Follow Nationwide qualifying live from Iowa Speedway, Saturday, Aug. 3
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Drew Herring has first pick with first Coors Light Pole Award
With Kyle Busch‘s eight wins this season, the No. 54 car continued its strong season on Saturday at Iowa Speedway with another driver, Drew Herring, who claimed his first career Coors Light Pole Award in the NASCAR Nationwide Series.
With the pole, Herring picked the first stall off of pit road, the second stall. His Joe Gibbs Racing teammates, Brian Vickers and Elliott Sadler, qualified sixth and 10th respectively. Vickers and the No. 20 teams selected a stall two boxes behind Herring with Morgan Shepherd‘s No. 89 in between in stall No. 3. Sadler chose the No. 21 stall.
Regan Smith qualified second and chose stall No. 15 with an opening in front of him. Across the opening is NASCAR Sprint Cup Series champion and former JR Motorsports driver Brad Keselowski.
The third-fastest qualifier, Alex Bowman, has the seventh stall with an opening behind him.
The U.S. Cellular 250 presented by The Enlist Weed Control System can be seen live at 8 p.m. ET on ESPN.
Paludo picks first stall at pit out into Turn 1
With Keystone Light Pole Qualifying rained out at Pocono Raceway, Miguel Paludo’s fastest time in Friday’s only practice allowed him first pit stall pick as speeds in that session set the field.
The Turner Scott Motorsports driver and No. 32 team chose the second stall, which is the first at pit out for NASCAR Camping World Truck Series competition. With four Turner Scott trucks in the top eight in practice, his teammates have openings in front of their pit stalls:
*Jeb Burton in stall 10
*Todd Bodine in stall 25
*James Buescher in stall 31 on the Turn 3 side of the start/finish line.
The Pocono Mountains 125 is scheduled to start Saturday at 1 p.m. ET on SPEED.
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No. 48 team picks first pit off of pit road toward Turn 1
After winning his 31st career Coors Light Pole Award and setting the 11th track record of the season with his Gen-6 Chevrolet SS, Jimmie Johnson and crew chief Chad Knaus chose the first pit stall at Pocono Raceway for Sunday’s GoBowling.com 400 (1 p.m. ET, ESPN).
In his Toyota Camry, Kyle Busch, who qualified second, and the No. 18 Joe Gibbs Racing team picked the 31st stall, located on the Turn 3 side of the start/finish line. He has an opening in front of him, one of only two on pit road. Crown Royal presents the Samuel Deeds 400 at the Brickyard powered by BigMachineRecords.com winner Ryan Newman chose stall 30 with the opening behind him.
The third-fastest qualifier in a Ford Fusion, Carl Edwards, chose the 25th pit stall with the other pit road opening in front of him. It’s on the Turn 1 side, five stalls off of the start/finish line. Across the opening from him is Kurt Busch in stall 24.
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NASCAR national series drivers keep close to their racing roots
LONG POND, Pa. — Mere humans will never be able to understand.
“You mortals have got to learn,” Tony Stewart lectured Friday at Pocono Raceway. “You guys (in the media) need to watch more sprint car videos and stuff. It’s starting to get annoying this week about that. That was just an average sprint car wreck. When they wreck, they get upside down like that. That was not a big deal.”
The three-time champion of the Sprint Cup Series was referring to his spectacular crash in a winged sprint car at a Canadian short track on Monday night, one day after Stewart-Haas Racing driver Ryan Newman captured NASCAR’s coveted Brickyard event at Indianapolis. Battling for the lead at Ohsweken Speedway in Ontario, Stewart’s vehicle apparently struck something, and then rolled roughly five times.
Stewart thankfully emerged unhurt, but video of the accident quickly made the rounds on the Internet, and the crash was the first thing the 48-time Sprint Cup race winner was asked about at his regular media availability at Pocono.
“I promise you, if there’s something to report, I’ll let you know,” Stewart told reporters assembled at the rear of his No. 14 hauler. “But I guarantee you, there were 15, 20 guys across the country who flipped just like that this weekend. We’re just fine. If it’s bad, we’ll let you guys know. But that was not bad at all. I mean, I raced the next night and ran fifth in a World of Outlaws race. So that wasn’t bad.”
