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For two
weekends every season, NASCAR drivers get to do more than turn
left. The road courses at Infineon and Watkins Glen give
drivers a challenge that they get at no other track on their
schedule: Road races.
And it’s
become typical for a few teams to bring in “ringers” for these
two races, drivers who specialize in driving road courses.
Now when
you have a team that only runs a few races every year, it’s not
a bad idea. You want to bring in a driver who is going to give
you the best chance to finish near the top, and earn the most
money possible for your team. That way, perhaps those winnings
will help you to run in more races the next season. If that’s
the situation for your team, hiring a ringer makes a whole lot
of sense.
But if
you’re a team that already runs all 36 races each season, does a
“ringer” make sense for only two races?
One of the
more obvious teams in this situation is the Chip Ganassi owned
#40 car. Of the 36 races this season, David Stremme will be
piloting the car for 34 of them. Although he’s a rookie, he’s
obviously “their guy” for this team. Yet for the two road
course races, Ganassi placed Stremme on the sidelines, and put a
“ringer” in the driver’s seat.
Okay, so
Stremme wasn’t exactly “on the sidelines”, having nothing to do
with the race. He was acting as a spotter for the car he
normally drives. But the point is, he wasn’t driving the
car he normally drives.
And why
not?
Well, the
obvious answer is that Stremme doesn’t have as much experience
with road course racing, and bringing in Scott Pruett would give
the team a better chance of winning, or at least finishing in a
better position than they would if Stremme drove the car. As
far as that goes, it worked out at Watkins Glen, where Pruett
finished 6th, pocketed a large chink of winnings for
the team, and earned some much needed owner’s points.
In the
short term, that may be just what the team needed. They got
some cash to operate with (although for a multi-car team like
Ganassi, I hardly think that’s a major concern. They wouldn’t
be a multi-car team if they didn’t have plenty of operating
cash). They got some owner points to keep them in the top 35
and a guaranteed spot in the next race.
But none
of that happened earlier in the season at Infineon. Pruett
finished that race in 30th place. Would Stremme,
with his limited experience, have fared much worse? Who knows?
And what
does this do for the team in the long run. Does Ganassi
plan to bring in a more experienced road course driver every
year? What if Stremme were competing for a driver’s
championship, or trying to get into the chase? What if he had
been closer to the top of the Rookie-of-the-year standings
this year? Taking him out of the driver’s seat for two
races all but ends any hopes of those things happening.
If you
bring in someone with “more experience”, then exactly where and
when is David Stremme supposed to gain experience? This
year, the #40 team has been mathematically eliminated from the
Race for the Chase. And Stremme was pretty much out of
Rookie-of-the-Year contention. So what did the team have to
lose by having Stremme drive the car on the road course?
Perhaps some owner points, and dropping out of the top 35. But
Stremme has been qualifying on time at most other tracks anyway,
so those owner points then don’t become as important.
This would
have been a perfect chance for Stremme to gain some
valuable experience on the road course. There was little to
lose, and much to gain. Instead, he was sitting in the
spotters’ boxes.
So what
happens next year, if the team is in contention for the chase,
and Stremme still has no experience on the road-course. Does
Ganassi bring in another ringer? That would certainly end those
chances. But when you’re in the middle of a championship run,
that is certainly not the time to be “learning” how to road
race, or to be “getting experience”. The time for that was this
season. Ganassi chose not to give it to his rookie driver.
We’ll have
to wait until next season to see if that decision comes back to
hunt him. |
