Sonoma, and let the summer games begin: Gordon versus Gordon, and which wild card drivers this time?
Patrick Dempsey and Jeff Gordon toast NASCAR at Sonoma, with a Gordon Napa chardonnay
(Photo by Sara Wolfram/Getty Images for NASCAR)
By Mike Mulhern
Croquet, anyone?
Wine, cheese, croquet….
Really good wine – Hey, how about a blind tasting of Jeff Gordon’s vino against Richard Childress’ stuff?
Really good cheese…and really bad croquet: “You HAVE to do croquet, “Gordon insists, when coming to Sonoma.
“But is anybody really good at croquet?”
Yes, it’s that kind of weekend for the NASCAR guys out in northern California, an annual off-the-wall thing for the stock car crowd, a weekend for the good, bad, and ugly. That’s the way racing at Sonoma and Watkins Glen typically goes. Fridays typically ugly, as Tony Stewart and Kyle Busch showed; Sundays, well, curious, right up till those final 20 laps when these guys suddenly turn into Twilight Zone monsters and you can’t even trust your best friend when you get to the top of that first turn hill or over in the wilderness esses.
Watch fuel mileage, gamble just right, force rivals play to your game, that’s one way to look at Sunday’s race on the hilly course just north of San Francisco. That’s the way Juan Pablo Montoya and then-crew chief Donnie Wingo won Sonoma last summer.
The traditional way to play the road racing game, though, is to have a special car armed with all the trick gear and best brakes, and a top-notch road racer, like Jeff Gordon, Tony Stewart or Robby Gordon, the three best in NASCAR right now.
The best ringer in the field? Scott Pruett waits and watches
(Photo Credit: Robert Laberge/Getty Images)
But the Montoya-Wingo gambit gave Jeff Gordon a different perspective: “You always run road courses based on fuel mileage, not as much on tire wear and track position. So when those guys did what they did last year, it opened our eyes—that we’ve got to start focusing more on fuel mileage.
“We didn’t get good fuel mileage, so we really worked hard on it for Watkins Glen last year, and we got better at it.
“But everybody is going to be focused on that.”
“Fuel mileage is the game,” Jeff Burton agrees. “You want to stop as soon as possible, and the first stop happens well before you’re out of fuel. It will be an issue.”
At least that should mean a more unusual afternoon than usual at the sport’s wine country track.
Jeff Gordon, 10 years ago, after the first of his record five Sonoma victories
(Photo Credit: Racing One/Getty Images)
Dale Earnhardt Jr., who may well remember his father’s struggles on the tour’s road courses, isn’t optimistic about following up that Michigan gas-mileage win with anything spectacular, but he expects to get some TV time on TNT: “I’m going to screw up; trust me, I’ll screw it up.”
So he’s glad to have a little points cushion in the Sprint Cup standings. “I can get through Watkins Glen okay,” he says. But Sonoma: “I just don’t run good. Never liked coming, don’t like the track – it’s not a fun track to compete on. Oh, it’s fun to goof off and raise a little bit of hell. But I don’t like being in competition on it. These cars ain’t built for it.
“Impossible to pass. Where do you pass? A couple of brake zones, but that’s about it. You just wait on people to screw up.
“We’ll probably try to save as much gas as we can.
“I’m not very good at road racing. I’m not a big fan of it. I don’t really run that well, so I’m just hoping to get through the weekend.”
Kasey Kahne on the Sonoma pole? Where did that come from?
(Photo Credit: Jonathan Ferrey/Getty Images)
The men to beat: Gordon, Stewart and Gordon, though Stewart will have to come from the back of the pack.
It’s been a good spring for Richard Childress’ guys – Jeff Burton, Kevin Harvick and Clint Bowyer—and for the veteran car owner too, who has signed two new big-buck sponsors, taking General Mills from Petty Enterprises and Caterpillar from Bill Davis.
This may not be shaping up as a great weekend for Burton, Harvick and Bowyer. But while others in the sport may be having a rough time of it, signing sponsors, but Burton, who comes into Sunday’s Sonoma 350 tight on Kyle Busch’s tail in the Sprint Cup playoff chase, is sitting on top of the world, with a new sponsor in the bank.
“It’s important sponsors want to talk to us, that we’re in their consideration,” Burton says of Childress’ two home runs. “Certainly it’s a tough market, there are not as many sponsors out there as we’d like to have, and more teams than we’d like to have looking for sponsors.
“So we feel good about the amount of interest. And that goes back to Richard.
“Richard is a very competitive person. More importantly, he’s very honest, very straight-forward, and I think sponsors recognize that, because they know what they are going to get.”
