Simona de Silvestro impressed in St. Petersburg
After finishing 13th or worse in the 14 starts she made last year, Simona de Silvestro made the move to KV Racing Technologies for 2013 in hopes of better results. With one race under her belt, she is off to a good start after finishing sixth in St. Petersburg.
De Silvestro ran within the top five most of the race, falling back to sixth in the final laps as the handling went away after going with the red tires while most of the drivers around her went with the blacks.
“It was just a big relief that we started off the weekend really strong, qualified up front and pretty much raced up front the whole race,” she said. “So it was really good. I think it was a big confidence boost for me and the team.
“I think now we can clean up a few things to be even better.”
In speaking of the tires, she said she lost the tires at the end, saying it was more set-up related rather than compound related.
In making the team switch, beyond the results on track so far, one of the benefits that she is already seeing this season is having Tony Kanaan as a teammate.
“He has a lot of experience. I feel like we have a good friendly competition going on in the team,” she said. “I think we really push each other every session. I think the team gets better that way. I think that’s going to make us pretty strong the whole season.”
One of the other things with the switch was from Honda engines to Chevrolet engines.
“It’s definitely great to be with Team Chevy,” she said. “As soon as I signed with KV, they embraced me with open arms. It’s been going really well. I think the engine is awesome. It’s been really fast. It showed it the whole weekend. In the lead, there was always a Chevy engine.”
She added that she has enjoyed the relationship so far, in seeing that they are always trying different things each week and the communication is pretty open across the board.
The next race will another test to see whether she can keep things going strong, or whether she will fall off and the run at St. Pete will be considered a fluke. In three starts at Barber Motorsports Park, she has finished 21st, ninth and 20th.
“We had a pretty good test there,” she said. “I think the race in St. Pete was really competitive. Everybody was racing really hard. I think we’re going to see the same thing at Barber.
“Last year I thought it was a pretty exciting race, quite a bit of passing, which we didn’t see in the past. Hopefully it’s going to be the same this year and it’s going to be pretty action-packed hopefully.”
Beyond that, there is the challenge of the ovals later on this season, which she admits is her weak link.
“I’ve done one test only with KV Racing so far, Texas, and it went pretty well,” she commented. “I think with Tony’s experience I’m going to be able to follow his lead a little bit on that and try to improve on that.
“I think that’s going to be the key for me this season on the ovals.”
With the success, that does put her in the spotlight and a role model for other young girls out there who want to get into racing.
“Well, I think the biggest thing for any kid, if you dream about something, I think if you put the effort behind it, you be able to achieve your dream,” she said. “I’ve been really lucky that people saw that I wanted to become a racecar driver at a young age. A lot of people saw that and they helped me throughout my career. I think the biggest thing is not to give up and to really focus 100 percent behind their goal, and their dreams should become reality.”
Hot 20 over the past 10 – Martinsville is next, but Hamlin’s race for the Chase begins in May
When the season started, we wondered about Mark Martin’s chances of making the Chase. Even in running a partial season, the 54-year old still had the chops to possibly win a couple of races before the deadline and claim a wildcard spot. If we contemplated Martin making it in, the odds of Denny Hamlin slipping through must be that much greater.
Hamlin was contending for his first win of the season when he and Joey Logano came together in California. His resulting back injury will have him out until Talladega on May 5th. Denny won eight times in 2010, had five victories last season, and 22 career decisions in 264 starts. The law of averages has him with a shot of at least one win over his next 16 starts. Can he get two?
Talladega likely will not provide one of them. In 14 contests there, he has no wins and just three top fives. His best was third in the spring race of 2008. Darlington is a different story. Seven races, six top tens, one victory. If Hamlin can claim Darlington, he would need just one more win in his next 14 races to be a contender.
In fact, in the 16 races that will await him upon his return, Denny has also won at Pocono and Michigan, which host two events apiece, New Hampshire, Bristol, Atlanta, and even at Richmond. 16 races to win two, with special emphasis on nine of those events, on seven of those tracks, where he has claimed 13 victories in 93 past attempts. It is not a lock, but Denny Hamlin most definitely has a chance. In the end, he needs to win at least two and climb back into the top Twenty in the season calculations. He might be as much as a hundred points out by then. Still, while points may mean something, wins for Hamlin will mean everything.
Meanwhile, as he slowly sinks from view on this chart for a few weeks, the rest will be in Martinsville on Sunday. Dale Earnhardt Jr is our biggest mover as he has now run nine of the past ten affairs, averaging 35.1 points in each. While Hamlin dropped six spots after Fontana, Clint Bowyer is down eight after his engine let go in his last outing. At least he can’t blame his misfortune on Joey Logano.
