clint bowyer

Have at it boys!

November 12, 2012 by Gary Grant

Few sports are as hotly contested as auto racing, which means that when things don’t go someone’s way, there is always a chance for fisticuffs to break out. Of course the roundy round racers have more of a history of “takin’ it outside” than most other series. The NASCAR circus kept true to that history yesterday when Jeff Gordon got into Clint Bowyer on the last lap of the 3 to last race of the season at Phoenix.

For those of you, who like me, didn’t get to see the race, I’ve got the action for you below.

What do you think: with the absence of the NHL, should the NASCAR boys keep fighting like hockey players?

Filed Under: clint bowyer, fight, jeff gordon, Nascar, Phoenix

NASCAR – Kasey Kahne Wins The Martinsville Pole – Allstar Race Rules Change

April 1, 2012 by

Kasey Kahne will accept his second Coors Lite Pole award of the 2012 season today during Driver introductions at Martinsville.

Kasey Kahne wants to win, and starting from the pole for the Goody’s Fast Relief 500 is how he plans on getting it done. For the second time this year Kahne finds himself leading the field to the green, this time with a speed of 96.128 mph, and hopes for a better ending to the race this time than he has had yet. Moving into Hendrick equipment this year should’ve meant more consistency, better finishes, and better points position, but lady luck has had other plans for Kahne so far. Wrecking out early, engine issues, and just plain bad luck have kept Kahne down in 27th in points despite his excellent starts so far this season. Since moving to Hendrick’s Kahne has an average starting position of 7.6 but has only averaged 20.6 position on his finishes.

Martinsville is a different beast than other tracks on the circuit. A short track which has the nickname of the Paperclip due to the unique track layout. The .526 mile track is the shortest in NASCAR and has a reputation for giving drivers a rough ride, and for shortening tempers. So how does Kahne feel about Martinsville?

“It’s a tough track to qualify and a tough track to race — always has been one of my tougher ones over the years,” said Kahne, who has only led for a total of 19 laps at the famed short track in his career. “I’m glad we can start up front, have a great pit stall — that No. 1 stall — I think that helps throughout the whole race with track position.”

“Hopefully, we’ll have a solid day [on Sunday]. That’s what we need to do. We’ve had great Fridays and Saturdays but just haven’t put together a Sunday yet.”

Kevin Harvick will start second today in Martinsville

Kevin Harvick will start second on the grid after qualifying only .08 mph slower with a speed of 97.048 mph. Can “The Closer” get it done from here? Harvick won here last spring and would love to repeat that feat but there are 42 other drivers. Making his 400th career start since taking over the ride after the tragic loss of Dale Earnhardt Sr., Harvick feels that his team has matured and that things are finally coming together again in the RCR stables.

“I feel like it’s taken seven or eight years to get through the Earnhardt transition,” Harvick said. “There’s a lot of things you look back on now and that effect took a lot of time. Then as the grandkids — Austin and Ty — came, you [can] really see that enthusiasm level come back that I first saw in Richard in 1999 and 2000 as we led into the start of my career at RCR.”

4 time Martinsville winner Denny Hamlin will start third followed by Clint Bowyer who ran the exact same time, but will start fourth based on current owner points. Ryan Newman starts 5th.

Dale Earnhardt Jr edged current series Champion Tony Stewart by one spot on the starting grid and will start 14th and Stewart 15th.

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The Allstar race will take on a new format once again as NASCAR changes it up once again.

The format will have the drivers competing in 4 separate segments of 20 laps each and a final 10 lap shootout. The winner of each of the first 4 segments will be advanced to the front for the restart before the final 10 lap segment, rewarding the sinners of the 4 segments with track position right when they need it most.

Steve Addington, Crew Chief for the #14 of Tony Stewart, talks about how this will change the strategy for the event this time around.

“Those 20-lap segments are going to be a lot like the 10-lap segment,” said Steve Addington. “Everybody’s going to be wanting to get up front. I think it’s going to be really important to win one of those segments, because coming down pit road, that opens it up to a lot.”

