SCENE & HEARD

A smooth Happy Hour here at Infineon Raceway, with 40 of the 43 cars making at least one lap and no incidents reported. Scott Pruett is in Mid-Ohio for the Rolex sports car race, while Brian Simo and Kevin Harvick sat out the final practice.
-- Mark Aumann

Just saw a doe in the hillside. This type of thing didn't happen when Ward was around.
-- Ryan Smithson

This is easily one the garages where there is a high possibility of being hit. Jeff Burton ran over my foot here back in 2002. And he hasn't won since. I am going to let him hit me to break the curse.
-- Ryan Smithson

Question asked of Tony Stewart: How hard is it to turn right?

"It's not hard, and if you don't figure it out, you're going to crash. We do it all the time in street cars. It's not like we can't figure it out in racecars."

Sometimes dumb questions require a smart-aleck answer.
-- Mark Aumann

Darrell Waltrip just finished filming his TV segment on the track with Jeff Hammond. It makes me hope that some trucker didn't have to drive all the way to Sonoma just to haul the car that Waltrip uses for 10 minutes.
-- Ryan Smithson

Denny Hamlin's crew was busy unloading the backup No. 11 after the rookie bounced off the tire barriers coming out of Turn 10 with five minutes to go in the first practice session. The car, which had substantial left-side damage, was up on jackstands in the garage.
-- Mark Aumann

Banner seen flying half-mast above Stewart's hauler: "The beatings will continue until morale improves." Stewart bought the banner last year sometime, but I've never seen it actually flying above his hauler.
-- Ryan Smithson

There still are quite a few guys doing double-duty this weekend, but Stanton Barrett isn't one of them. He actually pulled the feat one year while flying commercially to Milwaukee.

Talk about a tough break. And his publicist actually concocted a press release about his journey flying the friendly skies via United Airlines. Not all drivers have private jets.

Another thing about private jets: you can hear some crazy stories about the costs behind the danged things. One driver I know has a pretty nice one, and one time, before they took off, he was handed a bill for $8,800 for some obscure part they had to replace. I guess he put it on his Visa, and with that kind of money, he might have enough perks built up to win a free gas grill.

And obviously Ted Striker isn't flying the plane, so the pilot probably commands a good salary. $8,800. That is enough money to get a hotel for a whole weekend at Talladega.

Flying out to the West Coast makes me feel sorry for a lot of the crewmen, who often fly out here on these little bitty planes that go about 28 mph. They have to make about 21 stops for fuel in places called Broken Arrow, Okla., and Laughlin, Nev.

All that flying just to do two pit stops. It really makes a man appreciate Martinsville Speedway or Darlington Raceway, although the only wine you can get at those tracks is typically sold at Kroger.

Rumor has it that Boris Said and his crew chief, Frankie Stoddard, somehow pulled some strings and scaled to the top of the Golden Gate Bridge using one of the service elevators. Good for them.

Both of them have hair that resembles a Brillo pad, so I doubt they had to secure those curls before the ascent. That Bay wind is pretty rough, though.

Speaking of Frankie, he has got a lot to prove. All of his wins came with Jeff Burton.

If I had Boris Said at a road course in a decent chassis, I'd be feeling pretty darned good. When Boris is on, he can run with anyone, even Jeff Gordon. I wish he'd shave his head for laughs, but if he did, garage security would make him show ID every morning. I'd keep my locks too just to save that hassle.
-- Ryan Smithson

We are in Sonoma, and it is almost as hot as Atlanta, which is very hard to do. You step outside, and automatically, your back gets all wet from the sweat running down. I've only had my back this wet one other time in my life, and it involved sitting back-first in a urinal. Long story.

Strange being here without Rusty Wallace. He was a very underrated road course driver. I'll never forget this race in 2004, when his team ran him out of gas on the final lap. He went from like a sure top-five to a 28th-place finish. Then they ran him out of gas at Bristol, which is very hard to do. And you should have seen the look on his face when I asked him how the heck they had run out of gas on a half-mile track. I think those two races cut 15 years off his career.

