Hot 20 over the past 10 – Penske teams still 25 points short, while the only thing hot about Stewart is his temper
Jimmie Johnson remains our hot dog as the action swings to Talladega, Alabama this weekend. Both Carl Edwards and Clint Bowyer would have been regulated to third except for a certain rear end housing. Two in fact.
Roger Penske is still appealing the 25-point penalties and suspensions that cost the teams and crews of Brad Keselowski and Joey Logano. They lost the first round this week, but have one more shot to have the sanctions altered when they meet next week with NASCAR’s Appellate Officer John Middlebrook. Penske says the parts at the center of the issue were approved by NASCAR, while the organization says they were not presented in “a completed form/assembly…” for consideration. In short, a part might be fine, but how that part is used in conjunction with other parts might not be. It is similar to having approval to drive after seven beers over the course of a week, but having them all within one hour of that week might not be. The devil is in the details, I guess.
While our Hot 20 chart only dwells on the past ten races, it does allow us a glimpse at the direction any driver is going. In the case of Tony Stewart, the trend is that the bottom appears to be dropping out. In fact, Stewart is one point off this list, right behind Mark Martin, a driver who has appeared in only nine of those events. With this kind of luck, no wonder Stewart got hot when Kurt Busch bumped him out of a Top Ten spot at Richmond to leave him once again an also ran.
While some usual suspects are among our warm wheel men, Aric Almirola probably was not a pre-season pick to be amongst them. The driver of the iconic #43 is just outside the Top Ten in the standings with three Top Tens over the course of the past three.
As for who might be hot enough to win on Sunday, Bowyer has done well at Talladega. While the boy from Kansas has claimed a Top Ten in five of the past six there, Keselowski and Kevin Harvick have three Top Fives to their credit over the same term.
| Name | Points | POS | W | T5 | T10 |
| Jimmie Johnson | 352 | 1 | 2 | 4 | 6 |
| Carl Edwards | 332 | 2 | 1 | 4 | 5 |
| Clint Bowyer | 332 | 3 | 0 | 5 | 6 |
| Dale Earnhardt, Jr. | 331 | 4 | 0 | 3 | 7 |
| Kasey Kahne | 321 | 5 | 1 | 4 | 5 |
| Kyle Busch | 320 | 6 | 2 | 6 | 6 |
| Brad Keselowski | 313 | 7 | 0 | 4 | 7 |
| Greg Biffle | 311 | 8 | 0 | 2 | 5 |
| Kevin Harvick | 307 | 9 | 1 | 1 | 3 |
| Paul Menard | 304 | 10 | 0 | 0 | 4 |
| Aric Almirola | 295 | 11 | 0 | 0 | 4 |
| Jeff Gordon | 282 | 12 | 1 | 2 | 3 |
| Ryan Newman | 271 | 13 | 0 | 2 | 5 |
| Martin Truex, Jr. | 270 | 14 | 0 | 2 | 4 |
| Jamie McMurray | 269 | 15 | 0 | 0 | 3 |
| Matt Kenseth | 268 | 16 | 2 | 2 | 5 |
| Joey Logano | 258 | 17 | 0 | 3 | 3 |
| Kurt Busch | 251 | 18 | 0 | 2 | 4 |
| Jeff Burton | 243 | 19 | 0 | 1 | 2 |
| Mark Martin | 235 | 20 | 0 | 1 | 3 |
| Tony Stewart | 234 | 21 | 0 | 0 | 1 |
Penalty still lingering, Kenseth remains strong bet at Talladega
There’s a large black cloud looming on the horizon for Matt Kenseth and his Joe Gibbs Racing team. It is not, however, the 2.66-mile superspeedway simply known as ‘Dega.
As the Sprint Cup Series heads to Talladega this weekend, Kenseth will do so – for now at least – with crew chief Jason Ratcliff and look for their third win of the season. Next Wednesday their appeal will be heard by NASCAR for infractions found with the engine following a win at Kansas two weeks ago. Should they lose, Ratcliff will be suspended for six NSCS races and the 50 driver and owner points will remain stripped.