Former All-Star Race winner Kasey Kahne said it would be tough for a driver on old tires to hold off another with four tires for the entirety of the final 10-lap segment. But the potential scenarios seem endless.

“If four guys don’t get anything, and then you restart sixth with tires, you might be able to win from there,” said Kahne, who won the event in 2008. “It will be interesting how it all works out. It will be a crew chief’s game late in the race.”

“I think the 20-lap segments are going to mean a lot,” Kahne said. “You want to be in that top four coming to pit road for the final 10, because 10 laps goes by quick here. You’ve got to be in those front four spots if you want to win the race in 10 laps, I think.”

Filed Under: clint bowyer, Dale Earnhardt Jr., Denny Hamlin, Goodys Fast Relief 500, Kasey Kahne, kevin-harvick, Martinsville, Motorsport, Nascar, Ryan Newman, Tony Stewwart

NASCAR – Kesolowski Wins Again At Bristol Despite Timing Changes – MWR Has Their Best Team Finish Ever

March 19, 2012 by

Brad Kesolowski's #2 Miller Lite Dodge proved to be the fastest at Bristol as he takes his second career Checkered flag at this track

When Brad Kesolowski won the race in Bristol in August 2011 almost everyone you talked to about it said it was because of how he took advantage of the timing lines on pit road and that his car was not good enough for the win, myself included. So NASCAR made changes to the timing lines, and Kesolowski went out to prove that he could win even without that advantage, and he did by winning the 2012 Food City 500 after leading the final 111 laps and holding off Matt Kenseth right up to the end. with a margin of almost 6 full car lengths at the finish line, Kesolowski proved how fast his #2 Miller Lite, Penske Racing Dodge, really was.

“I got on Twitter, and I got kind of PO’d at some people that said I won it because of the timing line,” Keselowski said. “I knew this Blue Deuce was fast enough to win the race last fall with or without timing lines. It feels so good just to prove it here in the spring race.

“This car here, this brand-new car that Penske Racing built — everybody back at the shop did a phenomenal job. The last few races have been really good, and I knew we had a shot at winning one if we closed the deal.”

“Matt didn’t make it easy,” said Kesolowski. ”That’s his job, to not make it easy on me. He raced me hard; I raced him hard, rubbed a little bit. That’s good racing.”

Matt Kenseth finshed second in Bristol in his #17 Roush Racing Ford.

Kenseth in his #17 Best Buy Ford, who finished second, felt he may have had a chance on the final restart if Kesolowski has chosen the bottom line.

”If I’d have been on the top, maybe I could have pinned him down there,” Kenseth said. ”But on old tires, I knew he was going to choose the top.”

“Yeah, he screwed that up,” Kenseth said, joking about the lane choice. “He should have started on the bottom for me. Unfortunately, he didn’t. I don’t know. I couldn’t run on the bottom, and Brad was really strong on the bottom of 1 and 2.

“I was thinking I could run outside of him, but he would roll through there so fast you could never get a run on him. I think he liked the bottom of 1 and 2, but I could never get around on the bottom of 1 and 2, so that was the right thing to do, to start on the top and leave me on the bottom — for him.”

Martin Truex finished 3rd and led his team to a 3-4-5 finish in the Food City 500 at Bristol Motorspeedway.

Michael Waltrip Racing had a banner day with all three of their cars finishing top 5. The 56 of Martin Truex Jr finished third followed by teammates Clint Bowyer in the #15 5 Hour Energy machine, and Brian Vickers making his return to racing in 5th in the #55 Aaron’s Dream Machine which he shares with Mark Martin this year.

“It was a great day for us. The only way it could have been better would have been to have the cars run one-two-three,” said Scott Miller, executive vice president of competition at MWR. “It was just a super-good day for us.”