See, it's the little things that kill you.
-- Ryan Smithson

I wouldn't necessarily base a fantasy team on this, but the "lucky numbers" in the fortune cookie from the chinese restaurant on Noriega Street on Thursday were 6 (Mark Martin), 12 (Ryan Newman), 22 (Dave Blaney), 38 (Elliott Sadler), 42 (Casey Mears) and 2 (Kurt Busch, who finished third here last year).

Of course, I could probably buy a lottery ticket and have similar odds of winning.
-- Mark Aumann

Welcome to Infineon Raceway, where it may get up to the low 90s today. That's still 10 degrees cooler than Thursday.

Expecting the usual June weather in San Francisco, I dressed accordingly: long-sleeve shirt and jeans. Wrong. Sunny and hazy, with a perfect view of the Golden Gate.

Of course, after switching to golf shirt and shorts, the fog rolled in Thursday night, dropping the temperature. It's sunny here, but you couldn't see 100 feet on the bridge this morning because of the fog.

That's the Bay Area for you.
-- Mark Aumann

Kasey Kahne was the last man to emerge from the pit-side bathrooms to head to his racecar, as the national anthem ended, and four fighter jets reprised, in solo runs, their initial four-man pass.

Kahne stopped behind pit road, amidst a crowd of bystanders, craned his head and watched the single passes in rapt manner. I had to wonder if, at any point, he ever wished he was "up there" at that moment, instead of "down here?"

Enjoy the race!
-- Dave Rodman

Highlight of the drivers' meeting came at the end, when Kevin Harvick asked a question about the red light at the end of pit road, which has replaced the "paddle man," a NASCAR official who for time immemorial had used a "ping-pong paddle" painted red and green on opposite sides to control traffic exiting pit road.

Race director David Hoots told him drivers could go a bit past the light to ease congestion on pit road, and then to proceed ahead when the light changed.

Leave it to Michael Waltrip to ask, "How do we know when to go if we're past the light?" Hoots said, "We're counting on your spotters to give you a hand."

Michael's comeback took the cake, when he addressed Hoots' previous dictate: "Don't speed on pit road to avoid losing a lap to the leader." Michael asked, "Can you kinda speed to avoid going a lap down?"

Hoots said, "No you can't; let's be thankful for Father's Day; Tim, lead us in prayer."
-- Dave Rodman

NASCAR vice president Jim Hunter was circulating with a tiny digital camera, which made me recall New England trade paper publisher Val LeSieur, who used to be [in]famous for carrying a tiny camera and clandestinely snapping images, which would show up in his paper, Speedway Scene in subsequent weeks, usually with hilarious captions.

Adam Sandler created a stir in the meeting, particularly with Yates Racing crew chief Tommy Baldwin, who greeted him and gave him a ball cap. After NASCAR VP of competition Robin Pemberton introduced a typical list of celebrities that included everyone from automotive industry executives to business leaders to an Army major general, Sandler's was the only hand he walked over to shake.

Sandler, the race's grand marshal, looked to be as much fun -- and as funny -- in person as he is on the screen.

Sat with Gibbs Racing president J.D. Gibbs, who modestly accepted congratulations for his teams' recent successes, but reminded that he was enjoying it because "things can go like that" in a hurry. He was holding his hand at a 45-degree angle at the time, with the fingertips pointed down.

And I wondered how badly some executive would feel if they missed the list?
-- Dave Rodman

Just had to visit with Kenny Schrader up in the lounge of the Wood Brothers' hauler to tell him that my new Schwan's Home Service delivery driver had told me this past week that Schrader still ruled "Schwan Nation" despite switching teams at the beginning of this season.

Sunday morning, Schrader was sitting with a laptop -- where else -- in his lap watching the weather radar that unfortunately turned out to be a true forecast of the race's delay. Schrader just laughed when told that some had speculated he'd be at Toledo Friday night to watch Supermodifieds.

