Thoughts on Winning for Grandma
  • Winning is a very powerful thing in and of itself, especially when you haven’t won a Sprint Cup race in over a year like Denny Hamlin has. But winning with a heavy heart is an even more powerful thing. So it’s understandable with the passing of his grandmother last Friday, why yesterday’s win by Hamlin meant so much to him, "We definitely had some angels with us today," Hamlin said in victory lane all the while fighting back tears. Sometimes you don’t have to say anything to say a lot.
  • One thing I’m going to need explained to me and not with the reason that this is just how it’s always been, is why Pocono has two Sprint Cup races? While yesterday’s race was for the most part pretty good, particularly the last 30 laps or so, the truth is that the racing at Pocono isn’t consistently good enough to justify having two Cup races here. Especially when you look at the track where the Nationwide Series ran this weekend, Iowa Speedway, and think what a show NASCAR’s top series could put on if they were ever given the chance. Iowa had close to 60,000 fans on-hand Saturday afternoon and featured side-by-side racing throughout the race and not just after a restart like at Pocono. Why not take the Sprint Cup series to as many diverse tracks as possible, particularly if those tracks will offer great racing that will likely get fans excited about the on-track product once again?
  • Here’s all you need to know why Jimmie Johnson and the 48 team are the three-time defending Sprint Cup champions. On Monday, engine issues left Johnson three laps behind the leaders. Instead of packing it in, and saying today is not our day, Johnson and the 48 team led by the best crew chief in the garage in Chad Knaus, put their heads down, went to work, diagnosed the problem, which they promptly fixed and began slowly working their way back into contention. At the end of the day, the box score will say that Johnson finished 13th, but the reality is that this was as much of a win by the 48 team as their actual win last week at Indianapolis was.


  • Another former champion who needs to be commended on his attitude and commitment is Tony Stewart. After a practice crash had him starting at the tail end of the field in a backup car, and with a car that for the first half of the race that can best be described as piggish, Stewart and his team rallied back to score their ninth straight top-10 finish and their series leading 17th top-10 finish of the year.
  • I have no real opinion of teams who elect to start-and-park. My thinking is if a team is good enough to qualify on speed, then they deserve to run whatever number of laps they elect to. Plus how is NASCAR supposed to regulate that they run a certain number of laps each race? That being said, it needs to be pointed out that yesterday by lap 40, there were seven cars that were in the garage parked for the day for a variety of non-descript reasons.
  • Brian Vickers had another top-10 finish Monday, his fourth-straight, but if he has any chance of making this year’s Chase for the Championship, then his pit crew is going to have to be a heck of a lot better than it was yesterday. On their first two pit stops of the day, the 83 crew lost a combined 13 spots on pit road, which is beyond unacceptable for a team who is chasing a berth in NASCAR’s postseason.
  • With his runner-up finish, Juan Pablo Montoya did two things yesterday. One, he recorded his first top-five finish of the year. The second is that with that second-place finish, Montoya took another huge step towards making the Chase for the Championship. Expect big things for this team next weekend at Watkins Glen.
  • After finishing a career-best fourth yesterday, Sam Hornish Jr. took yet another big step in showing the NASCAR world that he is becoming a genuine stock car driver. The next step for Hornish is to build on this and start putting top-20 finishes together on a consistent basis.
Posted: 8/5/2009 4:36:34 AM
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