Friday, May 09, 2008
Biffle, Junior, Jimmie and Tony: 1-2-3-4 for Darlington’s Carnage 500 Saturday night
At 200 mph on a track like Darlington, well, these guys are getting a bit too pumped up perhaps.
Jeff Burton (right) and Dale Earnhardt Jr. comparing notes about the speed through these corners
(Photo by Kevin C. Cox/Getty Images)
By Mike Mulhern
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DARLINGTON, S.C.
Noted NASCAR trucker-philosopher Henry Benfield surveyed the carnage filling the Darlington Raceway garage Friday and mused “They’ve hit everything but the lottery.”
Yes, when Dale Earnhardt Jr. called 200 mph at this track ‘pretty insane,’ he wasn’t far off the mark. And when practice opened Friday morning for Friday evening pole runs for Saturday night’s Dodge Challenger 500, well, things went pretty much as expected—crashingly so.
Jimmie Johnson, the NASCAR tour’s two-time defending champion, was only a few minutes into his first practice session when he crashed, and his crew had to quickly unload the backup Chevy.
Then Reed Sorenson also slapped the wall, and crew chief Donnie Wingo too was forced to pull out the backup.
Then Johnson spun and crashed again, then Robby Gordon and Paul Menard too....
Then Denny Hamlin, the fastest in Nationwide practice, crashed while qualifying for Friday night’s 200-miler and failed to make that field. “We had a car half-a-second faster than anyone else in the field,” Hamlin grumbled.
The weekend thus appears to be shaping up as a smash-up success, and it should be in front of a sellout crowd, the fourth straight sellout since NASCAR moved this race to Mother’s Day weekend.
“Heck, we don’t race until 7 o’clock Saturday night, so we’ve got plenty of time to go get another backup car,” Johnson managed to quip. “We’ve been fast all day....I just kept hitting things....”
But Johnson managed to recover well, to take a second row spot for Saturday 7:20 p.m. start in his backup, just behind the day’s two fastest—Greg Biffle and Earnhardt—and right next to Tony Stewart.
Biffle’s pole lap was a sizzling 179.442 mph. And all 43 qualifiers smashed the track’s previous track record of 173 mph, set more than 10 years ago by Ward Burton.
But the story—more than 30 drivers hit the Darlington Raceway walls Friday.
Jimmie Johnson wiped out his primary Darlington car early Friday
(Photo Credit: Geoff Burke/Getty Images for NASCAR)
“With the new surface, you can drive it as hard as you want every single lap and keep going,” Kyle Busch says. “It’s a trickier place and a lot less room for error. We’ve seen that—about 80 percent of the garage has marks on their right side.”
“It’s going to be a tough race, an exciting race, but I think it’s going to be a crew chief race,” Jeff Gordon says. “It’s going to come down to the crew chief making very, very good decisions—about how many tires, or not taking tires, or whatever is going to get track position.
“The track is very fast, the tire is very hard, and the groove is very narrow. There’s not going to be a lot of passing.
“Thank God they brought the tire they brought. Had they not brought this tire, we would have a lot of tire trouble.”
Ah, yes, that good ol’ Darlington Stripe on the wall....and Kasey Kahne later wiped out his own Dodge
(Photo Credit: Rusty Jarrett/Getty Images for NASCAR)
Too fast?
“Yeah, the track’s too fast…but what do you mean by too fast?” Gordon says. “No, it’s not a danger. But it’s too fast to really do what we want to do.”
Kevin Harvick says “It’s going to be tough to race on. If you look through the garage, there are more cars that have hit the wall than not…and I’m in that category—I hit it twice.
“It’s still Darlington, still can reach out and grab you; it’s just the consequences are a little bigger.
“It’s not slick, it’s just you’re riding on the edge, and when you go over the edge there’s no warning. It just goes. That’s just the hard tire and the new track and the high speeds, and it’s magnified at this place because you run right against the wall.
“It will be made for TV, it’ll definitely be made for TV.”
Chad Knaus, crew chief for Jimmie Johnson, is not having a good day
(Photo by Kevin C. Cox/Getty Images)
Ford’s Greg Biffle, whose tire testing here last month was key to Goodyear’s tire selection, after the first choice of tires blistered under the high speeds, says “Darlington is really, really tough.
“I talked to a couple of drivers, and they’re like ‘It’s tougher now than it has ever been.’
“And you think ‘How can it be tougher?’
“But when you run that fast that close to the wall—even before they re-paved it—it’s not very forgiving. And now we’re running three seconds a lap faster, or whatever we are, and it’s less forgiving.
“So it’s hard, it’s really tough.
It may take an Indiana Jones escape to make it through Darlington this weekend.
(Kyle Busch warming up for Saturday’s 500)
(Photo by Chris Trotman/Getty Images for NASCAR)
“It definitely changes the dynamic of this track 100 percent. Before, it was about car-control and throttle control. It’s still about that, but it’s kind of different. I don’t know how to explain it, because the tire doesn’t wear out much, much faster...so there’s a lot of things that have changed about it.”
Still Biffle says he relishes the challenge. And he says he’d prefer that NASCAR put Darlington Raceway into the 10-race championship chase in the fall: “I think a lot of the fans and drivers would rather see a place like this in the chase than a place like Talladega, where it’s just ‘Throw the dice and see who ends up where and who ends up in a big wreck.’
“This is about driving. Talladega is not about driving.”
J.J. Yeley’s troubles.....
