Posted on by Staff Report

RELATED: Smith, wife welcome baby boy


Regan Smith and wife Megan are expanding their family as the driver tweeted out and also mentioned on FS1’s RaceHub that the couple is expecting their second child later this year.
 



In February of 2015, the Smiths welcomed son Rhett into the world.

The 2016 calendar year has already been an eventful one for Smith, who landed behind the wheel of the No. 7 Tommy Baldwin Racing Chevrolet in the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series just weeks before the season kicked off in Daytona.



Entering Sunday’s STP 500 at Martinsville (1 p.m. ET, FS1, MRN, SiriusXM NASCAR Radio), Smith is 23rd in the point standings.

Posted on by Zack Albert

RELATED: See where Stenhouse ranks in the standings

CONCORD, N.C. — If there’s a tipping point that illustrates how far Ricky Stenhouse Jr. has developed in his NASCAR career, it’s one that traces back to the spring of 2010.
 
Stenhouse had begun his rookie NASCAR Nationwide (now XFINITY) Series season by crashing out of five of the first 12 races. On the 12th, at Charlotte, he doubled down on his early magnetic tendencies for running into walls or other competitors, demolishing one car in pre-race practice and exiting the race in another crack-up after just eight laps.
 
By then, team owner Jack Roush had had enough.
 
“It just added up,” Stenhouse says now. “That’s the thing that Jack wanted to really focus on — it wasn’t that crash, it was the other ones before that. You’re going to get caught up in wrecks and you’re going to have issues that are out of your control, but he wanted to focus on the ones that were in my control.”
 
With the cumulative effects of bringing Stenhouse’s wrecked cars back from the track wearing him down, Roush benched his young driver, putting him to work in the shop, helping to fix the damage in a very literal sense.
 
“I cut up cars, a lot of chassis,” Stenhouse says, pointing from his spot in the lobby of Roush Fenway Racing‘s museum to one of the buildings on the team’s spacious campus where he got his hands dirty. “I did some bodywork. I made quarterpanels and stacked ’em up on shelves so that when the guys were ready to build a car, they had a quarterpanel ready to go.”
 
The benefits of such a hands-on character-building experience had the desired effect. Stenhouse went without a crash-related DNF the rest of the season. One year later, he was hoisting the first of two consecutive NASCAR Nationwide Series championship trophies.
 
Six years removed from those humble beginnings, Stenhouse is a fourth-year vet in NASCAR’s premier division, still driving for Roush and still aiming to help the organization back to prominence. He comes off the Sprint Cup tour’s idle weekend buoyed by a fifth-place finish at Auto Club Speedway and improved performance elsewhere in the season’s early going.
 
It’s been a journey of transformation from crash-prone rookie to established veteran, the latest step in a path forged by those early morning arrivals at the shop in 2010.

RELATED: Stenhouse helps team fix car at Martinsville

Personnel matters
 
Roush Fenway Racing‘s rebuilding process has been long in the making. The team hasn’t won since 2014, enduring its worst NASCAR season in its 28-year existence last year.
 
The downturn in performance led to plenty of personnel moves across the organization, but one team was largely, purposely kept intact — the No. 17 Ford with Stenhouse and crew chief Nick Sandler. The decision meant that for the first time in his Sprint Cup career, the Mississippi native wouldn’t be starting a season with a new crew chief.
 
“There was a conscious decision to keep that team together and I think that spoke a lot about how our team worked and the people that we had,” Sandler said. “We sort of felt that was an important thing, that everyone had enough faith in that group to keep us all together and that we really needed to perform this year.”
 
With their roles established, Stenhouse and Sandler set about improving their communication in the hopes that, in turn, their performance would gain traction. Helping matters was Sandler getting more familiar atop the pit box in managing race-day operations.
 
“There were a lot of times last year where I was worried about race strategy and how we were going to do things throughout the race and I would catch myself not staying as focused as I needed to in the car about driving the car and I’d make a mistake,” Stenhouse says “… There were just so many things that added up at the beginning of the year last year that came from trying to do too much from inside the car. I think it’s really helped me a lot and him to have more confidence in the calls that he makes, the changes that he makes on the race car as well.”
 
Last season marked Sandler’s first as a crew chief, but his history with Roush Fenway runs deep. He joined the organization as a shock specialist in 2006 and served as a team engineer under veteran wrench Jimmy Fennig, helping him transition to managing the team’s weekend and race-day calls.
 