“It’s been a long time coming,” Truex said. “I told a lot of people in the off season that we’ve done a lot of things to make our team better. We had a great end to the year last year and we’ve really just been carrying that momentum. I’ve got a lot of confidence in my team right now — and obviously we’ve got good race cars. That makes our job a lot easier.”

Clint Bowyer put a lot of emphasis on the team success over his personal finish. Having moved to the #15 car this year when RCR could not find the funding to run a 4th car full time in 2012, Bowyer moved from Chevy to Toyota with MWR and has not seemed to lose any momentum in the changes.

“The 56 bunch had a really good package for this race last year. We elected to go with that and it paid off pretty good,” Bowyer said.

An excellent return to the race track for Brian Vickers as he earned a 5th place finish in his first race in the 2012 season

Brian Vickers, however, was the talk of the garage. After losing his ride last yet to a combination of time off recovering from an illness, and a team pulling out of the sport, Vickers was left without a ride at the end of the 2011 season. In his first on track showing this year however he took a 25th place qualifying effort and turned it into a top 5 result. Vickers even led the second most laps of the race with 125, second only to the eventual winner Brad Kesolowski’s 232 laps led.

“It felt really good when we were out there leading,” Vickers said. “It would have been awesome to hold onto that, but it was my first time back so I can’t complain.

“What an organization. I’m so proud to be a part of getting all three cars in the top five. I can’t thank [team owners]Michael Waltrip and Rob Kauffmann and everyone at MWR enough. I don’t know those two guys that well, but I can tell a lot about them by the group of people they’ve assembled and the team they’ve built. What an incredible organization.”

Other notable names had mixed results in their finishes. Tony Stewart was unable to find the handle on his car this week and ended up 14th. Dale Earnhardt Jr was in the top 5 all day long, but on the final pit stop of the day Jr was caught speeding on pit road entry and was sent to the back of the lead lap as punishment. Unable to make up spots in traffic Jr finished as the last car on the lead lap in 15th place and dropped 2 positions in the points to 6th. Jeff Gordon and Dale Jr had an on track incident which was blown out of proportion by most of the fans and media. What was actually a minor rub on the track ended with Gordon cutting a tire on Earnhardt Jr’s tailpipe relegating the #24 car to a lackluster 35th place finish. While the media made a big deal out of Gordon’s initial comments, Gordon himself noted afterwards that it wasn’t intentional, wasn’t even a hard knock, and was simply a racing incident, the kind of thing one expects to happen at Bristol.

Filed Under: Brad Kesolowski, Bristol, Bristol Motorspeedway, clint bowyer, Dale Earnhardt Jr., Food City 500, matt kenseth, Motorsport, Nascar, tony-stewart

NASCAR – Clint Bowyer Wins the Wild Card Race in Talladega – A Rough Ride For The Chasers Shakes Up the Standings Again

October 25, 2011 by

Clint Bowyer – Image courtesy of JDTImages

Clint Bowyer showed us that no matter what, teammate or not, when it comes down to it, you’ve got to race for the win. Pushing his teammate Jeff Burton on the last restart after the ninth caution, the Bowyer/ Burton tandem got a massive jump on the field running almost 20 car lengths away from the pack, which allowed for them to split apart and have a drag race to the finish. Burton opened up the bottom line coming out of turn 4 and Bowyer made an early move, almost too early, and held off Burton through the tri-oval and right to the checkered flag. The lat 200 yds was the best acing on the track all day. The slingshot manouver brought Bowyer door to door with Burton, who tried everything he could to sniff a little more draft off Bowyer’s car, but it was Bowyer who prevailed and took the checkered flag. Bowyer was prepared to push his teammate to the the win but when the lead opened up and the pack fell behind, he did what it took to get himself back into the win column.

“He[Burton] kind of moved up off of [Turn] 4, and I knew it was too early to go, but it was going to be a drag race, and it would give us both a shot at it,” Bowyer said. “He worked so well with me all day long. You hate that it comes down to that, but it is what it is, and you owe it to your team and your sponsors to go out and win the race.”