NASCAR owner Richard Childress, here in Richmond’s victory lane celebrating Clint Bowyer’s win, has everything going his way this season
(Photo by Rusty Jarrett/Getty Images for NASCAR)
And right now it looks like Childress’ sponsors have three legitimate title contenders….if Childress can just find them a little more speed.
“I felt really good about our speed at Charlotte, I felt really good about our speed at Pocono,” Burton says. “We didn’t have a good week last week obviously (a 15th at Michigan).
“But our better days are ahead of us. We have a lot of stuff going on I’m really excited about. I feel good about where we are.”
Kevin Harvick (left) and teammate Jeff Burton. Richard Childress’ three drivers—Harvick, Burton and Clint Bowyer—finished 2-3-4 at Sonoma last summer
(Photo by Robert Laberge/Getty Images for NASCAR)
Teammate Clint Bowyer, last fall’s title race surprise, won Richmond in early May for Childress, but since then he’s hit the skids: a 15th at Darlington, 25th at Charlotte, 36th at Dover, 39th at Pocono, and 26th at Michigan.
Time for a turnaround, if he and crew chief Gil Martin are to hang in for the championship run.
Last season Bowyer and Martin sneaked into the title game. This year? “It has been a lot different,” Bowyer says. “Making the chase was tough…and then finishing third. A lot of things have changed.
“But still you have to be good week-in, week-out. We are focused on bouncing back from three or four bad runs. We had some bad luck, we had a part failure, I crashed out in Pocono. It is time to get back on track.”
But at Sonoma? Well, this classic Midwestern ‘Aw, shucks’ kind of guy may not be known for his road racing skills, but he did finish fourth at Sonoma last June.
Is Clint Bowyer still Richard Childress’ secret weapon?
(Photo by Todd Warshaw/Getty Images )
“The track has been good to us,” Bowyer says. “You have to hone in on fuel mileage…and be fast. You still have to be fast on these tracks.
“I really enjoy the technical part of the Sonoma course. It is slower and more technical than Watkins Glen. I enjoy this one more than Watkins Glen. The Glen is real fast, wide-open; throw the car around and go. At Sonoma you have to really hit your marks and focus.
“If you race the track, make good fuel mileage, and make the right decisions, you will have a good finish.
“If you get caught up racing people, well, there are always people on different agendas—new tires that come flying by you. You have to just keep racing the track. Keep the big picture in mind.
“We fired off seven top-10s in a row earlier in the season (Atlanta, Bristol, Martinsville, Texas, Phoenix, Talladega and Richmond).
“We have just had three or four bad runs. Two of them have been our mistake. Dover could have been a top-five run. Take away those two, and we would be plenty fine.
“But two 38ths has been a hard hit.”
Still, it’s only the first weekend of summer, and more than two months till the playoff cut. Too early to sweat? “It is but it ain’t,” Bowyer frets. “I mean every weekend is a worry.”
Robby Gordon needs something good to happen. He’s got no sponsor for Sonoma, and if GM sells Hummer…
(Photo by Drew Hallowell/Getty Images for NASCAR)
THE NASCAR NOTEBOOK
A few weeks back Kevin Harvick and other drivers took NASCAR to task over the sanctioning body’s rather loose and ill-defined drug testing policies. Harvick and others have been pushing for a stronger, mandatory drug-testing program, and to make his case Harvick has instituted his own program at his Kernersville shops.
“We are done setting it up, we’ll go through our whole month of drug testing, the randoms every week,” Harvick says.
“We are all set.
“We are just waiting on NASCAR’s final investigation, and see where they go with it.
“We will give them the six weeks they asked for…then we will put the heat back on.”
Kevin Harvick, one of NASCAR’s enduring enigmas
(Photo by Rusty Jarrett/Getty Images for NASCAR)
However that meeting last week that NASCAR president Mike Helton had with the tour drivers may have put a muzzle on the typically outspoken Harvick, who has always prided himself on speaking his mind, regardless of the fallout.
Any more comment on Helton’s ‘shut up and drive’ lesson plan for drivers?
“Last week is over,” Harvick says bluntly. “If they wanted you to know (what was discussed), they would have invited you to the meeting. It is none of your business. How about that?”
Tony Stewart, who hasn’t won since last August, is deep in the field for Sunday’s Sonoma start
(Photo by Jamie Squire/Getty Images)
Jeff Gordon hasn’t won on the NASCAR tour since October, and he’s getting aggravated at the constant attention that streak has created.
But then to snap it, Gordon couldn’t be at a better place this weekend than Sonoma, where he last won in the summer of 2006, his fifth win at the hilly course. He’s also won four times at Watkins Glen.
The winless string, Gordon insists, isn’t the big issue: “I’m more frustrated that we’re not more competitive.
“What’s bothering me is we’re hit-or-miss.
