Posted on by Zack Albert

Kyle Busch leads nine drivers to break 15-second barrier in Thunder Valley

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BRISTOL, Tenn. — Kyle Busch‘s blazing-fast qualifying lap Friday afternoon provided an answer to who would start from the Coors Light Pole in Sunday’s Food City 500 at Bristol Motor Speedway. But it also begged the question: Just how fast can they go?

Busch looped the .533-mile track at a track-record speed of 129.535 mph, besting Ryan Newman‘s 128.709-mph mark which had stood since 2003. The 14.813-second lap was the best of nine qualifying efforts that eclipsed the 15-second mark; only three drivers in NASCAR Sprint Cup Series history before Friday had dipped into the 14-second ether.

"It just shows how good these cars are. To come out with a new car and have them drive this nice off the bat is a pretty nice deal."

— Tony Stewart

The five-time NASCAR Sprint Cup Series race winner at Bristol continued his fast weekend Saturday, sweeping both practice sessions and leading the Joe Gibbs Racing trio for a 1-2-3 finish atop the scoring pylon after the morning practice.

The combination of the new Gen-6 car, Bristol’s recent resurfacing or the Goodyear tire compound produced record speed ahead of the first short-track race of the year. As on the edge as Busch was, he said the likelihood of going faster in qualifying trim was a possibility.

"You could certainly put a softer tire on here and go lights out, but you’d have trouble making it very much longer after," Busch said, noting that the pace will certainly be more conservative in race trim Sunday. "You get a little bit better tire on it and start pushing lower lap times and then you start getting higher loads and then you’ll probably start seeing some fatigue in parts and stuff like that.

"If it was like the old days where guys would go places and try to do speed runs — you would take the lead out, and you would build a car as light as you could for here just to go make a lap. I bet you could run somewhere in the low 14s probably — some teens or 20s."

Those sentiments were echoed by Kasey Kahne, who qualified second — missing the pole position by .062 seconds — and was second-fastest in Saturday’s final practice.

"I think those speeds today were pretty good, especially what Kyle did," Kahne said Friday. "That’s fast. You put softer tires on it and you might be able to go faster; I don’t know."

As Newman watched his 10-year-old record fade away, he was conscious of the fact that his enduring lap came during the Gen-4 era of NASCAR racers. "A lot of things have changed — the track has changed and everything else," said Newman, who managed just the 31st-fastest qualifying time for Sunday’s race.

For his boss, Tony Stewart, who qualified eighth among the 14-second club, the torrid pace in a confined space was nothing new. As the owner of high-banked Eldora Speedway, a half-mile dirt track in Ohio which will host the NASCAR Camping World Truck Series for the first time in July, Stewart could only shrug.

"You’ve never watched winged sprint cars run around Eldora, have you?" Stewart said after his qualifying lap. "I can promise you the track record at Eldora is a 12.7 (approximately 141.7 mph) for the World of Outlaws. Under 15-flat is not a big deal here. It just shows how good these cars are. To come out with a new car and have them drive this nice off the bat is a pretty nice deal."

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Dillon couldn’t avoid wreck; Bayne tries to make most of 12th-place finish

BRISTOL, Tenn. — Austin Dillon said he “downshifted,” but couldn’t avoid the Toyota of Hal Martin. And while Dillon’s own Chevrolet didn’t look too much worse for wear, the car “was never the same” afterward, the Richard Childress Racing driver said.

Dillon was one of several drivers — a dozen, according to the official post-race results sheet — who failed to escape Bristol Motor Speedway unscathed during the running of the Jeff Foxworthy’s Grit Chips 300.

Five cars were involved in the incident that snared Dillon, which occurred on lap 160 of the 300-lap Nationwide Series race. It began when Martin spun on the frontstretch, slid up into the wall and collected the No. 79 of Jeffrey Earnhardt. Dillon brushed the wall trying to get slowed down, the nudged into Martin’s entry.

“That was unfortunate,” Dillon, who remains sixth in points, said. “You have to account for the fact that you will have days when you just get caught up in something. To come back and finish 11th, I’m really happy with that for a day that could have been really worse.”

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"To come back and finish 11th, I’m really happy with that for a day that could have been really worse."

— Austin Dillon

Bayne searches for positives

Local favorite Trevor Bayne, who hails from Knoxville, Tenn., likewise tried to put a positive spin on what was an otherwise forgettable run in the Roush Fenway Racing No. 6 Ford.