Indeed, Stewart competed again Tuesday night at the same track, and Thursday night at a dirt track in Paducah, Ky. Although sprint-car racing has come under some scrutiny in the wake of Jason Leffler’s death in June at a dirt track in New Jersey, Stewart is only the latest in a long line of established NASCAR drivers who stay close to their roots by competing on week nights at short tracks — a lineage that stretches from Ken Schrader to Stewart to Kyle Larson to Kyle Busch, who has super late model events scheduled in Canada on Monday and Tuesday night of next week.
“It’s just the only opportunity you get to race your fun stuff. Your golf game,” Busch said on pit road after his qualifying lap at Pocono. “Tony Stewart’s golf game is his sprint cars. He loves to go do that. My super late models are my golf game, I love to do that. … I like to be able to get out and go do those things, but the only real opportunity is during the week. And you’ve got to do it during the summer, because anytime you get too close to the Chase, you just have too much going on.”
Not all drivers feel the same way. Jeff Gordon came from the same sprint-car ranks as Stewart, but these days rarely, if ever, competes outside of the Sprint Cup tour. In the early 1990s, when he was just beginning to break into NASCAR, Gordon still kept one foot in the U.S. Auto Club ranks where he had been a star in sprint, midget and silver crown cars. As he grew older and started a family, the four-time Sprint Cup champion began to get less enjoyment out of extracurricular competition, and eventually even cut out Nationwide events.
But given his background, Gordon understands the allure that keeps drawing Stewart to the short tracks.
“Sprint cars to me are some of the most exciting, fun race cars there are to drive. In anything that you do, you can put yourself at risk. I think he knows the risks versus the rewards and chooses to do that, and I think that’s awesome. And he certainly is very impressive when he gets in them, how competitive he is …. I certainly look up to him in that way, because I raced those guys in sprint cars and know how difficult that is. Especially when you’re not doing it all the time,” Gordon said.
“If he was a young driver that was coming to work for Hendrick Motorsports, I would try to discourage him from doing that, because that’s an investment from us as a team. And we ask a lot from our sponsors and our team and everything. But he’s the team owner. There’s no asking that out of him. And you don’t want to take away that joy that those individuals have. You want them to make those choices on their own and just understand what they’re getting themselves into. Some of the younger guys maybe don’t always appreciate that, but somebody like Tony I think does and handles himself well with it.”
Ricky Stenhouse Jr. and Danica Patrick are a couple who personify the extremes. Stenhouse once competed for Stewart in USAC, and like his mentor still can’t get enough time in sprint cars even though he’s now driving at NASCAR’s top level. Meanwhile, there’s Patrick, who came up in go-karts and formula cars, and has no desire to race every night of the week herself. But she can appreciate what drives her boyfriend, as well as her boss at SHR.
“I do understand obviously with how much Ricky loves sprint car racing and racing on dirt, that flipping and crashing is very much a part of that sport,” Patrick said. “You catch the berm or clip tires — it’s an open-wheel car. As Tony would say, it’s the open-wheel car. It’s the original open-wheel car. And with how much they race? Some of them race 130 times a year. Some of them race 80 or 90 times a year. There are a lot of chances for accidents when that happens. It’s not for me, but those who love it very much love it.”
Patrick’s reaction when she saw the video clip of Stewart rolling at Ohsweken? “I think he must really love his sprint-car racing,” she said. Patrick added the very topic of Stenhouse wanting to race every night came up when the couple visited with Kenny Chesney before the country music star performed Thursday night in Charlotte.
“I just don’t have an interest in racing every single night,” Patrick said. “But coming from sprint car racing where you race 80, 90 times a year like he used to, 38 is just nothing. So Kenny was talking about when he was younger — because ol’ Ricky, he’s young, you know — how he felt like he could perform every single night and do the same thing every day. You know, you get older, and maybe you don’t have that. Maybe you do. I feel like those sprint car drivers, they just love their racing. They love racing every night. I didn’t come from that background. I watched it, my dad was in it, he raced it, and then he worked on the cars, and my mom and dad and sister would go watch on Sunday nights. But I just didn’t come from 90 races a year.”
Stewart did, and still competes whenever he gets the chance. In fact, his original intent was to race every day this week except Wednesday, when Stewart-Haas had scheduled a test that was canceled due to rain. Of course, that was until he had to cut out two events slated for this weekend, because the car he planned to drive was still damaged from Monday night’s crash.
