By Jen Dunnaway

Editor

This year’s Chase for the Sprint Cup has the somewhat underwhelming feeling of being over before it started. So many chasers got hosed at Sunday’s race at Auto Club–with Kyle Busch and Greg Biffle detonated, Carl Edwards knocked back with ignition problems, Kurt Busch wrecked and Jeff Gordon tagged with a pit-row speeding penalty–that a lot of people are saying that Jimmie Johnson all but has it in the bag. At this point, the reasoning goes, Jimmie would have to falter colossally to lose the Cup–he’d have to wreck or blow up and DNF. Still, I find the whole Drive For Five to be a kind of an uncompelling storyline–sure, it’s making history to win five Cups in a row, blah blah blah, but I just can’t feel it (you know?), and it seems to be something that’s more of a preoccupation of the pundits than the fans. The championship getting won by the same guy year after year seems boring, and if this year’s Chase really is all locked up for Johnson, I’ll probably stop paying attention to it pretty soon–it’s no fun if there’s no battle. But what about the guys who are still mathematically in the running–Denny Hamlin, Kevin Harvick, Jeff Gordon, and Tony Stewart–the last, an already two-time champion who is on the march and who scored a great win at Fontana last weekend? What do you think: do any of these guys have anything for Jimmie?

By Jen Dunnaway

Editor

Race car drivers are almost always involved in some kind of charity work, and it usually involves causes that are strategically uncontroversial, like disabled children or breast cancer. While it’s great that those worthy charities benefit from the motorsports involvement, it’s also kind of cool to see drivers who follow specific passions to support something a little more edgy. Leilani Munter, who drives in both the ARCA series and IRL, has never let up on her hardcore commitment to green living and animal protection. But for her, it’s not just a matter of writing a check: she recently traveled to Taiji, Japan, the scene of the gruesome annual dolphin slaughter made infamous by the Oscar-winning documentary The Cove, to get right up in the hostile, shouting faces of the “fishermen” responsible for the barbarism. Good for her–it’s a great cause, and one that any one of us can support simply by not giving our consumer dollars to captive swim-with-dolphins programs or marine-mammal exhibitors like Sea World–the corporations whose expensive purchases of captured display dolphins are what’s making the massacre possible in the first place. Read Munter’s account of her experience at Taiji here, and check out SaveJapanDolphins and SeaShepherd to learn more about the dolphin slaughter. Via Ecorazzi.

By Jen Dunnaway

Editor

It was hard not to feel terrible for Jack Roush on Sunday, as his shot at the Sprint Cup championship with any of his teams literally went up in smoke. I was glad at least that Matt Kenseth got to finish the race, even if in 30th, his crippled No 17 car leaving a wake of oily smoke as the motor started coming apart in the final laps. Even so, he ultimately fared a lot better than both Greg Biffle (finished 41st), whose engine blew up early on, and Carl Edwards (34th), who was mired hopelessly laps-down after having to go to the garage during the race with distributor problems. That’s it: the Roush Fords are completely out of the running for this year’s Sprint Cup. At least in the case of the two expired motors–one of which let go suddenly and punched a hole through the oil pan, while the other languished gradually following a late-race restart–the temperamental new FR9 engine platform, which has dealt out more than its fair share of black eyes, seems an obvious culprit. Still, it’s a bit baffling to see such an advanced and well-funded organization still struggling so greatly with their technology. It’d be great to have the Fords truly competitive again at the Cup level, so I hope they’re able to exorcise their demons in time for the 2011 season.

By Jen Dunnaway

Editor

This weekend I went to check out the Pepsi Max 400 at Fontana. Having been marooned in the NASCAR-devoid Pacific Northwest, I’m always keen on the idea of Sprint Cup-level tracks anywhere on the West Coast. And after visiting Auto Club Speedway, about a 45-minute straight shot from LA over to San Bernadino county, I think I’m finally actually jealous of SoCal residents: they get to call this place their hometown track.

The eye-appeal of Fontana is addictive–think of race cars against a desert backdrop of mountains and palm trees–and the two-mile D-oval, banked 14 degrees in the turns, is majestic in its scope. Despite its massiveness, Auto Club isn’t a restrictor-plate track, and with its breadth and its ultra-slick surface it lends itself to the kind of changeable, five-wide, thrills-a-minute racing that we saw on Sunday. The track is run as a pretty tight ship, with ample security and good crowd control–important when you’re dealing with a facility of this magnitude, though it can feel at times like you’re being herded just a little. Next year, in place of its twice-yearly NASCAR events, Auto Club will host only one Sprint Cup race in March. If you’re in the SoCal area, don’t miss it–it’ll be the only chance you’ll get for some local NASCAR action, and this gorgeous track is well worth the price of admission.

Head on over to the Events section to see a ton of photos from Sunday’s race!

