FIVE LAPS: Heading to Texas
Lots of Small Team news this week. Let's get to it.
Lap 1: When Petty moved its shop to Mooresville this year, it was billed as the start of something new. Now it looks like the beginning of the end, or maybe the middle of the end. Kyle Petty missed Sunday's race at Martinsville, a place that should be called Pettyville because King Richard own the place. Kyle's going to skip Texas this week, too. Worse, General Mills, tired of backing a team that has won just three races in 23 years, is going to Childress next year. Dustin Long and I were talking last week about which team we thought would be the next to follow Morgan-McClure to the garage. The likely candidates (other than BAM, which isn't much of a team) are the Wood Bros., the Pettys and and Yates. I had Wood, Yates and Petty in that order, but now I'm not so sure that Petty won't be the first.
Lap 2: Speaking of BAM, they're not coming to Texas this week. That's a death blow, because there's no way that team will climb back into the top 35, and they're not usually fast enough to qualify on speed.
Three more laps after the jump ...
Lap 3: I'm thrilled as heck that Jeff Burton is atop the points standings. I was convinced back in 2004 that RCR had made a sympathy hire, sort of like it did when it kept Mike Skinner on the payroll for all those years. But the Littlest Burton has been money -- in the
Chase for the past two years, wins in each of the past three. It's rare to see an elite athlete return to top form when success was so long ago. Remember Burton's run of four straight years of top 5 finishes? That was 1997 to 2000 -- in other words, a lifetime ago in athletics.
Lap 4: If the Chase started tomorrow, these four Chasers from 2007 would miss this year's edition: Martin Truex Jr., Carl Edwards and past champs Matt Kenseth and Kurt Busch. Interestingly, these four drivers are ranked 13-16.
Lap 5: Now that it's clear that Junior's move to Hendrick won't be a flop, it's now time to figure out when he might actually win a race. The schedule is very favorable for a Junior. He has wins at Texas (his first career win in 2000), Phoenix (2), Dega (a million) and Richmond (3, including his last win, which was in May 2006). My vote: Richmond, followed by a 100 percent chance of JUNIOR'S BACK! stories.
Green-white-checkers: The headline of the week: Allegations of Nazi-style orgy may topple FIA boss You can't, as they say, make this stuff up.
Due to recent automated spamming attacks on our blogs, we are temporarily requiring commenters to authenticate themselves via TypeKey® before posting comments to any News & Record blog in order to prevent denials of service. We sincerely apologize for the inconvenience.