“The comfort level is growing,” said Sandler. “I don’t know that you ever get completely comfortable in that role. It seems like it’s always a different challenge every week.”

RELATED: Roush seeks to make big gains in 2016

Moving forward
 
Stenhouse has registered just one top-five finish each season since joining the Cup Series full-time in 2013. Making the top-five in California the first of more to come will require the No. 17 team to continue a trend — turning last year’s struggle spots into strong suits.
 
“I think when you look at the progress between last year at those tracks versus now, I think it’s a big jump,” Stenhouse says, admitting that his team is playing the optimism cautiously. After all, it’s a five-race stretch in a season of 36, and a part of a larger rejuvenation effort within Roush Fenway’s corporate confines.
 
“This is the first offseason where the cars have gotten even better from where we ended,” Stenhouse said. “So I think everything that we’ve done hiring-wise and in management roles and different positions, I think is in the right direction and the pieces that they’re working on are the correct pieces. Still a lot of fine-tuning left to do and a lot of progress still to be made, but I do think that we’ve made some progress through last year through the offseason and it’s paying off.”
 
Roush Fenway’s three-driver lineup of Stenhouse, Greg Biffle and Trevor Bayne remained intact for 2016, but other personnel realignments — combined with a new technical alliance with fellow Ford affiliate Front Row Motorsports — have also begun to take root.
 
“We’ve done some changes in terms of (car) building on the technical side, making better cars, and then we’ve also culturally there’s been a little bit of a change here, too,” Sandler says. “That’s all been positive. I think that we’re — company-wide — we realize that we have a long uphill battle to get back where we’re contending the way we should and the way we have. We sort of stepped back and laid a really good foundation for that last year and it’s taking some time to start to seed.”

RELATED: Early returns have Roush Fenway trending up
 
Positive growth
 
While Roush Fenway Racing aims for its own rebirth, the 28-year-old Stenhouse has made his own strides in on-track maturity. That growth has spanned both of NASCAR’s top two national series, with each experience leaving its own impression.
 
The common bond has been communication.
 
“On the driving side, I think I grew in the Nationwide Series to a point, but then coming over to the Cup side, I kind of had to grow in different ways as far as the work ethic that I had to put back into talking to my engineers a lot more and talking to my crew chief a lot more,” Stenhouse said. “It kind of came a little bit easier in Nationwide once I figured out what I needed to do driving-wise. The cars were fast and I just showed up and drove and it was really good, but now we spend a lot of time during the week talking about things to be better for throughout the weekend.”
 
Since those earliest days, finding the fine line between being fast and out of control has been a delicate dance for Stenhouse, who too often rumpled sheet metal as he explored those limits early in his career.
 
It’s why trading in his fire suit to work in the shop was a difficult but necessary step in his development. Stenhouse sat atop the pit box during his 2010 benching to show his support, but he also bonded more deeply with his crew as he helped rebuild Roush’s cars in the shop.
 
“I think it speaks a little bit about Ricky,” Sandler said. “He’s got a lot of talent and a lot of desire. In those days, he had good performance and then some times he overachieved, and I think learning that balance is something that young drivers have to experience.”
 
Stenhouse said he’s occasionally had flashbacks to his shop experience when he’s endured rough stretches, the most recent one coming just last year. The reminders of those long work days that started bright and early at 6:30 a.m., have also helped remind him not only to keep his focus but of how far he’s come.
 
“If I look at it year-wise, it’s like, ‘Man, that was a long time ago,’ ” Stenhouse says. “It was one of those times that you’ll never forget and you’ll always have the stories. I think those are the stories that people like to hear.”

Posted on by Zack Albert

It wasn’t the first time that Jimmie Johnson and Matt Kenseth have been drafting partners. The two have won their fair share of races on NASCAR’s restrictor-plate tracks, where the nuance of aerodynamics and slipstreams is of crucial importance.


Wednesday, though, the pair worked a different sort of draft as part of a full-fledged peloton of cyclists on a 130-mile trip from Asheville, North Carolina to Charlotte, with each logging personal bests for distance. The event was the first leg of the four-day Ride On Atlanta, a 400-mile trek designed to raise awareness and funding for the non-profit PeopleForBikes organization.


