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Top 5: Surprising moments of 2010

Surgery, swap and a sweep raises eyebrows during a season full of twists, turns

By Joe Menzer
December 31, 2010 2:08 PM, EST

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As 2010 comes to a close, NASCAR.COM looks back at the season that was and forward at the season that's looming on the horizon with some Top 5 lists.

In Wednesday's list, Joe Menzer looks at the top-five surprises of 2010.

5. The Onion makes other cry in Camping World Truck Series

When he clinched his second Camping World Truck Series championship with a week to spare, Todd Bodine became only the third driver in the history of the series to hold multiple titles. The other two are four-time champ Ron Hornaday and two-time winner Jack Sprague.

But Bodine did it differently this season. For the majority of the year, his No. 30 Toyota for Germain Racing carried no outside sponsorship on the truck. That usually spells defeat for any racer hoping to compete at a high level in any NASCAR series. Yet Bodine and his determined team kept showing up every week and running up front, eventually piling up four wins, 17 top-five and 20 top-10 finishes that computed to an impressive average finish of 6.4.

"We did this without sponsorship. It's pretty awesome," said Bodine, who won his first title in 2006 while also driving for owner Stephen Germain.

Related: Todd Bodine's year in pictures

4. Kurt Busch's sweep of Charlotte races in May

Despite the fact that he had won earlier in the season on a 1.5-mile track at Atlanta, Kurt Busch arrived at Charlotte in May with modest expectations. It already had been experiencing an up-and-down year, with a pair of 35th-place finishes and six finishes of 18th or worse in the first 12 races to go along with his one win.

But in the next two weeks, Busch owned Charlotte Motor Speedway and held the rest of the sport hostage. First he won the NASCAR Sprint All-Star Race and the $1 million prize that went with it; then, eight days later, he pulled off the rare Charlotte May sweep by capturing the Coca-Cola 600.

"This one's for you, Roger," Busch shouted into the team radio as his No. 2 Dodge crossed the finish line in the 600 -- and indeed, it was. The victory was long-time NASCAR car owner Roger Penske's first in a points race at the storied Charlotte track -- but technically his second in a matter of just eight days.

3. The rise of the No. 3 Wrangler car in Nationwide

The pressure was more or less self-inflicted, brought about when Dale Earnhardt Jr. and sister Kelley Earnhardt approached their stepmother, Teresa Earnhardt, and car owner Richard Childress, keyholder to the famed No. 3 car number, about running that number in a car adorned with the same paint scheme that once belonged to Junior's legendary late father.

It was a collaboration brought about, they said, by a mutual desire to honor the elder Earnhardt in a special way the same year he was included in the inaugural NASCAR Hall of Fame class. It didn't hurt that Wrangler, the sponsor on the car, was willing to dish out some big bucks to help make it happen.

So it was that the younger Earnhardt took to the Daytona International Speedway in July for a Nationwide Series race to remember. Just running in the event wasn't enough, he admitted.

"Driving that car, anything else other than a win was pointless," he said.

And so, sure enough, he won. It was his first Nationwide victory since 2006, churning up all kinds of memories and emotions in a jubilant Victory Lane.

2. Denny Hamlin's remarkable run after knee surgery

When Denny Hamlin announced plans to undergo surgery to repair a torn anterior cruciate ligament in his left knee toward the end of March, the common thought in the garage area was that the driver of the No. 11 Toyota had just signed off on any real hopes he had of contending for the 2010 Sprint Cup championship. Surely the pain that accompanied recovery from major surgery eventually would take a physical and mental toll that would soon have him crying out about waiting 'til next year.

When Hamlin refused to get out of the car despite running poorly amidst great pain en route to a 30th-place finish two weeks later in the first race after surgery, many applauded his toughness but questioned his sanity. But as it turned out, refusing to get out of the car galvanized his team and proved to himself that he possessed the grit to come back and compete at a high post-surgery level. One week after that, he won the spring race at Texas -- kicking off a stretch in which he visited Victory Lane four times in eight races, and added a pair of fourth-place finishes in two of the other four events.

Asked later to assess what staying in the car during the Phoenix race meant to his season, Hamlin replied: "I think it showed character, and it shows I'm a team player. Those are two things I can characterize it as. The easy way would have been to get out of the car, sit there, and watch someone else go through the rest of the race with a dinged-up race car."

Instead, he stayed in and shocked all the doubters by proving then and for the remainder of the season that he could challenge for a championship with a dinged-up knee. He eventually finished second, only 39 points behind Johnson.

1. The 24-48 pit-crew swap

Had the circumstances been different, as in had a fifth consecutive championship not been on the line and had the switch not been made right in the middle of a race, the decision by crew chief Chad Knaus to swap out his regular No. 48 pit crew and replace them with the No. 24 crew normally used by the car driven by Jeff Gordon would have raised eyebrows but not been quite as surprising.

But Knaus made the move in the middle of the AAA Texas 500, then defended it two days later when the swap was made official for the final two races of the season. He deftly swatted away criticism from rival crew chief Mike Ford, who suggested that the switch was evidence of some kind of fatal crack in the 48 Chevrolet team's championship armor.

"I hate to say it as bluntly as this is, but it's like changing a spring or changing a shock or something like that," Knaus said. "You have to put the best components together to try to win a championship."

Two weeks later, Knaus and driver Jimmie Johnson were celebrating their fifth championship together -- along with members from both of the pit crews involved.