Now that hurt.
“That was the worst part of the week,” Stewart said, “when I was told I wasn’t going to be allowed to race this weekend."
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Five-time champ moves past Brickyard, seeks second Pocono win of the season
LONG POND, Pa. — Let it burn.
That was the advice Jimmie Johnson gave to his pit crew last Sunday night after a lengthy pit stop cost the four-time Brickyard champion a chance at a fifth victory at Indianapolis Motor Speedway. Johnson led a race-best 73 laps, but an uncharacteristically slow stop of 17.2 seconds helped Ryan Newman claim one of the crown jewels of the Sprint Cup Series schedule.
Johnson salvaged second, and afterward refused to place the blame on his pit crew. On Friday at Pocono Raceway, the five-time champion of NASCAR’s premier series said he delivered a simple message to his crew the same evening after the race got away.
“I talked to the guys Sunday night, and just asked them to enjoy the pain. Let it sit there, let it hurt. Let it bother you,” Johnson said. “But Monday morning, when they started hitting lug nuts and jacking the car and going though their routine, it was out of their mind. I asked them also to be fearless when they hopped off the wall this weekend, and just do their jobs. The worst thing any of us can do that have to go out and perform is to carry something in the back of your mind mentally. That will do more damage than you can ever imagine.”
It’s no surprise the No. 48 is one of the tightest-knit units on the Sprint Cup tour, and one that always keeps the bigger picture in mind. Johnson may not have won at Indianapolis, but he still emerged from the Brickyard with a 75-point lead — the largest ever under the current system — and comes to Pocono, where he led 128 laps en route to a dominant victory in June.
But Johnson is well aware that most or all of his lead in the standings will evaporate after points are reset prior to the Chase for the NASCAR Sprint Cup, and drivers are seeded by victories — which right now would knot Johnson at the top with Matt Kenseth, who have four wins apiece. No question, the No. 48 car has shown speed almost every weekend. But race wins are what will separate the top contenders once the playoff begins in six weeks, and toward that end, Johnson knows he’s let some — Dover, Kentucky and Indy spring immediately to mind — get away.
“I feel like the team, the cars, our racing ability, the things needed to be dominant, it’s right there if not a touch ahead of my best year when I think I won 10 races,” he said. “The difference is execution. We’ve left races sitting on the table. We have the foundation of our most dominant year, but finishing it off, executing, we’ve given up some races in it. That would be the only difference in it, the only thing that would pull it back down.”
That was the case at the Brickyard, where Johnson’s crew was a touch slow on the left-rear of a four-tire stop with 27 laps left. Newman’s team did the opposite, taking two tires and vaulting from second place to 7 seconds ahead, and winning by 2.6 seconds. For a team trying to tie the record for victories on Indy’s oval layout, it was a stinging outcome. And yet, those kind of self-inflicted mistakes are often what it takes to beat Johnson, given that he and crew chief Chad Knaus have built a program where speed and performance are a given.
“Jimmie, obviously, he has no Achilles heel. He’s good everywhere,” Newman said. “…I get to see the feedback of the drivers with our alliance with (Hendrick), and Jimmie has amazing feedback, which I think definitely keeps things sharp, keeps the pencil sharp at least for Chad to be able to keep doing the things they do. They are not just good, they are great, and that’s why it’s additionally gratifying last week to beat somebody that’s obviously one of the best, and had proven to be the best last year at that race track.”
“It’s hard to talk about the 48, and Jimmie what they do, because what they’ve been doing is expected of them,” Jeff Burton added. “They’ve set the bar so high that when they do phenomenal things, it’s just, ‘Oh, well, there’s Jimmie.’ It’s not that big of a deal. It is a big deal, but it’s not perceived as a big deal. So it’s really hard to put your finger on them, because they have such a lofty expectation level. It’s like a football team that wins 14 regular season games and nobody talks about it, because it’s expected. What they’ve been doing is phenomenal, but it’s almost expected of them.”
Which made the final pit stop at Indianapolis all the more glaring by comparison. Afterward, Johnson refused to point fingers — “We win as a team, we lose as a team,” he said. There’s still a much larger goal out there, and Johnson wants his crew focusing on a potential sixth series championship rather than one Brickyard that eluded them.
