Weekend That Was: Texas (cont'd)

Angry truckers
You've gotta love the Craftsman Truck Series this season.

Just when Friday's Silverado 350K (what's up with that, by the way?) seemed to be shaping up as a two-man battle to the finish between points leaders Ron Hornaday and Mike Skinner, rookie Chad McCumbee shook it all up over the final five laps by playing a role in two wrecks that ultimately enabled Ted Musgrave to win, thereby breaking Musgrave's 66-race winless streak in the series (watch video).

Hornaday, who entered the race with a slim four-point lead over Skinner, was racing for the lead with Skinner on Lap 144 of the 149-lap event when McCumbee made it three-wide and all hell broke loose (watch video). McCumbee emerged from the scrape with the lead, but spun his tires upon the restart on the next-to-last lap and was hit from behind by Jack Sprague, giving Musgrave the victory.

Skinner rallied to finish third, giving him a 57-point lead over Hornaday, who faded to 18th, with two races remaining (complete standings).

Congrats to King Carl
He's taken numerous public-relations hits, and rightly so, for his in-your-face, on-camera bullying of Roush Fenway Racing teammate Matt Kenseth after the Cup race at Martinsville on Oct. 21. But driver Carl Edwards has apologized for that, and the resulting bad publicity should not take away from the fact that he clinched the Busch Series points championship Saturday in Texas (watch video).

Edwards has been the dominant player on the Busch scene all season and quickly ran up what proved to be an insurmountable lead of as much as 800 points early on. After finishing 11th in the O'Reilly Challenge at Texas Motor Speedway, Edwards leads his closest pursuer, David Reutimann, by an insurmountable 552 points with two races left (complete standings).

It makes you wonder, though. Did Kenseth send Edwards a congratulatory note? Or speak to him directly without being spoken to for the first time in six months? It's doubtful.

Thumbs up
To Kenseth and Johnson for the duel they put on down the stretch of the Dickies 500, battling back and forth for the lead (watch video). Kenseth did all he possibly could, and did it relatively cleanly, before the faster car won again. It was riveting stuff, about as good as anything that has transpired on the track all season (complete story).

Thumbs down
To the folks who made Johnson don a cowboy hat and a pair of six-shooters in Victory Lane. Puh-leaze don't do it again! It looked about as corny as anything that has transpired in NASCAR all season, and that includes some pretty bizarre stuff that occurs in media centers prior to events.

Pit Stops
• So Bruton Smith isn't saying anything about possibly working with NASCAR to move a race date to Las Vegas Motor Speedway by 2009. Surprised? You shouldn't be. Nor should you be surprised when that second date shows up during the Chase by that season, whether it comes at the expense of one of the dates at New Hampshire track Smith just purchased or not (complete story).

• Upon further review, it might make more sense for Smith to lobby NASCAR to move one of the two race dates from Atlanta Motor Speedway, where he is having trouble filling the grandstands, rather than New Hampshire, where there have been 26 consecutive sellouts. But what he surely would like to see much more than that is to have a race date moved from somewhere else -- as in sacrificed from one of the tracks he doesn't already own, like California Speedway. Good luck with that, as the ruling France family isn't likely to part with a date from a track owned by the International Speedway Corporation that it controls.

• True enough, it's all about winning races and no one has done that better or more often than Johnson this season. But Gordon has indeed been amazing with 28 top-10 finishes -- six more than Johnson and Tony Stewart, who with 22 each are the closest in the statistical category that best tracks consistency. In the eight Chase races to date, Gordon hasn't finished worse than 11th.

The opinions expressed are solely those of the writer.