By Lou Modestino
Kevin Harvick’s win at Phoenix was a plain and simple domination of the race. He led 78 consecutive laps of that race. “We’ve put a lot of work into the race car,” said Harvick in victory lane. Kevin has been a master of that track having won three out of four races at that track. Getting second was Junior who said, “We were just too far away to catch the leader. We worked our butts off before and during this race. Sixth place finisher Jimmie Johnson quipped, ” We could have used more time because I think it would have been different. But, I’ll still take this finish, anyway, even though we were off.” Fourth place Joey Logano echoed the other drivers comments then he also added, “We didn’t have enough to catch Brad (Keselowski). Brad finished third at the finish line.
Kurt Busch is still trying to reshape his image. He was on Fox Cable News last week telling Fox and Friends that he’s really up for racing in the Indy 500 and flying back to Charlotte for the Coca Cola 600 later that night. He could make the fans forget all of his past behavior problems if he’s somewhat successful.
Phil of Manchester, NH has been taking in Speed Weeks for the past few years at Daytona. Phil told us about his most recent experience at Daytona International Speedway. He and two friends took in the Daytona 500 on race day. They got to the track reasonably early. One of the entourage had to have a handicap parking spot after fighting the heavy traffic. They finally got one after searching three lots.
The trio finally got to the seats and after 30 laps when a deluge stopped the race. Under the grandstands they went with thousands of others for six hours. Over the PA they all got the word that there were tornado warnings and were advised to seek shelter as the track would not be responsible for the their safety. Phil and company, along with many others, wrongly assumed that the race would be a Sunday washout and would run Monday morning at 10 a.m.
Off they went fighting the traffic to get back to the campgrounds. Crawling in the traffic and weather they finally got back to their motor homes and turned on the TV to find out that the race was going to be restarted and watched it until the 10 p.m. finish time. They were not very happy campers to say the very least.
Obviously the Fox Sports Network was calling the shots on this whole affair. Ever since the TV networks advised NASCAR to change the date of the 500, there’s been a 40 percent success rate on getting that race in without any problems.
Other fellow travelers of mine tell me, and I’ve also read, that Brian France is obsessed with making the Chase to the Nextel Cup work! In spite of the fact that many ticket buying fans hate format.
On the other events surrounding Speed Weeks the dirt track racing at Volusia County Speedway were successful in terms of entries and attendance. Not so good were the paved track entries and fan turnout for the NASCAR Modified Battle at the Beach at Daytona and the World Series of Stock Car racing at the New Smyrna Speedway. The lone exception at NSS for the first ever K&N Series Pro event which had a great turnout of fans and entries. The feeling is that the Modified events at DIS and NSS need to pay a bigger purse in order to get the entries to make the long winter trip to Florida. NASCAR has heard all of this previously.