“Unfortunately, it came down to that situation, but — trust me — I was prepared to push him to the win, no matter what the cost was, if we’d have had people breathing down our necks. It just wasn’t meant to be for him. He’s been a great teammate, and I’ve learned a lot from him — but he’s already won a lot of races [21], and I’ve only won five.”

Burton took his second place finish with a smile of pride. After all, it’s not every day that you get to break the two car tandem at Talladega and drag race your teammate to the finish line.

Jeff Burton – Image courtesy of JDTImages

“Whenever you leave here not wrecked, you ought to be happy, but at the same time, I’m heartbroke we didn’t win the race,” said Burton, who recorded his first top-five finish in more than a year. “Having said all of that, I don’t know what I would have done different.”

“Honestly, I thought he made his move too early. I kind of gave him the bottom, because you tend to be able to pull them back to you better when you’re on their right rear quarter panel. He made his move really early, I thought. I thought I’d be able to pull back to him, but he had a lot of momentum when he made the move.”

The race also made a huge difference in the points standings as some tried to hang out in the back field for safety and never had the chance to move forward at the end of the race.

Carl Edwards hung at the back with Greg Biffle all day and made his move towards the front with around 40 to go, but with the burst of cautions coming right at the end of the race, Edwards was not able to get all the way to the front having to settle for an 11th place finish. 11th was still good enough to gain points on Kenseth, who sits 2nd in the standings by14 points now, but 3rd and 4th in the standings made gains on Edwards by finishing ahead of him.

Brad Kesolowski

Brad Kesolowski finished 4th on the track and moved up to 3rd in the standings, now only 18 points behind the leader, Carl Edwards. Gaining 3 positions in the standings from 7th to 3rd Kesolowski is showing that the consistency that got him into the chase is still working in his favor and moving him to the front of the standings slowly but surely.

“This is exactly how we needed to leave Talladega, with a strong finish — gained points on the leader; gained points, really, on all the Chase cars. ”

“I’m very proud of the effort, proud to have a good day and very fortunate to have missed all the wrecks.”

Tony Stewart, who led the most laps of the day gaining 2 bonus points along the way, held out for a 7th place finish on the track and moved up another spot in the standings from 5th to 4th.

The other teams who chose to hang back did not fare as well as Carl Edwards and Greg Biffle. Jimmie Johnson and Dale Earnhardt Jr hung back all day as well and when the time came to move forward they simply could nit find any room to move around the field who was running 3 and 4 wide in front of them as the final laps of the race wore down. Avoiding the wrecks to make it to the finish is always the plan at Talladega, but it also leaves you in a precarious position not knowing if you can make it back to the front when it counts. Jr and Jimmie talk about how their planned failed.

Dale Earnhardt Jr. – Image courtesy of JDTImages

“Whenever we thought they were getting a little bit crazy, we’d move into the safe areas and we rode there most of the day with a lot of other people doing the same thing,” Earnhardt said. “Then at the end, we had a lot of cautions late. We wanted to try to work our way toward the front in the last 20 laps. The cautions kept coming out, and we ran over some debris and we had to come to pit road. We just didn’t have the track position at the end to make a run with two laps to go. Just not enough time.”

Still, Earnhardt still believes that their plan was solid, just that lady luck was not on their side on Sunday.

“Yeah. There’s a lot more room at this place,” he said. “Daytona is real narrow when it comes down to it. We felt like we were in a good position to make our move inside those 20 laps to go, and we just kept having cautions and that sort of hurt our strategy a little bit and didn’t give us a chance there with two to go. I mean, [you] run up on guys five-wide, you can’t go nowhere.”

Johnson agreed. After being pushed across the line for the win by Jr earlier this year, Johnson stated publicly that if the tables were turned the next time around he would be glad to be pushing Jr at the checkered flag, but the opportunity never presented itself as they got mired in the field finishing 25th (Earnhardt) and 26th (Johnson).