Though Wednesday’s ride represented the extreme end of the pendulum for their road biking exploits, Johnson and Kenseth have been increasingly involved in running together on two wheels. Most Tuesdays, the two can be found bounding around Charlotte-area trails on mountain bikes, sharpening their physical and mental skills.

(Photo courtesy of Meg McMahon for PeopleForBikes)



“What I like about mountain biking is that when you’re really, really tired, you’ve still got to pay a lot of attention because there’s still going to be a rock or a root or a jump or an obstacle of some sort,” Kenseth said. “To me, it kind of relates to racing a little bit because when you’re most tired, you still have to pay attention and be on your toes and do all that.


“And you’re out in the woods. You’re not going to get hit by a car. You might hit a tree, but the tree’s not going to hit you. You might hit it.”


Johnson, whose skills as an avid triathlete are well established, said Kenseth has been a quick study as a relative newcomer to the biking scene. Johnson’s previous distance record was a 100-mile journey he took for his 40th birthday last September; Kenseth’s personal best was an approximately 60-mile ride with Johnson in the Daytona area this February.


A review of Johnson’s bike telemetry at day’s end showed 130.4 miles — “definitely the high score,” he said — more than 7 hours, 21 minutes of rolling time, an average of 17.6 mph. Johnson said that he and Kenseth were understandably a tad nervous about Wednesday’s distance, but that — much like his trail-riding prowess — Kenseth matched him pedal for pedal.


“I’ve been impressed with his bike-handling skills,” Johnson said. “I’ve taken race car drivers on mountain bike rides and they’re scared for their lives, like they’re just going to wreck at any point. Growing up in Wisconsin, (Kenseth) had dirt bikes, he raced snowmobiles — he has a very good sense of where he is on the bike.”


On race weekends, Johnson can often be found running or biking along speedway grounds in the early morning hours or after the garage’s closing time. His running routine hasn’t made its way to Kenseth, who claims his wife, Katie, is the runner of the family.


But Kenseth said his renewed devotion to fitness involving handlebars is just part of trying to be better behind the wheel.


“Just trying to stay in better shape. As you get older, it’s not easier, it’s always harder so I feel like you’ve got to work harder at it,” Kenseth said. “I think the more physically fit you are, the more mentally fit you are as well. I think it all kind of goes hand in hand.”

Posted on by Zack Albert

RELATED: Watch the incident between Kenseth, Logano

 

CHARLOTTE, N.C. — If the biggest lightning-rod moment of the 2015 season had somehow slipped through Matt Kenseth‘s memory banks, he wouldn’t have to search far for a reminder of what went down at Martinsville Speedway last fall with rival Joey Logano.

 

The historic race track has used the replays of Kenseth’s intentional crash of Logano last November in television commercials promoting Sunday’s STP 500 (1 p.m. ET, FS1, MRN, SiriusXM NASCAR Radio). But even if Kenseth hasn’t been tuning in, he said the incident has also endured with fans, who continue to broach the topic in casual conversation.

 

“Every week. People bring it up pretty much every week,” Kenseth said. “All winter.”

 

Kenseth, speaking Wednesday after joining Jimmie Johnson on a 130-mile charity bicycle ride from Asheville, North Carolina, to Charlotte, drew a two-race suspension from NASCAR last season after bouncing Logano from victory contention in the most recent race at the historic .526-mile track. The two drivers said this offseason that they’d prefer to put their incident in the past, but returning to the site for the first time since last year’s confrontation has made it unavoidable.

 

Martinsville Speedway president Clay Campbell defended using the footage in the track’s promotional campaigns, telling reporters Tuesday: “Yeah, it stirred up controversy, but what do people want me to show, the pace lap?”

 

Kenseth said he could see merits to both points of view.

 

“I mean, yes and no. If it’s so bad you get suspended from it, it seems like if it’s maybe that bad of an act, then maybe it shouldn’t be used to profit from, because I certainly didn’t profit from it,” Kenseth said with a deadpan smirk. “On the other hand, the fans … a lot of people come to see controversy and action and wrecks. I mean, that’s what the fans love.

 

” … I don’t know. I understand. If I’m a promoter, I’d do the same thing obviously. They’re trying to put people in the stands, and the people loved it that were in the stands, the action and the controversy. So I can’t blame them there, but yeah, it does seem kind of — I don’t know what the right word is — not what I would expect, I guess, if it was really that bad of an act.”