“We’ve put some top-fives together (Darlington, Charlotte and Dover); some of them we earned, some of them we earned by strategy. We didn’t go out and really perform.
“The team has been awesome in the pits, and with Steve Letarte calling the races.
“It’s just getting the car to do the things I want it to do to go faster…”
A telling stat: this season Gordon has led only 264 miles – just 211 laps of the season’s 4,867.
In stark contrast, Joe Gibbs’ Toyota men – Kyle Busch, Denny Hamlin and Tony Stewart – have together led nearly 40 percent of all the laps run this year.
But will fuel mileage mean more than rubber at Sonoma? Kurt Busch inspects his tires
(Photo by Rusty Jarrett/Getty Images for NASCAR)
Also looking to snap a long losing streak – Kevin Harvick.
It’s been quite a while since his photo-finish victory over Mark Martin at Daytona last season.
It is Harvick who usually sets the game for teammates Clint Bowyer and Jeff Burton when it comes to road racing. “Kevin is our road racer, and we bank on him to do the testing. Kevin and Jeff both went to VIR (just north of Winston-Salem) and tested there; I made it to Mexico City, so I have raced a road course this year,” Bowyer says.
And Harvick’s game this weekend?
Simple: “You can turn a 30th-place car into a 10th-place car if you wind up getting lucky and are on the right strategy. But to win you still have to have a car fast enough,” Harvick says.
“The biggest thing is you can lose so much ground if something goes wrong.”
Denny Hamlin, second at the Glen last season, and 10th at Sonoma, may be ready to break out of the shadows of his teammates
(Photo by Doug Benc/Getty Images)
Harvick is only one of Childress’ threesome to win a road race, at the Glen two years ago. (Childress’ other NASCAR road course wins have came with the late Dale Earnhardt Sr. at Sonoma in 1995, and with Robby Gordon at Sonoma and the Glen in 2003.)
“We have always focused on road races; some people don’t,” Harvick says. “We test, practice, and try to get in a rhythm.”
But Harvick comes into Sunday’s 350 distinctly out of rhythm. While Burton is cruising, Harvick, like Bowyer, has hit a tough streak: “We have had a bad six weeks. We have crashed constantly...ran out of gas at Phoenix….just have had a lot of things go wrong.
“Speed would help everybody…but obviously the speed isn’t hurting him Jeff Burton too bad. They have been consistent and finished every week. That is why we are where we are—we haven’t finished.
“We have top-10 cars; we just don’t have dominating speed.”
Harvick says he’ll find out Sunday how good a teacher he has been for Bowyer: “We have been talking about it quite a bit—where you shift, what you do,” Harvick says.
“They took the opposite approach to it and didn’t test at all…left it up to us to tell them where to start.
“We will find out if we did a good job.”
NASCAR execs are enlisting every driver in their ticket sales push. Here Carl Edwards handling out tickets
(Photo by Nick Doan/Getty Images)
Tickets, tickets, tickets. Wanna a deal?
NASCAR promoters are hawking tickets as hard as they can….even though the price of admission is an increasingly smaller part of the financial picture for fans and families looking to fill some of these seats.
And it’s not just $4 a gallon gas. In fact, given the typically exorbitant price of hotels rooms race weekend, it’s cheaper sometimes to take a motorcoach to the track.
So what’s Daytona look like for the July Fourth race weekend?
New ticket packages for the Saturday night event for the backstretch start at $100, and include a Sprint Fanview rental – that’s a high-tech race scanner with live video and more.
And Daytona is already selling tickets for next year’s season-opening Daytona 500, starting at $149.
No wonder these guys get overheated. Juan Pablo Montoya warming up for Sunday’s 350 at Sonomaj, where he won in 2007
(Photo Credit: Jason Smith/Getty Images for NASCAR)
NASCAR officials, responding to complaints from drivers about excessive heat inside the cockpit of the new winged cars, have been monitoring heat and carbon monoxide. Jeff Burton says that’s good: “I think it’s good drivers can say ‘Hey, we’re having this issue,’ and NASCAR tries to help with it.
“They are hot, there’s no question the cars are hotter than they used to be.”
However Burton says he’s not worried about excessive carbon monoxide levels, because previous worries – and drivers getting so badly gassed they needed a lot of post-race oxygen – have solved most of those issues.
“Personally I’m at an all-time low in carbon monoxide exposure,” Burton says. “I was involved in carbon monoxide testing 10 years ago and learned a lot about carbon monoxide.
“My team has put a lot of effort into putting systems in the car that scrub carbon monoxide, and we’ve seen some real positive results.”
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Sonoma and the art of flying: Ryan Newman takes the esses
(Photo by Geoff Burke/Getty Images for NASCAR)