"I won at Quincy, Ill., Tuesday night [in a dirt Late Model]," Schrader said. "I didn't do so well at Pevely [Mo.] Wednesday night, but we won at I-96 Friday night."
-- Dave Rodman

Yeah, I know Jimmie Johnson is leading the Nextel Cup standings and Scott Riggs is running 20-something. But maybe the fact that Scottie came from his hauler rather than from the motorhome lot was the reason he made it all the way from there to the drivers' meeting room without being stopped by one person, rather than creating another miniature dust cloud.
-- Dave Rodman

Longtime buddy Scott Goodman, a NASCAR official who works in the scoring department each week, had an apt observation while viewing the melee that was the Cup garage at 11:15 a.m.

"When was the last time you saw one of those," he said, gesturing at a pair of rectangular box-hooded payphones mounted on the end wall of the last garage, facing the backs of the haulers. "Or better yet, when was the last time you actually put money in one of 'em?"

By the weathered looks of them, the phones might have been original equipment when MIS was built. And for the record, even though I can remember making 10-cent calls on payphones, the going rate on these was 50 cents.
-- Dave Rodman

That was all I could think as I walked into the Nextel Cup garage at 11 a.m. -- 40 minutes before the drivers' meeting -- and saw a diagonal, four-deep wave of people that completely blocked the passageway behind Matt Kenseth and Tony Stewart's end-of-the-row haulers.

I assumed the fans were there to observe the drivers coming from the motorhome lot to the drivers' meeting, until I wriggled through a foot-wide space that need to simultaneously accommodate both me and a crewman pulling a gas-can cart, and went beyond it 20 yards to stop and visit with another bystander.

Moments later, I saw a mobile dust cloud, a la the Charlie Brown comic strip character ''Pigpen'' coming toward me. In the middle of it was Jimmie Johnson, trying to sign as best as he could while never slowing his moderate pace.
-- Dave Rodman

I didn't see Jeff Fuller's brutal Busch Series wreck Saturday night from Kentucky, but having known Fuller since before he was a Modified Tour champion back home in New England, the best possible news of all this weekend was that Fuller was released from a hospital Sunday morning.
-- Dave Rodman

If you were lucky enough to watch it, Saturday night's Busch race from Kentucky was one of the most thrilling and dramatic endings in, well, a real long time.

The irony of Sunday morning's e-mail roster was the discovery that race winner David Gilliland, son of former Winston West champion Butch Gilliland, and Stephen Leicht, the Robert Yates Racing development driver, each made their seventh career Busch start Saturday night.

Now, I'm not knocking Yates' development program nor CitiFinancial for backing it -- but I think someone missed the boat by letting Hype Manufacturing, which is Gilliland's sponsor "by default" since it's his team owner Clay Andrews' company, get all the play while Gilliland out-dueled Nextel Cup drivers J.J. Yeley and Denny Hamlin for the win.

And didn't you love the way Gilliland wore his Hype hat for the TV interview?
-- Dave Rodman

Happy Father's Day today to my dad in Boone and all fathers everywhere.

Let's go racing!
-- Mark Aumann

Welcome to windy Michigan International Speedway, where the biggest concern might be the weather. There's a stiff, steady breeze from south to north, which may be blowing more gray, angry-looking storm clouds our way. The track is dry and there's no rain in the immediate area, but it's stormy in Indiana and Illinois.

Saw the No. 9 Dodge in the garage area before it was rolled out to the track. The guys did a great job hammering out the right real quarterpanel. Other than a few ripples on close inspection, you'd never know Kasey Kahne whacked the wall yesterday. He should be good to go.

I've heard horror stories about getting into this place, since the track is surrounded by two-lane state roads. But there are a number of secondary farm roads that criss-cross the area -- and I was able to get from Ann Arbor to the infield parking lot in no more than 45 minutes.
-- Mark Aumann