 

Martinsville is one of five tracks where Kenseth has never won. One factor that may help him fill the void this weekend is the return of a familiar face to the spotters’ stand in Chris “Crazy” Osborne.

 

Osborne, sidelined with multiple injuries in an automobile crash Dec. 17, will be working the team radio for the Joe Gibbs Racing No. 20 Toyota for the first time this season. Lorin Ranier and Curtis Markham spotted for Kenseth in the interim.

 

RELATED: Osborne talks accident, return

 

“I’m glad that he’s feeling better and he’ll be back, so we definitely missed him for sure,” Kenseth said of Osborne, who also spots for Daniel Suarez in the NASCAR XFINITY Series and NASCAR Camping World Truck Series. “Curtis did a good job filling in and so did Lorin, but it’s just not the same when you get a guy you’re used to giving you certain kind of information and communicating with the crew chief.

 

“All that working together and understanding each other, he’s the guy you talk to most of the time, so it’s hard to unplug him and just plug someone else in that late in the game for sure.”

Posted on by Nascar

When the NASCAR Camping World Truck Series rolls into Martinsville Speedway for this Saturday’s Alpha Energy Solutions 250 (2:30 p.m. ET, FS1, MRN, SiriusXM NASCAR Radio), John Hunter Nemechek will arrive as the series’ most recent winner.
 
It’s coming up on a five-week break for Nemechek and his fellow racers, more than a month since he pulled into the winner’s circle at Atlanta Motor Speedway for his second career victory.
 
The win sets up the 18-year-old to be in position to participate in this year’s inaugural NASCAR Camping World Truck Series Chase. Similar to the Sprint Cup Series’ Chase format, eight drivers will compete for the title, attempting to advance through two elimination rounds to reach the championship-determining event at Homestead-Miami Speedway where four will vie for the title.

RELATED: Truck Series Chase 101
 
That Nemechek is already in position to begin considering Chase scenarios is nothing short of remarkable – the son of former Sprint Cup driver Joe Nemechek had only 30 career starts in the series heading into the 2016 season.
 
That his NEMCO Motorsports team has been able to compete against larger, more established organizations in spite of its limited resources is no less amazing.
 
There’s no questioning Nemechek’s talent – he has finished in the top five in roughly one third of his starts and has 17 career top-10 results. His first win came last season at Chicagoland Speedway.
 
The inability to test slows progress, but it’s something each team must deal with today. Nemechek said it helps that he is surrounded by so much experience on his team.
 
“I have two of the most veteran (people) here in Dad and (crew chief) Gere Kennon,” he said. “They like to do stuff the old way, old school; all their experience and knowledge I’ve learned from.
 
“Dad has taught me everything he’s learned in a 20-year period in a 3-4 year period. That’s sped up my learning curve. Then bringing Gere on board, he’s taught me a lot about these trucks; he’s been in the sport forever.”
 
The elder Nemechek won four times during a 20-plus year career at the premier series level. He also won 16 times in what is now the XFINITY Series, and was that division’s champion in 1992.
 
Kennon’s racing resume includes title-winning runs with two-time series champion Sam Ard in what is now known as the NASCAR XFINITY Series, as well successful stints with Brett Bodine and Ron Hornaday in the that series. Kennon was also a chassis specialist for Roush Racing before moving into a crew chief role in the mid-‘90s for team owner Butch Mock and driver Morgan Shepherd in the premier series ranks.
 
NEMCO Motorsports is a single-team, family-owned organization with roughly a dozen employees and limited funding. The group hired its first engineer this season.
 
They might get out-spent, but they won’t be out-worked. They might be out-engineered, but not out-smarted.
 
“To be competitive in this series, it takes a few million dollars,” Joe Nemechek said. ” … It’s hard to round that up on a weekly basis.”
 
Funding from Fone Fuel and Berry’s Bullets has been a big help, he said, but added that his group is “making hundreds and hundreds of calls every week.
 
“I know what we spend in this deal, and we’re probably spending half of what the big teams are. But it’s too hard; you just can’t keep doing that and have success. At some point all your people get burned out; it’s tough.”
 
Parker Kligerman has driven to the top of the points standings after teaming with the small Ricky Benton Racing organization. Nemechek sits third, behind Kligerman and Brad Keselowski Racing’s Daniel Hemric.