That pending disappointment though, is in the future. For now, what lies ahead is a wildcard race that Kenseth is eagerly looking forward to. Pretty ironic for a driver who once felt he never knew what to do on restrictor plate tracks.
“I used to dread it. Last year I was really excited about going there because we were just running so great at the plate races, and I’m excited to go this weekend,” said Kenseth on Tuesday during the weekly NASCAR teleconference.
“We had a great Daytona 500 until we dropped out of the race, but we had a really competitive car. We were leading the race when we broke.”
Competitive is an understatement. In his first official race with JGR he picked up where he left off in 2012 – by dominating the Great American Race. Before his engine expired, while as mentioned leading, he had led 86 of the 149 laps he completed. Teammate Kyle Busch’s engine expired just a number of laps later.
It would have been Kenseth’s third Daytona 500 win and third plate win in five races. After winning the season opening race last year with Roush Fenway, he finished third at both the spring Talladega race and the summer Daytona event before winning the Chase Talladega race last fall. Going two for four thereby giving himself an average finish of 2.0 on the restrictor plate tracks.
“Yeah, that was a pretty gawdy number, I don’t think we’ll ever be able to do that again,” noted Kenseth. “It’s the same approach, you show up at the track, you go through to lead laps, put yourself in position to win.
“Last year, we had really fast cars at the superspeedways and this year at Daytona we did as well. I think when we had our mechanical problems, we had JGR cars first second and third and led some laps there and had ourselves in a good spot.
“So hopefully going back to Talladega, our cars will have some speed in them again and we’ll be able to make it 500 miles and hopefully be up front and be in that mix.”
Freak breaks have bitten Kenseth more than once this season, resulting in finishes that haven’t been indicative of his performances. But Kenseth remains pleased with the team’s progress and early success together. While there are always areas to improve, he isn’t shy from saying how “really, really good” the group of guys on the No. 20 team are.
Now moving forward, even with the uncertainty hanging ahead, the focus is on winning Talladega. There’s not much that Kenseth feels will carry over from 2012 in terms of his success, but he is a believer in momentum. With his recent success not only at Daytona but through the first nine races, there’s not much more that he needs, except maybe a different strategy.
“I would expect to run a very limited amount of laps,” Kenseth said about the upcoming Talladega weekend and practice in particular. “I don’t think that handling is going to be a big deal. I don’t think we have a lot of stuff to work through. I think that you have your basic Daytona package, being an impound race, there’s not really anything to work out, much to work on in qualifying other than how much taping you put on the grille.”
Once the green flag falls in Sunday’s Aaron’s 499 however, Kenseth will go to work on another plate win. As well as re-earning the Chase bonus points that were taken away from the Kansas win. And should the 20 team follow through on Kenseth’s practice prediction and the engine remains together, it would be foolish to overlook the possibility.
“I think that Talladega, especially being impound, is one of those rare races, you can almost do the thing in a day; you could tack everybody, qualify them, line them up and race them,” he said.
“I don’t think you’ll see a lot of cars out there doing a whole lot of practice I think most of your practice is actually during that 500 miles, figuring out where you can pass, where you can’t, trying to figure out your moves so you have it for the end of the race. Nobody has told me any different, but I wouldn’t anticipate a whole bunch of laps in practice.”
Robby Benton returns to his roots at Richmond, crew chiefing for Kenny Wallace
With sponsors hard to find and the rough state of the economy, Robby Benton had to do what he had to do to keep his team his float.
“I had to go the route of everything that I had acquired for myself and utilize that to keep my team float by using other drivers that their own sponsorship, their own funding,” Benton said during an interview on Tuesday afternoon. “So going that route to just survive, to keep the team together.
“So I started doing that. I was the crew chief and general manager and we grew from a part-time ARCA team to a full time ARCA team and then we parlayed that into a full time Nationwide team and now we’re in our fifth season in the Nationwide Series.”
With Alex Bowman behind the wheel and Chris Rice calling the shots this year, the No. 99 team has scored five top 15 finishes in seven starts, including a third at the season opening Daytona race.