By Jen Dunnaway

Editor

Just when I thought I was probably all done with NASCAR travel for the season, I got a surprise invite from our Streetfire crew in LA to come check out the race at Auto Club Speedway in Fontana. Sweet! Our office maven Michelle and our marketing guru Butch are here, and I’ll be all over the track and garage during the race today in the hopes of snagging you guys some half decent photos.

I’ve never attended a Chase race before, and already, the vibe around the garage seems single-mindedly focused and pretty intense. Kyle Busch won the Nationwide race last night, the Roush Fords were fast in practice, and Jimmie is back on the march in the Drive For Five. I’m frankly kind of at a loss to pick a Champion winner at this point, because it still seems like it could be anyone’s game. Who is your pick for this year’s champ?

Dale Jr. of course didn’t make the Chase, though he’s celebrating his birthday today and there’s clearly at least some fans who feel a Sprint Cup win for Junebug would beat the hell out of a whole cakeful of candles–see this tribute car not-so-happy-birthday message after the jump.

Continue reading "Howdy From Fontana!" »

By Jen Dunnaway

Editor

Here’s a shocking headline: live motorsports events can lead to irreversible hearing damage for spectators, drivers, and crew. While anyone who’s ever attended a race could easily have told you this, the feds are now sniffing around a few of the loudest NASCAR tracks, measuring decibels in an effort to prove it. The National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health is on a mission to quantify the adverse health effects of various recreational sporting events–they even commissioned a study on vuvuzelas (those obnoxious World Cup horns) a few weeks back. And now, just days ahead of the Nationwide and Sprint Cup races at the sport’s loudest track, amphitheater-like Bristol, they’ve dropped a bomb that lays out the real truth about motorsports and noise. While this not-news will likely necessitate a bunch of tiresome regulatory interference (they’ve already tried mufflers on the cars; it didn’t work), at the very least perhaps it’ll mean free earplugs for everyone at the track. That’d be nice. Sunscreen too!

Stay tuned for NIOSH’s groundbreaking report on brain-cell loss caused by alcohol consumption during sporting events. Full story at aol.

By Jen Dunnaway

Editor

In a really vicious wreck on the track, the best thing a race car can do is come apart. A multiple-barrel-roll thrill-ride featuring a car that’s dumping flaming debris and fluids all over the track might look really scary, but it usually means the driver’s just fine–by contrast, when a car is brought to an abrupt but unspectacular halt after hitting a guard wall or a dirt embankment and the window net doesn’t come down, it’s usually a sign of big trouble. Same as in highway crashes, the old truism holds that energy dissipated through flying car parts and rending sheetmetal is energy that the driver’s body will not have to absorb. In stock-car racing’s past, many of the fatal wrecks are those that don’t really look all that dramatic at the time–Dale Earnhardt’s tragic last-lap crash at Daytona in 2001 comes to mind. And perhaps ironically, it was this very incident that changed the sport’s entire approach to driver safety, and paved the way for cars that now crash very differently from the way they did even a few years ago. Read more…

Continue reading "Surviving A Wreck That Would Have Been Fatal: Luck Or Engineering?" »

By Jen Dunnaway

Editor

I totally missed the Nationwide race this weekend–I was lulled into complacency by the fact that Sprint Cup is on hiatus. But from what I hear, it was Carl Edwards FTMFW, Brad Keselowski again bore the brunt of it, and the ensuing hellacious wreck got Brad’s dad threatening to bring on some serious fisticuffs (“he ain’t gonna kill my boy”). Wow. I kind of think that Brad should tread lightly with Carl, (otherwise a very nice guy until you mess with him), if he doesn’t want to get ganked. It’s like Denny Hamlin said a season or two ago: you throw a rock at me, I’m going to throw a brick right back. Your thoughts–was it just hard racing for a clean win, or is outrage in order?

By Jen Dunnaway

Editor

My photos from the Nationwide Series segment of the 4th of July weekend in Daytona are live over in our Events section (full coverage here), so you can now get an eyeful of the new NASCAR Challenger, Mustang, Impala, and Camry during their first competitive weekend at the track. In addition to Friday night’s race, there’s a ton of pics from qualifying and the starting grid, back when it was still reasonably light out, so you can check out these new race cars in pretty decent detail. Enjoy!

By Jen Dunnaway

Editor

One of Joe Gibbs’ NASCAR Toyota teams recently went out for some aero testing at the massive Kennedy Space Center runway, where the space shuttle lands. They were going for vehicle dynamics rather than top speed, paying particular attention to downforce and handling during deceleration between 205 and 150 mph.  Testing at facilities like Kennedy is actually cheaper than the wind tunnel, which can cost NASCAR teams upwards of $4000 per hour–and for their part, NASA has a whole program dedicated to pushing “business development uses for the spaceport’s unique assets.” Good for them–as fundraisers go, it probably beats the hell out of a bake sale. Check out the article at NASA’s website.

Continue reading "Far Out: NASCAR Team Tests At Kennedy Space Center" »