RELATED: Hemric finds perfect home | Dual roles lead to success for Kligerman
 
He has five starts at Martinsville, more than at any other track hosting the series, and finished second there in last season’s fall event.
 
“It means a lot to be able to come back to the race track where I made my (series) debut,” Nemechek said during the track’s recent media day event. “I’ve improved a lot since then.
 
“Also to finish second here (last fall), we’ve improved on our finishes every time we’ve been here over the past two and a half years so if we can keep doing that and just improve it by one (position) this year, we’ll be good.”

Posted on by Holly Cain

RELATED: Women racers pave new roads to success in NASCAR

 

There is a bit of irony in Danica Patrick‘s Martinsville Speedway resume.

A racer who made international headlines and officially became a first-name only reference for nearly winning her Indianapolis 500 debut at one of the world’s most famous and grand-sized tracks, Danica bolstered her track record in many eyes by scoring one of her best NASCAR finishes (seventh) on one of stock car racing’s smallest (.526-mile), most challenging and endearingly iconic facilities: Martinsville Speedway.

Patrick, who celebrated her 34th birthday during the off-week, returns to “The Paperclip” for Sunday’s Sprint Cup Series’ STP 500 (1 p.m. ET, FS1) — site of a historic seventh-place finish for her only a year ago.

The result tied her with the great Janet Guthrie for most NASCAR top-10 finishes (five) by a woman, and two weeks later Patrick made the mark her own, scoring her sixth top 10 — a ninth-place showing at the sport’s second smallest track (.53-mile) in Bristol, Tennessee.

RELATED: Janet Guthrie’s groundbreaking racing career

In fact, Patrick’s record at Martinsville makes this challenging shortest of tracks one of her best. She recorded a 12th-place debut in 2012 — a better first try than some of the sport’s greatest champions such as Hall of Famers Rusty Wallace (who finished 15th) and Dale Jarrett (14th) and even Patrick’s team owner, three-time Cup champ Tony Stewart, who finished 20th in his first start there.

“I came from a road-course racing background and at Martinsville, I feel like you have to set passes up a little bit like that,” Patrick said. “I think it’s also a track where you have to exercise a lot of discipline. It’s easy to make mistakes. It’s easy to overdrive and try to get a little bit more when you’re passing somebody and make mistakes. Those are the two things I keep in mind when I’m there. I also think you really need a good car there, too, and Stewart-Haas Racing has always had good cars there.”

This time around Patrick’s No. 10 TaxAct Chevy will have a new crew chief, Billy Scott. It’s her third crew chief in four seasons as the team searches for the kind of good chemistry and juju to elevate Patrick into the post-season and give her a legitimate shot to score her first Sprint Cup victory.

 

MORE: SHR names new crew chiefs for Danica, Stewart

It’s already been a challenging start to 2016 with Patrick crashing in two of the opening five races. She was handed a $20,000 fine from NASCAR last week for violating safety rules because she angrily approached and gestured toward Kasey Kahne‘s car after they wrecked at California’s Auto Club Speedway. Kahne’s car hit hers while the two were racing close together.

For Patrick, this week is a real opportunity to restore her preferred path to the postseason.

By the fifth race in each of her full-time Cup seasons, she has been ranked 29th, 27th and 23rd in the standings and is now 29th again despite two top-20 finishes.

The challenge in having another new crew chief is the early season get-to-know-you time. But the other tasks that have dominated Patrick’s transition from Indycars to stock cars have become more manageable, giving her and the team great reason to be optimistic.

 

MORE: Danica reacts to SHR move to Ford

Especially here. Especially now.

“I’m far more confident and comfortable,” Patrick said coming into the season. “I’m understanding the car properly and able to help in making it better quickly on the race weekend. 

“Also the comfort of getting up to speed fast helps that learning curve, too. I remember there were lots of times in the very beginning when I wasn’t able to drive the car to the very limit. We’d come in and make changes based on the way that I was driving it. Once I was driving it the way it needed to be, all of a sudden we ended up back where we started. We wasted all practice for me to learn how to do it. 

“I’m much better at getting up to speed. But always room to improve. I’m still working on doing a better job at that. I think as a driver, we all tend to have our general weak areas and general strong areas. I know mine.” 

That this track has provided some of the most interesting story lines in NASCAR history is only another reason to expect better days.

