After impressive run at The Glen, Lally deserves ride

Andy Lally needs to be a Cup racer.

Each of the two road races on the Cup schedule always brings up questions -- like, should road courses even be on the schedule?

To bury that issue quickly, not only should they be there, there should be one in the Chase. Like, how about Watkins Glen as the Chase kickoff event?

You got to deal with that upstate New York weather, after all. But whatever you'd deal with in the fall couldn't be any worse than those mid-summer thunder-boomers, could it?

But I'm getting off track, and how ironic that, when you're talking road racing, that getting off track will truly mess you up -- just ask David Stremme and Kevin Harvick -- and not that making a mistake on an oval, won't put you in a wall with dire consequences.

But that perfectly gets us back to Lally.

This is a guy who grew up right in the midst of stock car country, virtually the same place as the Park family -- and we know their NASCAR heritage -- or we should. Lally wanted to be a Cup racer from childhood. His hero was Mark Martin.

But racing was his bottom line, and since going racing most often involves taking the path either of least resistance or most financial feasibility, road racing was what he did.

And he did it well, winning championships and winning races -- like the six professional road-racing victories he has at Watkins Glen -- and accruing experience.

It's strange that in the week before he came to The Glen, Lally, who six years ago had told a visitor at the Barber Motorsports Park inaugural Grand-Am race how much he wanted to go NASCAR racing, spoke of how it had taken this long to get a chance at his first Cup race.

But the supreme irony came when he virtually stole a line from his hero, Martin, when he said he wouldn't be the person, or the driver, he was when he took his shot in qualifying last Friday, if he hadn't struggled for six more years.

And what was the result? With a limited amount of practice, in his first attempt qualifying NASCAR's new car at a dauntingly fast "superspeedway road course," the guy put it in the field in 15th. He beat Robby Gordon, he beat Jeff Gordon, he beat five-time Glen NASCAR winner Ron Fellows and he beat his hero, Martin.

After he accomplished that, the emotion in his voice was very palpable, and very gut-wrenching. And what he achieved in the race, finishing on the lead lap despite getting tied up in a mid-race melee triggered by guys with loads more stock car experience than he, was spectacular.

Wins: Thru Watkins Glen

	2008	2009
Cup Series	7	3
Nationwide	6	6
Truck Series	2	2

And what's the bottom line? The Cup Series needs to see more of Lally. I'm sure he'd agree.

Chase bubble bursting

There was no irony in the fact that Kyle Busch was the only "on the outs" Chase bubble driver that did what he had to do on Monday at Watkins Glen, that is, soundly handle all the bubble "in crowd" that was ahead of him. Do the math -- Busch is still alive in the Chase while Brian Vickers, David Reutimann and Clint Bower, despite another decent Glen finish, just didn't get it done.

'Ouch' all the way to Victory Lane

I don't care what Brad Daugherty said to excuse his driver's mistake, or how out-of-his-skin Marcos Ambrose was after winning the Zippo 200. I agree with owner/driver Kevin Harvick when it comes to wrecking the winning car doing a post-race burnout: It's pretty damned dumb.

On Sunday, Harvick laughed about it as he viewed the replay during the Cup rain delay, but there was no mistaking his feelings when he spoke words to the effect that Ambrose was lucky he wasn't driving a KHI car.

The only positive coming from Ambrose ruining, at the very least, the entire right rear quarter panel of his No. 47 Toyota is that they don't need that car for three weeks.

Kyle Busch Victory Watch

The beat just keeps going on for Busch, who along with extending his current record 10 consecutive Nationwide Series races finishing either first or second, still has a mathematical possibility of eclipsing his 2008 record total of 21 wins (8 Cup, 10 Nationwide, 3 Truck) across NASCAR's three national tours.

Busch can still do it, but while Watkins Glen proved how consistently good -- though not quite good enough -- his Nationwide car was, it continued to show that his Cup program is just a little shy of being where it truly needs to be to contend. At the time when he needed to charge, Busch went backwards, so he remains halfway there with 11 wins down and 11 to go. His 2008 win total at this point was 16, and this is where his Cup season went in the tank a year ago, so it's now time to prove his new attitude will work wonders.

The opinions expressed are solely those of the writer.