Looking to Daytona

1. Tony Stewart

2. Denny Hamlin

3. Greg Biffle

4. Juan Montoya

 

Indeed, swaim. It was a masterful job of passing without punting.

 

David Poole, excellent racing writer for The Charlotte Observer, put together his own Nascar State of the Sport address here. I think everything he says is spot-on and I think everything he says makes too much sense for Na$car to implement.

I think he forgot to say that he would also bring back the Southern 500 at Darlington on Labor Day weekend.

 

Now that the 125's, oops, I mean the 150's are over, make your pick for the 500.

The easy pick is Tony Stewart, and that's the pick I'm making. Tony's had the best car in both races and I think he learned something from getting beat 2 years ago in the 500.

In 2005, Tony led the most laps, but at the end of the race, he was adamant about hugging the yellow line, unwilling to budge from it and it cost him the race. I believe we have sufficient evidence from the last few restrictor plate races to say that this strategy is flawed and I believe it's the racing equivalent of "playing not to lose". The drivers who race to win are the ones who try to make things happen, whether it's on the inside or the outside, rather than hugging the yellow line and being the one that things happen to. I think Tony Stewart learned this lesson in '05 and won't repeat it on Sunday.

 

Rooting for a particular manufacturer used to be interesting when the cars were actually different from each other. I suppose they still are, but the degree of difference is much smaller than it used to be. Regardless, Chevy definitely has the better car at Daytona, and a decided advantage in the caliber of driver overall.

Just for fun, here's my ranking of the Top 5 drivers for each make of car.

Chevy
Tony Stewart
Jeff Gordon
Jimmie Johnson
Dale Earnhardt Jr.
Kyle Busch - Dark Horse pick to win the 500.

Kevin Harvick and Jeff Burton can't even crack the Top 5 for Chevy and would if they drove a Ford, Dodge or Toy.

Ford
Matt Kenseth
Greg Biffle
Carl Edwards
Ricky Rudd
David Gililand

So, the 4th best driver is a guy who's been out of racing for a year and the 5th best is a rookie. It was either Gililand or Jamie McMurray and if you're 5th best driver is McMurray, there are some problems in the camp. I still don't know what McMurray is doing driving for Roush.

Dodge
Kasey Kahne
Kurt Busch
Ryan Newman
Bobby Labonte
Elliott Sadler

Dodge has been considered the #3 manufacturer, at least to me, since coming back to Cup racing in 2001. It's time to start thinking of them as #2. This is a nice lineup of drivers, even if it includes the overrated Ryan Newman. :tongue3:

Toyota
Dale Jarrett
Michael Waltrip
Jeremy Mayfield - will miss the 500
Brian Vickers - will miss the 500
Dave Blaney

Toyota just isn't fast, nor do they have the drivers. Looking at the group of drivers for Toyota makes me think I need to change my predicted Toy wins from 1 to 0. I don't see any wins coming for a Camry in '07. I do think the Japanese boys will be better in '08 and beyond.

 

Actually, I didn't expect to see such a disparity until I made those lists. The Ford camp, in particular, has really fallen from where they were a few years ago. Most of it is cyclical, but the best drivers are in the Bowtie Brigade as we go into the '07 season.

On 2nd thought in the Chevy rankings, I'm moving Harvick to 4, Jr to 5 and Kyle Busch to 6. I also didn't make mention of Mark Martin driving the 01 Army car, another Chevy. No other make has the kind of quality drivers in their cars, much less the depth. The Dodge camp has some of the youngest drivers in the sport, such as Sorensen, who is supposed to be very good, and they also have Montoya, who I think is going to excel. It will be interesting to come back to this list in November and see how it's changed.

Speaking of Montoya, I think the one thing he has that many rookies don't have is the ability to handle a car with worn tires. In the '05 F1 season, the teams could only run 1 set of tires from the time they qualified through the race. There wasn't a single race where JPM had problems with tires, which is no small feat considering the amount of stress the F1 cars put on tires.

Plus, anybody who hasn't bowed down and kissed Michael Schumacher's ring is pretty Ok with me. :thumbs:

 

Wow. Wow. Wow.

What a finish.

I'm not Bill Simmons, so I didn't keep a running diary, but I did spend the day making notes about various things in the 500. For your reading pleasure, or displeasure if you prefer, here's some notes I made today.

Who was the skank putting on the mini-concert before the race? Who likes that sort of nonsense anyway? I think it's silly to have this kind of garbage at halftime of the Super Bowl and I think it's even sillier to have it before The Great American Race. Is there a race fan out there who was thinking, "It sure would be nice to see some girl I've never heard of sing some songs, and have a bunch of people pretend to have a great time before the biggest race of the season." That garbage was the reason I didn't get to finish watching the race before church and had to tape the last laps and watch it after. Although, as it turned out, I wouldn't have been able to watch the end of the race till after church anyway.

I didn't care too much for the Photo Finish segment, but I wanted to say a word about the photo finish they showed between Harvick and Gordon at Atlanta in 2001. After my favorite racecar driver died, I nearly stopped watching racing. I didn't watch much of the next couple of races and did watch that Atlanta race for some reason. While I'm not a huge Harvick fan, it was, as Mike Joy said at the time, pure magic when Harvick won that race. I don't know what would have happened had Harvick not won, but him winning probably kept me watching.