Morgan Shepherd won a pole position here at 45 years old in 1987 and Harry Gant famously won the race in 1991 at the age of 51 and a half.

Eleven drivers scored their very first Cup wins at Martinsville — the last being Ricky Craven in 2001.

Notably, the majority of Patrick’s top-10 finishes have come after sub-top-20 starts. Her very best Cup showing, for example, a seventh-place finish at Atlanta in 2014, came after starting 27th.

“It’s twice as hard as it used to be to get to Victory Lane,” Patrick said. “It was hard to do it back when I was in IndyCar. I did it once in seven years. It’s very challenging. There’s lots of great drivers. Experience definitely helps. I’m working on getting that. 

“I mean, everybody wants to win. … It’s very hard to win in Cup, it just is. Everything’s got to go your way and be right and be clicking. That’s what also makes it so great when it happens. The blood, sweat and tears to get there. 

“It’s always frustrating, but it’s frustrating to just keep wanting to do better. But that’s what drives you.”

Posted on by Staff Report

RELATED: Buy tickets for Texas

Worlds will be colliding as Brandon Jones will sport the colors of Major League Baseball’s Texas Rangers during next weekend’s NASCAR XFINITY Series O’Reilly Auto Parts 300 (Friday, April 8, 8:30 p.m. ET, FS1) at the 1.5-mile track.

Jones’ No. 33 Richard Childress Racing Chevrolet will carry the logo of the defending American League West division champions on the hood of the car. Watch how it came together below.


Jones is in his first full season in the XFINITY Series. The 19-year-old Sunoco Rookie of the Year candidate ranks fourth in the series standings with three top 10s through the series’ first five races.

The scheme’s running coincides with the opening week of the Major League Baseball season. A tripleheader of games kicks off the season this Sunday, April 3, with the traditional “Opening Day” for most of the other teams on Monday afternoon.

Texas Motor Speedway is located in Fort Worth, Texas, while the Texas Rangers play in nearby Arlington.

Posted on by Staff Report

Two-time champion Ray Alfalla (Slip Angle Motorsports) took his first checkered flag of the 2016 NASCAR PEAK Antifreeze Series in dominating fashion at Auto Club Speedway on March 29. Alfalla started on the outside pole and quickly asserted himself as the driver to beat by taking the lead on the opening lap from pole-sitter Cody Byus (The TEAM) and totaled a race-high 66 circuits at the front.

PJ Stergios (Last Row Motorsports) finished second, five seconds behind Alfalla at the checkers for his fourth top-five finish in as many races. Kenny Humpe was third, his second top-five finish of the season. Allen Boes (Deadzone) finished fourth and David Rattler (LockDown Racing) played an alternate pit strategy to earn a fifth-place result.

“This is one of my favorite tracks, and it feels nice to bring it home with the win,” Alfalla said.

Two weeks after a caution-free event at Phoenix, the caution flew twice in the first nine laps for a pair of incidents. First, Timmy Hill was sent spinning after contact with Justin Bolton. Hill was able to continue to a mediocre 23rd-place finish. Just a few laps later, Dillon Raffurty veered hard into the outside wall on the restart after experiencing technical difficulties. The crash would collect nearly a dozen cars and end the race for five sim racers, including Raffurty, who was credited with 42nd-place.

After the two quick cautions, the rest of the 125-lap race was run caution-free, giving drivers with speed on the long run an advantage while also allowing varying pit strategies to play out. With tire wear once again a huge factor, drivers near the front chose to pit well before fuel became an issue.

 

On the first run Alfalla fired off quickly and built a gap to the rest of the field but slowly began losing his gap as the run wore on. Since Alfalla was on a three-stop strategy, his total time given up was quite minimal and after performing some adjustments to his car, his long run speed improved in later runs. Despite the early troubles on the long run, Alfalla was never seriously challenged on speed the rest of the race.

With the race seemingly in hand, other drivers lacking the outright speed to keep up with Alfalla tried a riskier two-stop pit strategy. Rattler and Andrew Fayash were two drivers willing to try the counter-strategy and Rattler in particular found success with it. Although his car was not as fast as the leaders, his long run speed was competitive and one less trip down pit road than the leaders saved him nearly 40 seconds on track.