(Photo by Chris Graythen/Getty Images)
Johnson, dryly, noted “people are hitting the wall more than what we have seen in the past here.
“It is going to be tough to pass; it is going to be tough to race side-by-side, because the track is so narrow and the speed is so high.
“People are just driving so hard that you are running out of space and getting into the wall.
Jack Roush watched Darlington 500 practice --- with fingers crossed
(Photo by Geoff Burke/Getty Images for NASCAR)
“As far as tire wear and tire fall-off, it is nothing I have ever seen here before. You can go out on 11 or 12-lap tires and run your fastest lap time.
“In the past your first lap was your fastest and you would lose two to three tenths every lap from there.
“So guys, in order to pass, are going to need to be really, really aggressive. And our cars don’t run very well side-by-side, so you could see guys lose it because of the aero situations. That might be a problem. So there may be plenty of action.”
Jeff Burton says “If you make a mistake you’re going to pay a big price. When you hit something now you hit it quite a bit harder because you’re going so much faster.”
Another Darlington Stripe, for Brian Vickers
(Photo by Jason Smith/Getty Images for NASCAR)
Kyle Busch and Dale Earnhardt Jr. may be the men to beat in Saturday’s 500. Yes, they crashed while dueling for the win a week ago at Richmond, but both men have been drawing praise for their coolness and civility in dealing with what could have been a fiery controversy. That’s good – because the two may well wind up fighting it out for the Sprint Cup championship right down to the wire at Homestead.
“It’s fast, it’s smooth, I guess it’s going to be aero-sensitive,” Busch says of this tight track. “This has always been a tough track; it’s going to be even tougher yet.
“For a track as narrow as it is, and as hard as it was to get around here already two-wide, it’s going to be that much harder yet.
“And running side-by-side is really going to slow you down, so you won’t see much of that.
“It’s a good, hard track…and you don’t really know what can happen. It’s a hard place to understand exactly. But it’s a good place to show who is pretty good.”
So what does Busch think about people comparing him to the young Dale Earnhardt Sr.?
“It’s flattering…I guess,” Busch says slowly. “It’s just not what I’m out there concentrating on being. I’m concentrating on being Kyle Busch.”
That is ironic, given the growing sense that the title chase this season could well come down to Busch versus Dale Earnhardt Jr.
“It’s whatever is the best for NASCAR,” Busch says of the curious debate. “We’re here to have a job: whatever we can do to get people in the stands and get viewership on TV, then that’s what we need.”
Reed Sorenson didn’t have a great Friday at Darlington
(Photo Credit: Geoff Burke/Getty Images for NASCAR)
THE NASCAR NOTEBOOK
One of Carl Edwards’ tricks is slowly coming to light: his car body appears to be set on the chassis at a decided angle, so it gets more aerodynamic side-force in the corners, though it does look weird on the straights.
“The car looks stupid going down the straightaway because it’s ‘dog-tracking,’” Kyle Busch says. “It just doesn’t look right.
“But it is NASCAR’s rules. We asked them at the beginning of the year when we started looking at things if they were going to make a rule change on it, and they said ‘No, do what you want with it.’ So everybody kept going that way.
“When you get the car out in ‘yaw’ through the corner, you have the side-force, that holds the car straight. The more yaw we can get in the car, the better.”
Jeff Burton: “It’s pretty obvious what Carl has been doing, and they deserve a lot of credit.
“But that’s not the only reason they’re running well. They’ve done a lot of things really well, and Carl is driving it well, Bob Osborne (the crew chief) has a good set up, the engineering program is working really well.
“They certainly have pushed that to the extreme in comparison to what most teams have done. It was blatantly obvious what they were doing even early, early, early in the year.
“We’ve seen a rash of people trying to imitate them and not yielding the same results. So there’s more to the picture than just that.”
Jeff Gordon, winner here a year ago, but still looking for his first win of the year, considers the Busch-Earnhardt incident at
Richmond “typical Kyle Busch. He was racing too hard, and I think he just drove in too deep.
“In turn three, when you’re on the inside, you’ve got to be the conservative one. You can’t be the aggressor.
“And the guy on the outside, you know he’s going to hold you, he’s going to pinch you.
“If you don’t want to wreck, you’re going to have to check up a little early and try to get a run on him at the bottom of the corner and then drive down into turn one and get him. Or beat him off turn two.
“You can’t try to outrun a guy into turn three, not when you’re on the inside like that.”
Of course Busch has won seven NASCAR events this season, in Cup, Nationwide and Truck, while Gordon, his former teammate, is still winless.
Jeff Burton says Kyle Busch’s wide-open style of racing is fun to watch: “There’s not a time in this sport we haven’t had people willing to push the button, willing to lay it all out there and not worry about the consequences. It’s Kyle’s turn.
“Last week, as seen by me, was hard racing. Kyle made a mistake, and I think Kyle would admit he made a mistake, and obviously it took out the most popular driver in the sport, so it’s been big news.
“But it wasn’t the first time that’s happened, and it certainly won’t be the last.
“To be quite honest, in Kyle’s defense, when you wreck Dale Earnhardt Jr. what are you going to say that makes anybody feel okay about it anyway? Seventy percent of the crowd is going to hate you no matter what you say.
“Now if you’re Mark Martin you can probably get by with it.
“If you’re Kyle Busch, you’re given less latitude, because he’s very aggressive, he has pushed it to the limit.”
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One for the hook...and the Darlington weekend is still young
(Photo by Rusty Jarrett/Getty Images for NASCAR)
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