This past weekend, though, RAB Racing branched out with a second car – the No. 29 Toyota Care Camry – with Kenny Wallace driving.
“Just to get Kenny Wallace back in the seat – he has done a lot for our race team,” Benton commented. “He had been a very important part of RAB Racing for the past almost four years. Being able to take him back to a place that is near and dear to him – Richmond is one of his favourite tracks – I think was very special to us.”
Benton also got to return to his roots, sitting on the box as the crew chief.
“As a car owner on this race team, my normal day to day attention is elsewhere,” he said. “I used to be a crew chief when we started this team so it’s nice to get back to working on the cars and sitting on the pit box and things like that. It really reminded me of how strong our 99 group is because there are things that you take for granted, things that they do on a normal routine basis. When you have to do it for yourself, you’re reminded of how good a job they actually do.”
Benton says that he was proud of how the team ran with being a new team. They were seventh and second in the two practice sessions, before qualifying fifth.
“We were able to show strength in our organization because the 99 has run upfront a lot this year and to be able to unload another car and be able to run up front with Kenny showed a lot,” Benton commented. “It was fun to work with Kenny again. We hadn’t got to work with him since last year. It was an honor to serve as his crew chief.”
The race wouldn’t go as well as Benton had planned as they’d finished 36th due to a failure in the rear end gear.
“We had a DNF there which no team wants, which we defiantly didn’t with bringing Kenny back into the organization and his first race in 2013 being a DNF,” he commented. “We’ll get back to Charlotte and rebound from it and hopefully have a good run there.”
With one of the smaller organizations in the garage compared to the Sprint Cup Series backed organizations they are running against, Benton says that he feels proud when his guys can go out there and compete right alongside them.
“I think what we lack in budget, we make up for with the guys in heart and effort and experience,” he said. “Our guys want it bad and everybody that works here knows what we have to work with and the constraints that we’re operating in. I think running well is the best thing that can happen because it pushes the guys that much further. I think going into the season we had a goal that we wanted to try and meet. As you run and do better, those goals change, but our guys have stayed realistic in what we should do and what we want to do. At the same time, everybody is very proud to compete with the Gibbs and the Roush and the RCR cars, Penske cars. T
“hose are the cars that we’re parked in between in points so I think that says a lot for our organization, for our size to the people that we have to the budget that we have to the budget, it’s something that we can be proud of.”
Crunching The Numbers: Talladega
After a crazy weekend for the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series and the NASCAR Nationwide Series at the short track of Richmond International Raceway, both series pack up and move on to the biggest, fastest track on the circuit for some restrictor plate racing at Talladega Superspeedway. As is the case each trip to the 2.66 mile, high banked behemoth in Alabama, these races are sure to provide nonstop action and the driver who can play the 200 mph chess game just right and avoid the inevitable “Big One” will come out on top.
Sprint Cup Series
With Talladega being the second restrictor plate race for the new Gen6 Sprint Cup car after its debut at Daytona to open the season, only time will tell if the racing in the Aaron’s 499 on Sunday will mirror that from the Daytona 500 or if Talladega has a few tricks up its sleeve for these drivers as they try to figure out the new car in the restrictor plate draft.