“That was a struggle,” Bayne said of his 12th-place finish. “It wasn’t at all what we wanted.”

Bayne, the 2011 Daytona 500 winner, said his team’s car was “not there” from the time the team arrived at BMS.

“That thing was so tight,” he said. “It was unfortunate; we wanted to knock out solid top-fives every week.”

The 12th-place finish did move Bayne from 13th to 12th in the point standings after four events.

Sadler ready to dig out

Elliott Sadler, on the other hand, wasn’t as fortunate, tumbling from third all the way to 10th after engine issues sidelined the Joe Gibbs Racing driver.

“Something internal … let go and I think our rocker or something like that broke; just a tough deal,” Sadler said. “So this puts us in a hole, but we have a lot of racing left to do this season and we’ll try to get some of it back in California."

No regrets for Kes

Brad Keselowski led 26 laps and appeared to have one of the stronger cars. But damage after contact with Regan Smith eventually cut a tire on the Penske Racing Ford.

Keselowski, leading the race, found himself in a heated battle with Kevin Harvick and Smith when Smith, in the JR Motorsports No. 7 Chevrolet, slipped up the track and made contact just shy of the 180-lap mark.

By lap 193, Keselowski was heading to pit road with a shredded left-front tire.

“You can second-guess yourself all the time,” he said when asked if he should have pitted sooner. “I wasn’t going to give up the lead.

“Either way it would have been the same result.”

Keselowski was able to race his way back to 15th, the first car one lap down.

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Posted on by Nascar

Defending champion enjoys track’s atmosphere, challenges

BRISTOL, Tenn. — NASCAR Sprint Cup Series teams will roll out onto Bristol Motor Speedway for the season’s fourth stop Sunday, and Brad Keselowski couldn’t be more pleased.

The series’ defending champion has only six career Cup starts on the 0.533-mile track. Two of the last three, however, have seen him parked in Victory Lane at the end of the race.

“I really just love coming here,” Keselowski said. “I love what this track stands for and I love how it races. I think embracing that challenge is part of our success.”

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Finishes of fourth, fourth and third in the season’s first three races have Keselowski, 29, trailing five-time Cup champion Jimmie Johnson by just five points. Johnson’s been no slouch either, scoring a win, a runner-up and a sixth-place finish to open the year.

Each track on the Cup circuit is unique. Each provides its own set of difficulties. High banks that vary between 24 and 28 degrees and short straightaways provide the ingredients that create the 125-mph speeds at Bristol. When filled with a 43-car field, there’s little room — or time — for error.

Keselowski, driver of the No. 2 Ford for Penske Racing, describes it as “extremely demanding” and compared it to playing the video game Tetris “because it’s such a mental and physical challenge.” 

“You never get a break,” he said. “When you finally get that one puzzle piece to fit the next one is coming, and when you think you’ve got it all figured out it just keeps going faster and faster and faster until it just breaks you down mentally, and I love that challenge.”

It is “an in-your-face race track, where if you just ride around here, you wreck,” he said.

Being overly aggressive can result in trouble as well.

And if you try to ride the edge between the two? “You just have a bad day,” Keselowski said. “So that mental challenge, the window is so small, and that’s what I love about it.”

Denny Hamlin won the last time Cup teams competed at Bristol, the first race after the track’s upper groove had been ground away in an attempt to shrink the racing groove and generate more close-quarters competition. Instead of avoiding the high line, however, teams found the fresh pavement took on rubber more quickly and ultimately provided a better groove.

That may not be the case this time.

“I tried (the upper groove) and I hit the wall, so that’s good,” Keselowski said of an opening-practice incident Friday. “I hope that lane doesn’t come in at all. I hate that groove.”

Points leads, strong starts and momentum can be erased with the turn of the steering wheel at Bristol. It’s 500 laps of racing into the unknown.

“Unpredictability kind of lends itself to drivers making mistakes and drivers making mistakes lends itself to action,” said Keselowski, who will start seventh. “So those are the things I think people look for.

“I think that can still happen, whether you have to run the top groove, the bottom groove or whether this track was multi-grooved to begin with.”

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Nine drivers break 15-second barrier; pole is first at Bristol for Busch

BRISTOL, Tenn. — Across the board, drivers marveled at the speed of NASCAR’s Generation-6 cars during qualifying for Sunday’s Food City 500 at Bristol Motor Speedway. 