Instead of being stuck mid-pack, Rattler wound up leading 34 laps and was leading as late as Lap 111 before Alfalla overtook him on fresher tires. Though he fell short on picking up his first NASCAR PEAK Antifreeze Series win, a top five was just what Rattler needed as he moved up to 12th in the series standings.

With a quarter of the 2016 season in the books, a quintet of drivers is in position to battle for the series title. PJ Stergios and Alfalla are tied for the points lead, 11 points ahead of Boes. Jake Stergios is another three points adrift, followed by Chris Overland, who sits four markers behind the second Stergios brother.

Consistent top-five finishes have separated the front five drivers from the pack. Nick Ottinger, who is sixth in the championship, is 25 points behind fifth and 48 points — equal to a full race — behind the leader.

In two weeks, the rest of the field will look to close in on the front five as the series heads to Texas Motor Speedway. The fast 1.5-mile track is aero-dependent and notoriously tough to pass on, making qualifying and pit strategy of high importance. Can past champions Humpe and Tyler Hudson spoil the fun of the top five, or will Texas see familiar faces at the front once again? Find out in two weeks’ time when the NASCAR PEAK Antifreeze Series takes to the Texas high-banks on iRacingLive!

 

Posted on by Nascar

Photo Credit: Richmond International Raceway‘s official Twitter account, @RIRInsider

RELATED: Schedule for Martinsville

Joey Logano isn’t expecting a warm reception when he arrives at Martinsville Speedway for this Sunday’s STP 500 NASCAR Sprint Cup Series race (1 p.m. ET, FS1, MRN, SiriusXM NASCAR Radio), but the driver of the Team Penske No. 22 Ford isn’t losing any sleep over it.
 
“I think that’s one of those race tracks that will probably be fairly negative toward me,” Logano said during a break in Tuesday’s Goodyear tire test at Richmond International Raceway. “But you know, I guess over the years there are only certain people that know who I really am. I don’t really take that stuff too personal. I know there’s only one person who can judge me. So I don’t get worried about it. To be honest with you, it motivates me. I’m kind of OK with it.”
 
It will be the first Sprint Cup race at the 0.526-mile track since last fall’s Chase for the NASCAR Sprint Cup event, when Logano’s day soured after he was taken out, while leading the race, by Joe Gibbs Racing driver and 2003 series champion Matt Kenseth.
 
Many fans on hand that day cheered as Kenseth drove his ailing Toyota into the left rear of Logano’s Ford, pushing it up into the outside wall in Turn 1.

RELATED: Recap what happened at Martinsville last year
 
Kenseth had been spun out of the lead in a race at Kansas two weeks earlier after contact from Logano as the two battled for the lead. He was parked by NASCAR and eventually suspended for two races as a result of his actions at Martinsville.
 
Logano was unable to rebound from the incident, and failed to advance to the championship round as a result.
 
How he is greeted this week, Logano said, “doesn’t bother me at all.
 
“I just want to go show them up,” he said. “It gives you that motivation, you know. … Someone puts you down and you want to show them. It gives you that little extra fire to show people what’s up. And I think that kind of gives me a little drive.”
 
Asked if Logano has merely gotten a bad rap, Hamlin — who had his own run-in with the 25-year-old — joked “He’s in the room, so (it’s) a little difficult …”
 
“Careful what you say!” Logano quipped.
 
“My perfect 100 percent honest answer is Joey races really tough and really hard,” Hamlin, who also races out of the JGR camp, said. “At times he’s difficult to pass. A lot of times that pays off in the end … I think it just seems like sometimes there are coincidences. I’ve had probably the same thing happen to me — somebody is pissed at me, then next week someone else was pissed at me.
 
“We all have our styles of driving. … You can’t expect someone to convert the way that they drive to appease other people, because it’s what’s made them successful. It’s hard for me to criticize the way anyone drives, even though it may not be the way that I do it.”
 
Hamlin opened up the 2016 season with wins in the Sprint Unlimited non-points event, then capped off SpeedWeeks with his first Daytona 500 victory.
 
Logano, six times a winner last season, is sixth in points and searching for his first victory of the year.
 
“A lot of times when drivers put on helmets, their attitude changes,” Logano said. “It becomes a competitive atmosphere. You’re out here to win.
 
“Like Denny said, I race hard. I’m not going to disagree with that. That’s what I’ve found works for me. I’ve tried it the other way and it didn’t work. When you find something that works for you, you try to stick to that.”