Jimmie Johnson – Imgage courtesy of JDTImages

“We planned our strategy like we had hoped to,” Johnson said. “And on that last restart at the end, we had some issues with my car overheating. That last caution that came out, I got some trash and grass and stuff on the grille of the car. We were out of sequence the way we were lined up. I was going to push Junior, and I had to be in the lead the way we had the debris on the grille. And then as we went to make our switch, the pack was organized and with the [final-laps] situation, there’s not a lot of time to get organized, and we lost our momentum there, and got to the outside and kind of stalled out up on the top, and finished far worse than we had hoped to.”

Does he fell that the championship is beyond his grasp now?

“We’ve just got to keep fighting, and keep working on getting every point we can at every race,” Johnson said. “We have no clue what’s going to happen to all the Chase drivers, and I want to finish as high as I possibly can in the Chase. That does mean the championship. If it’s not there, I want to finish as high as I possibly can.”

“We’re going to keep fighting hard,” Johnson said. “… and see what we can do.”

Here’s how the standings for the chasers line up after Talladega.

Pos.	+/-	Driver	Points	Behind
1 .	–	Carl Edwards	2237	Leader
2 .	+1	Matt Kenseth	2223	-14
3 .	+3	Brad Keselowski	2219	-18
4 .	+1	Tony Stewart	2218	-19
5 .	-3	Kevin Harvick	2211	-26
6 .	-2	Kyle Busch	2197	-40
7 .	+1	Jimmie Johnson	2187	-50
8 .	-1	Kurt Busch	2185	-52
9 .	–	Dale Earnhardt Jr.	2163	-74
10 .	+1	Jeff Gordon	2155	-82
11 .	+1	Denny Hamlin	2153	-84
12 .	-2	Ryan Newman	2149	-88

Filed Under: Carl Edwards, clint bowyer, Dale Earnhardt Jr., Good Sam's 500, Greg Biffle, Jeff Burton, jimmie-johnson, Motorsport, Nascar, talladega, tony-stewart

NASCAR – Stewart Makes it 2 For 2 in Championship Chase and Takes the Points Lead in the Standings

September 26, 2011 by

Tony Stewart catching a mouthful of the celebration spray from his crew after winning the Sylvania 300 at New Hampshire Motor Speedway – Image courtesy of JDTImages

It’s not how many laps you lead in the race, but which laps you lead that determines the winner. Tony Stewart led only 2 laps to win the Sylvania 300 in on Sunday and proved that the only important lap to lead is the last one. This was the fewest laps Stewart has ever led while winning a race, his previous low score was 6. Running the last 71 laps on a single tank of fuel also showed that Stewart is becoming the master of fuel mileage in the current Sprint Cup cars. With a fuel mileage win in Chicago just 6 days prior to this win, Stewart is making it look easy making his car go fast, and saving on fuel at the same time.

The reversal of fortune over last years Chase race in New Hampshire where Stewart ran out of gas and Clint Bowyer passed for the win was not lost on Tony and crew chief Darian Grubb.

“If that’s not a flip-flop from last year, I don’t know what is,” Stewart radioed to crew chief Darian Grubb after crossing the finish line.

“Man, what a way to win it. Such an irony from last year where we ran out gas coming to the white. You hate to see anybody lose that way, but you’ll take a win any way you can get it right now.”

“I saw (Bowyer) slow down the back stretch and thought ‘Oh no, You’re kidding me’ I know exactly how he feels right now.”

“I planned it for some 280 laps” Stewart joked. “I knew he was going to run out of fuel right at that moment.”

“Clint was one of the first guys on pit road to get to me and congratulate me. He’s thinking the same thing – just how ironic it was that the roles were reversed.”

Clint Bowyer ended up finishing a disappointing 26th.

Brad Kesolowski during driver introductions at the Sylvania 300 – Image courtesy of JDTImages

Brad Kesolowski’s momentum and wild card entry into the chase are not showing any signs of slowing down. 10 weeks ago when NASCAR left this track Kesolowski was 23rd in points and not looking like he had any shot of getting into the chase, a point that is not lost on the 27 year old driver of the #2 Miller Lite Dodge.