| Name | Points | POS | LW | W | T5 | T10 |
| Brad Keselowski | 373 | 1 | 1 | 0 | 5 | 8 |
| Kyle Busch | 345 | 2 | 4 | 1 | 7 | 7 |
| Jimmie Johnson | 336 | 3 | 3 | 3 | 4 | 6 |
| Kasey Kahne | 325 | 4 | 6 | 1 | 5 | 6 |
| Greg Biffle | 325 | 5 | 5 | 0 | 1 | 6 |
| Matt Kenseth | 318 | 6 | 7 | 2 | 3 | 5 |
| Dale Earnhardt, Jr. | 316 | 7 | 14 | 0 | 3 | 7 |
| Carl Edwards | 313 | 8 | 8 | 1 | 3 | 3 |
| Paul Menard | 313 | 9 | 10 | 0 | 1 | 5 |
| Clint Bowyer | 312 | 10 | 2 | 0 | 3 | 6 |
| Kevin Harvick | 293 | 11 | 11 | 1 | 1 | 4 |
| Kurt Busch | 292 | 12 | 13 | 0 | 2 | 5 |
| Ryan Newman | 283 | 13 | 15 | 0 | 3 | 5 |
| Joey Logano | 279 | 14 | 16 | 0 | 1 | 1 |
| Denny Hamlin | 275 | 15 | 9 | 0 | 2 | 2 |
| Aric Almirola | 275 | 16 | 12 | 0 | 1 | 2 |
| Jeff Gordon | 262 | 17 | 19 | 1 | 1 | 4 |
| Martin Truex, Jr. | 256 | 18 | 17 | 0 | 1 | 3 |
| Tony Stewart | 255 | 19 | 18 | 0 | 2 | 3 |
| Jamie McMurray | 252 | 20 | 20 | 0 | 0 | 1 |
From early struggles to solid finishes, Earnhardt Jr. carries momentum to Martinsville
While Martinsville may be one of Dale Earnhardt Jr.’s best tracks now, it didn’t start out that way. In his first trip to Martinsville as a rookie, he finished 26th and 36th on the paper clip short track.
“I remember the first several races I ran there, I ran into everything,” he said. “I ran into other race cars, walls, pace cars, just about everything that could be ran into, I found it. And you know, it was real frustrating because I had thought of myself as a short track driver, and I thought that I had honed these skills on these short tracks in the Southeast, and this should be where I excel the most.”
There was one point in the race where he hit the ambulance, giving it a little bump ’cause it wouldn’t move. Even though the first start there was somewhat disastrous, there were a highlight.
“Somewhere in the race I had started on the inside a lap down, and I took off and yarded the leader by a straightaway,” he said. “I was so proud of myself, and that’s the only thing I took away from the race.”
Though one of the things that the young driver was not noticing at the time was the need to be patient due to the race being 500 laps, versus most short track events that are at most 100, 200 laps. He says he learned to preach patience to himself and control his emotions, knowing that he couldn’t push hard into the tight corners every single lap.
“It took me a few trips to really learn to be more patient, to let the race sort of come to me, that the track is going to come and go, the balance of the car is going to change, that you don’t do all your work in the first 100 laps, and you’ve sort of got to wait out the competition and let your crew make good choices and good strategy that keeps you in the thick of things and then have an opportunity at the end,” he said. “It just took a really — it took a while for me, it seems like a while anyways, to really understand that. Now I do feel like I do do well on the short tracks because it takes a totally different mentality than what you think coming in, even though you might be coming from the short track ranks.”
Since picking up his first top five at Martinsville in 2002, Earnhardt has ran up front at Martinsville, in the thick for the win, scoring 10 top 5s, 14 top 10s in 26 starts – but no victory.
Coming into the weekend, many are thinking that Earnhardt could pick up his first grandfather clock as he has had a good season so far, leading the points by 12 over Brad Keselowski and finishing in the top 10 in the first five races thus far this season. Earnhardt attributes the success to the adjustments that crew chief Steve LeTarte has made late in the race in helping them gain positions.
“Two races really come to mind, and that’s Bristol and California, with just a handful of laps to go, we’re not in the top 10 in either one of those races,” he said. “Steve made some pit calls in the last 25 percent of those races that set us up to be able to make up a lot of ground at the end if everything went according to plan. I don’t really know if that was his plan, but he surely makes it look good.”
The success they’ve had, Earnhardt also attributes it to “circumstance and good fortune”, in saying that they’ve been good, but not great.
“I think we’re a better team than we were last year but still — I just feel like that we need to be winning races,” he said. “We need to be running up in the top 2, 3 all day long, we need to be just — we just need to run a little bit better. There’s just a little bit there for us to gain until I feel super comfortable and feel, I guess, like our statistics and our points position really reflect on our performance.”
Many fans and people within NASCAR have been waiting for Earnhardt to return to the top of the points standings, predicting that it would fix some of the sports’ popularity problems. However, in the week that Earnhardt led the points standings, he wasn’t the focus of the attention. That was directed towards Denny Hamlin and Joey Logano feud and how it blew up in the final laps at Auto Club Speedway. Earnhardt is fine with saying, saying that it allows them to focus on what they’re doing.
“We’re still not — we’re not winning races, and I don’t expect to get much attention until we can win races,” he said. “And I know a little bit more about — I guess the way we’ve ran doesn’t really reflect well on our finishes, meaning that I think we should run better. We’ve finished well, but I think that there’s a lot of areas that we can improve, and we get to focus on that sort of being out of the scope and out of the spotlight. We can pay more attention to how do we get better as a team.”
Earnhardt Jr. added that when he can begin to win some races, they’ll get the credit that is due, but till then, they’re in the right spot – attention wise – based on what they’ve done in comparison to other drivers up front. For now, the focus is getting better as the season goes forward.
“We’ve got time in the season to get there, and we did that last year; we got faster throughout the season,” he said. “And by mid-summer we were really one of the best teams out there, I thought. So I’ve got good confidence in the team that we’re going to be able to gain what I think we need to gain to be able to compete once the Chase comes around, and hopefully we’ll have that opportunity to be in the Chase at that point.”