Posted on by Nascar

CHARLOTTE, N.C. — The respect was there from the beginning, a carryover from years of competing against one another on the track.
 
The understanding has been a bit slower to materialize as the two former rivals became co-workers, but it’s coming along nicely according to NASCAR on FOX analyst Jeff Gordon.
 
The four-time premier series champion, speaking Tuesday at the NASCAR Hall of Fame, said there are no issues between himself and fellow NASCAR on FOX analyst Darrell Waltrip.
 
“We all understand the age difference and the different eras where we were dominant in our sport, but the respect that DW and I have for one another has always been there,” Gordon, 44, said during an appearance to help promote this Sunday’s STP 500 NASCAR Sprint Cup event at Martinsville Speedway (1 p.m. ET, FS1, MRN, SiriusXM NASCAR Radio).
 
Gordon retired from driving at the conclusion of the 2015 season with 93 victories to go along with his four titles. Waltrip, a staple in the FOX broadcast booth since 2001, ended his career with 84 wins and three championships.
 
“In the booth, even though we might not always agree on things, because we have common respect for one another … it probably took a little bit of time of that understanding and having more personal time together, at dinner and meetings and texting back and forth – but our relationship is great,” Gordon said. “And I think we’re having a lot of fun.”
 
There have been differences of opinion, but Gordon said fans shouldn’t read “controversy” into those situations.
 
When Stewart-Haas Racing driver Kevin Harvick pitted for tires and fuel under green and then inherited the lead in the Auto Club 400 thanks to a caution flag barely two laps after his stop, the question for Gordon and Waltrip was who benefited? Harvick because of the immediate gain in track position as those who hadn’t previouly stopped came to pit road, or Jimmie Johnson, the race leader at the time of the caution, who restarted second after a two-tire change?
 
“I wouldn’t call it a disagreement but a difference of opinions,” Gordon said of the conversation. “The nice thing … (whichever) one of us is right and one of us is wrong, we smile about it, pat one another on the back, make jabs about it and go on. I think at first fans were taking that maybe the wrong way or people at home were taking that as ‘Oh man, these guys genuinely don’t like one another.’
 
“No … we do have differences of how we see things and we’re going to express that. But at the end of the day we’re going to have fun and enjoy those differences and not take it personally.”
 
The Auto Club Speedway discussion was similar to one just a few weeks earlier when rev limiters on the cars was the topic.
 
Waltrip, 69, later addressed that particular discussion in a posting on the FOXSports.com website.
 
“Some of you have tweeted suspecting there’s friction, but trust me, you couldn’t be more wrong,” Waltrip wrote. “Just because we don’t agree on everything doesn’t mean I don’t like him and he doesn’t like me. Who wants a booth where they all think, sound and act alike? I sure don’t.”
 
With five races in the booth under his belt, Gordon is becoming more comfortable in his new role. Whenever possible, he arrives at the track on Friday morning and heads into the garage as soon as it opens.
 
“My old crew chief, Alan Gustafson, is all mad at me (saying), ‘Oh sure, you stop driving and now you decide to come in the garage area at 8 o’clock when it opens up,’ Gordon said.
 
“I said, ‘Yeah, I didn’t need to know all this stuff before. I just drove the car.’ “
 
Those early-morning conversations allow him to catch up on topics of the day and get acquainted with many people he once raced against.
 
“When you’re up in that booth and mentioning names, it’s nice to put a face with it and have a conversation with … (No. 78 crew chief) Cole Pearn comes to mind, someone I talked to at Daytona,” he said. “… A lot of these guys, I’ve been on the other side where they’re my competitors and I didn’t really get to know them.
 
“Now I’m looking at it as personalities that really make up our sport. And I don’t think our job on Sunday in the broadcast booth is to come up with some revelation of ‘Hey, somebody’s doing this or doing that and that’s how they’re getting a competitive advantage.’
 
“It’s not necessarily that, but if something happens, you want to have knowledge. And understand why they’re doing that. Or why they’re not doing that. Whether it’s a pit call … an adjustment to the car or what the car looks like on the race track.”
 
Such understanding, he said, is important in his new role. And thus far, it’s been extremely helpful.
 
“In the times I’ve gone in the garage are I probably have learned more in that hour that I’ve been there than I have in years, actually,” he said.