Nic Cage had an understated, "less is more" kind of GSYE. It wasn't bad and is a clear indication that Cage knows that the best GSYE's were given by Matthew McConaughey and Adam Sandler in 2005, and nobody will top them.

Krista Voda is a much better pit reporter than the next-to-useless Jeanne Zelasko. With that said, I had to laugh at her report about Carl Edwards remembering his first Daytona 500 start all the way back in 2005. Such nostalgia. :laugh:

DW said that a Dodge hadn't won the 500 since the 70s, forgetting entirely that Wawd Buhton won the 500 in 2002 in a Dodge. And, I wrote this mostly so that I could write Wawd Buhton and hope that everybody remembers his incredibly thick accent, then listen to Jeff Burton talk and wonder how in the world those guys grew up in the same house.

I wonder if the past champions provisional will go away after this season. 61 cars qualified for the 500 and 10 of those that went home qualified faster than Dale Jarrett. I will grant that DJ was able to make this race the way Smith Barney used to make money. He earrnned it.

"...crazy, mutant desert guys." Not bad, Jr. Not bad.

When they talked about the difference between loose and pushing, I'll never forget the late, great Neil Bonnett. "When you're pushing, you see the wreck. When you're loose, you are the wreck." Neil is still missed. BTW, I'll never forget the 1991 Richmond night race for one reason. At one point, Mark Martin gets in a wreck and the car catches fire. During the replay, we hear Neil say, "And Mark is the first one out of the car." Evidently, Mark got out before the clowns he had riding in the back seat did. :laugh:

Boris Said showed today that, while he's a fantastic road racer, he doesn't have the instincts required to be a good oval racer. Everybody runs out of racetrack coming off of T2. Boris should have known this and obviously should have lifted coming off of T2. Instead, he drove his too tight racecar up the hill and wrecked it. There was absolutely no reason to push the car over the limit like that so early in the race.

This morning on Nascar Now, a new ESPN show, they did a segment called "Fact or Fiction". Rusty Wallace said it was fiction that Jeff Gordon could win starting 42nd. The reasoning had nothing to do with how his car might, or might not, have run, but simply because he was starting 42nd. It made no sense for Rusty to count Jeff Gordon out just because of a poor starting position.

Run Kasey, Run. Run away from the stalkers!

Scott J doesn't post about Nascar anymore, which is too bad really. He was very knowledgeable and fun, in spite of being a Jeff Gordon fan. :tongue3: If you're lurking Scott, I thought about you when Tony Stewart and the Busch brothers were running 1-2-3. I know who you would have been rooting for too. The Wall.

Juan Montoya called his car "silly tight". This is what the former F1 driver brings to the sport. New terms. I like it.

At lap 107, the race officially hit the "this is really boring so let's find something silly to talk about." They were talking about Kevin Harvick's pretty helmet and how Carl Edwards should shave and look his best before the race. Because it makes complete sense for a racecar driver who wears a helmet to look his best.

It might be a very long year if we have to spend it hearing phrases like, "The Busch brothers are running up front" as we cut-away to commercial.

Who here believes that Kasey Kahne is old enough to be shaving? Put some milk on that and let the cat lick it off, Kasey.

Favorite phrase of the race: "Jeff Gordon hits the wall." If I hear that enough times, it just might balance out the Busch brothers phrase.

I love how DW said that somebody with old tires will drive it into the wall, but it won't be his fault. Who's fault would it be? You have to drive what you have, not what you want it to be. As Ken Schrader once said when talking about wrecking racecars: "These cars don't drive themselves."

Then, Tony and Kurt wrecked. The dominant cars were taken out. Somewhere, Scott was smiling.

I do give Kurt Busch credit for taking the blame, but he didn't need to and was beating himself up too much. There's nothing he could have done about it. DW can talk about comparing Tony Stewart to Dale Earnhardt, but Tony hasn't been in a position to win the race then lose it in the heartbreaking fashion that Earnhardt did. The comparison rings hollow to Earnhardt fans.

T4 used to be called "Calamity Corner" and I thought maybe T2 would have to be renamed, then came the last lap.

Wow. Wow. Wow.

Fantastic finish.

The comparison is obvious between Harvick's win and the former driver of that car's final win in 2000 at Talladega. Harvick came pretty much out of nowhere, as did the winner of that 2000 Talladega race. About halfway through the race, I wrote something like, "The winner of this race will be the 20, the 5, the 2 or the 29", but nobody predicts stuff like this to happen. Fantastic finish. I love it.

BTW, kudos to Nascar for not throwing the yellow. They didn't even find some debris to throw a caution over when the race got boring during that long green flag run. Hope they keep this trend up, but I'm not holding my breath over it. They've done some dumb things over the last few years, but they absolutely got the finish right. For once this week, the racing overshadowed everything else. This is how you want a season to start.

It wasn't the best Daytona 500 ever, but it was a long, long way from the worst one. As far as finishes go, I'd rate this one as 3rd best, behind 1976 and 1979. 3rd straight Daytona 500 that had a GWC finish and I'd say that the GWC was one of Nascar's good ideas.

Kevin Harvick wins the Daytona 500 on February 18th. Awesome. I love it.

 

Yeah, I think skank was not the best choice of words. Sorry about that.

AI? I know of 2 AI's, artificial intelligence or Allen Iverson, and I don't think you meant either of those. Please enlighten me.

Ha!