“Indy means so much to everybody,” he said. “I think that one stings universally, it doesn’t matter if you’re a regular up front or wherever you run. But to me, my eye has always been on the big prize, and that’s the championship. The comments I made following the race were sincere in how I felt, because of where my viewpoint is. I’m not going to make a comment that’s going to tear down my race team and prevent us from winning he big prize, from winning the championship. And that’s the way we all think at the 48.”
The best way to do that? Climb into the car and try to sweep Pocono, which Johnson did in 2004.
“You hate to give away race wins for any reason, especially when you have a dominant car,” he said. “Whatever the mistake may be, wherever it comes from, driver or team, you just hate having that on your shoulders for the week following. You’re just eager to get back on the track and get that behind you. For me, it hasn’t brought any more focus or drive or meaning to the next event. It’s in some ways, a relief. It’s something new to talk about, something new to put your mind on, and to move forward from there.”
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For second time in three races, ‘Five-Time’ goes on five-minute clock
Related: Lineup | Full Pocono coverage | Weekend schedule
LONG POND, Pa. — The clouds rolled in right on cue and Jimmie Johnson rolled out to the grid–late to Friday’s qualifying session at Pocono Raceway.
Inspection issues delayed Johnson’s arrival at the head of the qualifying queue and just may have been a contributing factor in the driver of the No. 48 Chevrolet SS winning the pole for Sunday’s GoBowling.com 400 with a track-record run at 180.654 mph (49.019 seconds), .004 seconds faster than the lap recorded by Kyle Busch.
Johnson had drawn the 24th qualifying position but was the 28th driver to make a run during time trials, after his team hastily pushed the car to the front of the grid. The few minutes Johnson gained from the difficulty getting through tech allowed the track to cool that much more–and a cooler track generally translates to higher speed.
The pole was Johnson’s second of the season, his third at Pocono and the 31st of his NASCAR Sprint Cup Series career. In addition to Johnson and Kyle Busch, Carl Edwards (180.180 mph), Ryan Newman (180.004 mph), Kurt Busch (179.695 mph) and Joey Logano (179.601 mph) all broke the previous record of 179.598 mph set by Logano in June 2012.
Johnson didn’t believe that going out four spots later made a difference in his qualifying performance. In his view, any possible advantage would have been offset by the pressure of getting through inspection and beating the five-minute clock to the top of the grid.
"Only four spots, no, it wouldn’t have made a difference," Johnson said. "We had a left rear toe (tire angle) was off by a thousandth of an inch. The system is pass-fail… a thousandth of an inch. I’m glad we got it sorted out.
"We got on the clock, which is always a scary thing, but we beat the clock."
Going out eighth on a warmer track, Kyle Busch was the first driver to top 180 mph, posting a lap at 180.639 mph (49.823 seconds). Though he thought Johnson’s late draw in general was more of a factor than the four spots he gained in the order, Busch did insinuate that the 48 team might be gaming the system.
"Probably not the clock that he was on, I don’t think that made much difference, but just the draw that he had, being 20 cars later in general than us, I think that was certainly beneficial to him," Busch said. "A lot of these other teams figure out how to play by the rules. It seems like there’s one that is sometimes late, quite often more than the rest.
Similarly, Johnson, the series leader, was late at New Hampshire Motor Speedway three weeks ago and qualified second, but his time was disallowed because the ride height was deemed too low in post-qualifying inspection. But Johnson said Friday that the inspection issues weren’t by design.
"I wish there was some master plan behind it all–but they’re welcome to try it," Johnson said. "They’re welcome to experience the stress. My heart was pounding out of my chest, trying to get in the car and beat the clock. I don’t wish that kind of stress on anybody."
The winner of the June race at the Tricky Triangle, Johnson can become the first driver to sweep both events in the same year twice at the 2.5-mile track. One of six drivers to accomplish the Pocono double, Johnson recorded his first season sweep in 2004.
Dale Earnhardt Jr. will start 25th on Sunday, and Danica Patrick will take the green flag in 34th.
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As standings fluctuate, drivers search for stability
Related: Nationwide standings
NEWTON, Iowa — Just stop the bleeding.
