by Mike Maruska
5/18/2008
Kasey Kahne won the All-Star race thanks in part to the fans. He finished 5th in the Sprint Showdown, but made the feature event from the fans voting him. I’m sure some people will say he didn’t deserve to make the race, but so what? Involving the fans in an exhibition race is the whole point. All-Star games in every sport see players that don’t deserve to make it, but wind up in the starting lineup every year. Give Kahne credit for parlaying his spot into a giant check (the more I think about it, the more I want to win a physicaly giant check. Even if it’s for $5, I want a big check.).
Kahne’s win also highlights how the track changes from day to night. He didn’t run particularly well in the qualifying heat but was far better when the track was cooler. It’s hard to cull a lot of information from this weekend and apply it to the Coca Cola 600, but that is one point to remember. In a 400 lap race we will see cars struggle in the first 100-200 laps but then look a lot better in the second half of the race.
-Dale Earnhardt Jr made an interesting observation about that relating to the 600.
I’ll tell you one thing I was surprised about was how much my car changed from the start of the run to the end of the run in 25 laps. I would go from real tight to real, real loose and we’re going to have to run 60 laps in the 600 on gas and you will be hanging on for dear life. It should be a real tough, tough 600. Probably tougher than any other one any of us has ever ran.
Long green flag runs at intermediate tracks haven’t been kind to the CoT. Hopefully the Lowe’s test will help, but as Junior noted things could get dull this weekend.
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If Joe Gibbs Racing is going to have a race where they lose three engines during the weekend, it may as well be an exhibition race. Of course if you’re going to pick a weekend to experiment with engines, well this is the weekend for that too. According to Denny Hamlin, that’s exactly what they did.
“This is definitely experimental ‘All-Star only’ racing. We came out here with our guns loaded and unfortunately our gun went off a little bit before the end of the race. It just wasn’t enough. We knew this engine wasn’t going to go 500 miles. It was built for just a few more laps past 100 and it just didn’t make it.”
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Thumbs up for AJ Allmendinger for winning the undercard race, the Spring Showdown. After really struggling to get his NASCAR career on track, he finally had a positive breakthrough.
I feel like I won the Daytona 500. Nobody understands how much this means to me after what we went through as a team. It may be just an All-Star Showdown, but this means the world to me. These guys — everybody at Red Bull Racing Team and Toyota — they’ve stuck behind me.
After Red Bull replaced Allmendinger with Mike Skinner for five races, it was reasonable to believe that Allmendinger may not get another chance in the #84. Obviously 40 good laps won’t mean much in a points paying race, but it is proof that he’s capable of running much better than he’s shown so far. He did score his career best finish last fall at Lowe’s (15th). The fact that he also accepted 100% of the blame for bumping Elliott Sadler into the wall also shows he’s learning the political side of NASCAR too.
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I’m all for new and creative ideas, but I don’t think the burnout contest is one of them. Maybe I’m in the minority, but there’s not much variety in burnouts. Obviously it’s different being at the race and watching, but for a televised event it’s pretty lame.
It’s kind of like where the NBA dunk contest is now. All the good, creative dunks have already been done, so everything is pretty vanilla.
For more racing news, check out Trouble in Turn 2