| Driver | Races | Win | Top 5 | Top 10 | Pole | Laps Led | Avg. Start | Avg. Finish |
| Brad Keselowski | 8 | 2 | 3 | 6 | 0 | 31 | 18.9 | 12.2 |
| Dale Earnhardt, Jr. | 26 | 5 | 9 | 13 | 0 | 737 | 15.6 | 15.0 |
| Kevin Harvick | 24 | 1 | 6 | 10 | 1 | 155 | 22.0 | 15.4 |
| Tony Stewart | 28 | 1 | 9 | 13 | 0 | 317 | 16.5 | 15.8 |
| David Ragan | 12 | 0 | 3 | 5 | 0 | 27 | 19.8 | 16.0 |
| Kurt Busch | 24 | 0 | 6 | 13 | 0 | 143 | 20.8 | 16.1 |
| Clint Bowyer | 14 | 2 | 4 | 7 | 0 | 96 | 18.7 | 16.1 |
| Jeff Gordon | 40 | 6 | 15 | 19 | 3 | 839 | 11.5 | 16.4 |
| Jimmie Johnson | 22 | 2 | 5 | 9 | 1 | 234 | 10.2 | 17.7 |
| Travis Kvapil | 10 | 0 | 0 | 2 | 1 | 17 | 22.1 | 17.8 |
Who To Watch: As the defending spring Talladega race winner and two time winner at Talladega, Brad Keselowski leads all active drivers at the track with two wins, three top fives, six top tens, 31 laps led, and an average finish of 12.2 in eight starts at the track. Coming in just behind Keselowski is Dale Earnhardt, Jr., who has five wins, nine top fives, 13 top tens, 737 laps led, and an average finish of 15.0 in 26 starts. However, Earnhardt has not won at Talladega since the Fall of 2004 and only has five top tens in the eight years (16 races) since that last win, but Earnhardt can never be counted out at restrictor plate races, no matter the track.
Others that could find their way to Victory Lane this weekend include: Richmond winner and winner of the Fall race in 2010 at Talladega, Kevin Harvick; Tony Stewart, with one win, nine top fives, 13 top tens, and an average finish of 15.8, David Ragan, who hasn’t won at Talladega, but does have a Sprint Cup restrictor plate win at Daytona and a Nationwide Series win at Talladega under his belt as well as an average finish of 16.0; Kurt Busch, who has six top fives and 13 top tens in 24 starts and an average finish of 16.1; two time winner Clint Bowyer, who also has an average finish of 16.1 in 14 starts; Jeff Gordon, with six wins, but none since sweeping both races in 2007; and Jimmie Johnson, who has two wins, but has had horrible luck at restrictor plate races as of late, especially at Talladega.
Nationwide Series
If fans thought the season opener for the Nationwide Series at Daytona was wild, this weekend’s at Talladega is sure to provide just as many, if not more, thrills as that race did, due in large part to the two-car tandem drafting style that these drivers use in this series.
| Driver | Races | Win | Top 5 | Top 10 | Pole | Laps Led | Avg. Start | Avg. Finish |
| Joey Logano | 4 | 1 | 4 | 4 | 0 | 21 | 10.5 | 2.0 |
| Kurt Busch | 1 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 1 | 31.0 | 6.0 |
| Trevor Bayne | 2 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 23 | 22.0 | 9.5 |
| Sam Hornish, Jr. | 2 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 4 | 10.0 | 12.5 |
| Danica Patrick | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 17.0 | 13.0 |
| Brian Vickers | 4 | 0 | 0 | 2 | 0 | 17 | 11.2 | 14.0 |
| Justin Allgaier | 4 | 0 | 0 | 2 | 0 | 0 | 19.2 | 15.5 |
| Joe Nemechek | 18 | 2 | 7 | 8 | 5 | 202 | 10.7 | 15.9 |
| John Wes Townley | 2 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 28.5 | 16.5 |
| Kyle Busch | 9 | 1 | 4 | 5 | 0 | 114 | 11.6 | 16.6 |
Who To Watch: Sprint Cup regular Joey Logano will be making his first start in the Nationwide Series for Penske Racing at Talladega and carries an impressive Nationwide Series record at the track with him. In four starts, Logano has one win, four top fives, four top tens, 21 laps led, and an average finish of 2.0. If Logano can reproduce those results that he obtained while driving for Joe Gibbs Racing with his new team, Logano will definitely be one of the favorites for the win on Saturday.
Logano isn’t the only favorite for the victory, several others will also be in contention, including: Kurt Busch, who will be teaming back up with Phoenix Racing, finished sixth in his lone Nationwide start at Talladega and won last July at Daytona, so he has ran well on restrictor plate tracks in the Nationwide Series; Trevor Bayne, who has two starts, one top ten, and an average finish of 9.5; Sam Hornish, Jr., the current points leader, has two starts and an average finish of 12.5; and Danica Patrick, who will be running for Turner Scott Motorsports, who has one Talladega Nationwide start and an average finish of 13.0.