With three different drivers sitting atop the standings over the past three races, fluidity in the top five and the developing trend that those atop the standings seem to rise and fall in unison, it’s becoming clear that the guy who will be holding the big trophy at Homestead-Miami Speedway on Nov. 16 will be the one who figures out how to salvage the races he has no business competing in.
“I think the guy that’s going to win this championship is the guy that figures out how to stop the bleeding as much as they possibly can and not give away points unnecessarily,” said Justin Allgaier at Iowa Speedway on Friday, so casually offering the theme of a race upon which so many teams’ seasons hinge.
Regan Smith, whose standing eased up from a 28-point lead over Allgaier following Road America to a six-point deficit to Austin Dillon heading into Saturday’s U.S. Cellular 250 presented by Enlist Weed Control System (8 p.m., ESPN2) can’t help but agree.
“After last week, if you look at the top five, I’d say that’s probably an accurate statement,” said Smith before placing 12th and 16th in Friday’s two practices. “It seemed like nobody wanted to have a good day. I was pretty happy with where our car was and then we had the motor problems. Sam (Hornish Jr.) obviously had motor problems. I don’t know what the other guys fought, but they didn’t appear to be as good as they’ve been in the weeks leading up to it.”
Smith fought back to a 19th-place finish at Indianapolis, which certainly wasn’t the goal heading into Indy, but it might be exactly the kind of recovery race these drivers are looking for.
“It was one of those weeks when you look and as bad as we were having it, we knew if we just salvaged it we were going to come out of here OK,” Smith said. “I don’t know that you have to stop the bleeding, I think everybody’s had speed at most of these tracks. … It seems like everybody will have one good week together and then everybody has a bad week together for whatever reason, so I think it’s just a matter of piecing the races together. Whoever finds just the littlest bit of consistency will be in good shape.”
Right now, it looks like the drivers setting the bar for consistency are Hornish and Dillon, the two most recent points leaders. With an average finishing position of 6.0 in the five races preceding Indianapolis — where, you know, he has an Indy 500 title to his credit — everything seemed to be pointing toward Hornish extending his points lead. The Penske Racing driver qualified second but ran into a bit of tough luck when a chunk of grass got stuck in his radiator, overheating his car. It resulted in a 34th-place finish after completing just 64 laps.
Hornish’s secret to success the rest of the way?
“Keeping grass out of our radiator would help out a lot,” he quipped.
He’s got a point, but he also knows there’s a certain element — luck — that each driver has to take into account each time out.
“Everybody always wishes you good luck and you say, ‘Oh thanks, you know, I need it,’ but sometimes you really do,” said Hornish, who trails Dillon by six points. “None of us go out and prepare 50 percent better than the next person, sometimes it just comes down to did the guy crash behind you or did the guy crash in front of you? I think it just shows that fluctuation is just something that can happen very quickly. It could’ve been the guy ahead of you that gets grass on the radiator. That’s racing.”
While luck seems to make itself known in some way every weekend, one factor the Nationwide drivers can count on at Iowa is that the man who has won eight races this season is far, far away in Pocono. It’ll level the playing field between the drivers competing for a championship and allow everyone to see how they rank against each other, instead of seeing who’s the fastest as they try to catch up to the 54.
Dillon, who despite being in the points lead has yet to celebrate in Victory Lane, didn’t shy away from acknowledging this.
“It’d be very important to win a race. I think that’s just an overall goal, even if we do win the championship without a (win) because of what Kyle Busch has been able to do this year. It’s kind of hard to win one when he’s winning every one of them,” Dillon said. “This is a great weekend, for sure, to come out with him not being here and less Cup drivers … to take advantage of that and getting the first one behind us would be huge. I think it would propel us for the rest of the season.”
It’d be hard to bet against Dillon. Heading into Iowa he’s averaged a finish of 5.8 in his previous five races, nearly won from the Coors Light Pole position here in June before giving way to Trevor Bayne in the final laps, and opened the weekend by topping each of Friday’s practices.
But as we know, it sure seemed like it was Hornish’s race to lose last week. Look what happened.
One thing’s for sure, though, and Smith put it best.
“It’s going to be a dogfight these next 14 races.”
We’ll just have to see who can stop the bleeding first.
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