 16th-place finish.
10. Dale Earnhardt Jr. (unranked) — Earnhardt’s sixth-place finish Sunday was his 15th top-10 of the season, which is as many as Kenseth has this year. The difference is that while Kenseth has won seven times, Earnhardt remains winless and has cracked the top-five only once in the past 14 races.
NASCAR: Strange turn of events for NASCAR as Chase unfolds is a post from: PhatzRadio.com