“It’s funny, because 10 races ago, we left Loudon here 23rd in points,” Keselowski said. “Who’d have ever thought we’d be third in 10 weeks? It’s been a good road to travel down the last few weeks, and today was no exception.”

“We weren’t the fastest car — I’d be lying if I tried to tell you we were — but we made good adjustments to our car, got it to where it was a good, solid top-10 car and drove up to fourth or fifth there with 100 to go, 80 to go, whatever that was. … All in all, I felt like we earned the majority of our good fortune.”

The third place finisher, Greg Biffle, made a hard fought effort to get there. After tangling with 5 time champion Jimmie Johnson earlier in the race, Biffle continued his hard charge right to the end of the race. Not having a chance to win the championship has put a different kind of motivation in the forefront of Biffle’s mind.

“My role being a non-Chase guy is to try to win the last eight (races) that are left,” Biffle said.

Dale Earnhardt during driver introductions at NHMS – Image courtesy of JDTImages

Dale Earnhardt Jr. had some of the bad luck he experienced mid season return to him in Loudon. Although NHMS is not a track where he has done particularly well in the past, Earnhardt was frustrated that he and his team did not get the position he felt they all deserved.

“I had an awesome car all day,” Earnhardt said. “Just pretty frustrating. I want to win here. We’ve been so good here in a lot of races and would like to win. But you’ve got to get up front, and we really couldn’t accomplish that all day long. We had a good, quick car and I am proud of how we worked on it. Happy about what my guys did. The car they brought and how they worked on the car, everything was seemingly going as planned until we got caught a lap down with Landon’s flat tire then we had a couple flats ourselves that cost us a couple more spots there. It’s frustrating, but I was happy with how the car was driving. As a driver, we haven’t had that all year.”

“We’ll take it right now. It could be worse,” Earnhardt said. “We could be sitting in Victory Lane, but we could be out of the Chase all together. I think having two flat tires, we got pretty lucky today to get home in the top 20.”

Ryan Newman during the Chase Racers introduction – Image courtesy of JDTImages

Jr was not the only chaser who’s luck ran out in Loudon. Ryan Newman, who started the race from the pole, also had late race tire issues that scuttled his shot at a decent finish. After winning the race here in July and setting the pace for the field on the green flag drop, Newman was looking at a top 10 finish when he had a tire go down in the ;ate stages of the race.

“We just had a tough day,” Newman said. “We had a couple of slow pit stops, and then we had a tire go down at the end. It was just a disappointing day for us. We just didn’t capitalize on what we could have, and today was a good day to do that, and we didn’t do it. Our team, we know we can do it. We’ve done it before. Going to Dover, we need to improve from where we were in the spring, and I think we can do that.”

Denny Hamlin, who was 12th in points entering the race, looked like he was going out for redemption from his 31st place finish in Chicago. He was running in 6th when he was forced to pit for fuel with only 3 laps to go. The stop ended up costing him 23 positions on the track giving his a 29th place finish, the lowest position finish of all the chasers for the second week in a row.

Denny Hamlin comes down the stairs during driver intros at NHMS – Image courtesy of JDTImages

“We thought we were good, and that’s just strategy racing nowadays,” Hamlin said. “We just came up short right there. The only thing I can think of is we were on a little bit of a cleaner racetrack that last run, but that was the worst fuel mileage we got all day, and I was backing my corner up quite a bit.”

“Either we weren’t getting the fuel mileage we thought or we didn’t get it full or I just used too much. We’ve got to work through it. Another tough day for us, but we’re just figuring out what we need to do to be a little bit more competitive.”

Filed Under: Brad Kesolowski, Carl Edwards, clint bowyer, Dale Earnhardt Jr., Denny Hamlin, jeff gordon, jimmie-johnson, Loudon New Hampshire, Motorsport, Nascar, New Hampshire Motor Speedway, NHMS, Sylvania 300, tony-stewart