None more so than Kyle Busch, the fastest of nine drivers to break the 15-second mark on their qualifying lap. Prior to Friday, only three drivers (Ryan Newman, Carl Edwards, Jeff Gordon) had turned a Sprint Cup qualifying lap in less than 15 seconds.

“I like driving it,” said Busch, whose 11th career pole marked his first Coors Light Pole Award at Bristol and the first time he’d qualified higher than ninth on the .533-mile oval. “You can drive it a lot more like the older car we had years ago where you can abuse it a little bit.”

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Busch, no stranger to Victory Lane at Bristol, captured the pole with a lap of 14.813 (129.535 mph) seconds in the No. 18 M&Ms Toyota.  Newman’s track record, set in 2003, had been 14.908 seconds (128.709 mph).

Each of Friday’s top three qualifiers — Busch, Kasey Kahne and Denny Hamlin — topped Newman’s mark. Hamlin (14.879) looked like he might join his Joe Gibbs Racing teammate on the front row until Kahne knocked him down a peg with his time of 14.875.  

Brian Vickers (14.929), Paul Menard (14.949), Jamie McMurray (14.957), Brad Keselowski (14.966), Tony Stewart (14.990) and Martin Truex Jr. (14.997) also eclipsed 15 seconds, with Joey Logano (15.005) rounding out the top 10.

“The car felt great during that lap,” said Busch, who has come from off the pace to win five times (including four of the past eight Cup races) at Bristol. “We’ve never really worried too much about qualifying runs. We unloaded with a really good race car and we just kept fine-tuning to make it a little bit better — and we were able to get it where it was pretty quick in practice.”

For Hamlin, if even for just a couple laps, it felt good to get back to racing. Hamlin had spent recent days embroiled in controversy, after being fined following his comments at Phoenix.

He had no gripe with his machinery Friday.

“I’m pretty happy with what we’ve got,” said Hamlin, who earlier in the day said he had “bigger fish to fry” than worrying about the $25,000 fine. “For my team’s sake, we need to focus on running as good as we can and trying to make this Chase. Any distraction is something that you don’t need — especially when the competition is so close. You just can’t afford anything that hampers your ability to go win, so this is going to be a step in the right direction for us.”

Kahne, driving the No. 5 Great Clips Chevrolet for Hendrick Motorsports, thought he might have challenged Busch had he not been a little tight between Turns 1 and 2.

“I felt like I may have given up a little bit in 1 and 2, which would have made it really close for the pole,” Kahne said. “But still we were very good in 3 and 4. The car was balanced really nice.”

How fast can cars go at Bristol? Maybe closer to 14 seconds than 15, according to Busch.

“I think a lot of it is probably (about the) tire,” he said. “You could certainly put a softer tire on here and go lights-out. You’d have trouble making it very much longer after that, but I betcha you could run somewhere it the low 14s.”

Sprint Cup Series points leader Jimmie Johnson qualified 13th.

Scott Riggs was the lone driver who failed to qualify on Friday. Ricky Stenhouse Jr. was forced to change an engine during practice and will start at the rear of the field despite qualifying with the 28th-fastest time.

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Champ reigns supreme but Toyota cars take four out of top five spots

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Apart from Matt Kenseth’s win at Las Vegas last week, Toyotas haven’t enjoyed a ton of success thus far in 2013. If Friday’s Sprint Cup Series practice for the Food City 500 offered any insight, that could soon change.

Led by Kenseth in second, Toyota cars took four of the top five spots on the leaderboard, as Kyle Busch, Clint Bowyer and Denny Hamlin followed. Three of the four (Busch, Hamlin, Kenseth) are Joe Gibbs Racing teammates.

Reigning Sprint Cup Champion and defending Bristol spring race winner Brad Keselowski took the top overall spot, grabbing the lead on his 63rd and final lap in 14.869 seconds and a best speed of 129.047 mph. Kenseth, who inserted himself into seventh in the standings with last week’s victory, ran 53 laps and finished just behind Keselowski at 128.908. Hamlin, who announced Thursday that he elected to not appeal his recent $25,000 fine, ran his 61st lap in 14.952. He won last fall’s race at Bristol.

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Current points leader Jimmie Johnson spent plenty of time on the track with 44 laps but posted just the 27th best speed. Teammate Dale Earnhardt Jr. was barely ahead of him in 22nd with a time of 15.098.

Early on in the practice, Busch tried to sneak around David Gilliland but made contact and suffered a half-spinout. On his 24th lap, Ricky Stenhouse Jr.’s No. 17 Ford started billowing white smoke. He did not return to the track.



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