Posted on by Nascar

Well-traveled champion touches on variety of topics

DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. —  If there’s a certain mold from which NASCAR Sprint Cup Series champions are cut, no one has told Brad Keselowski.

The Penske Racing driver, the most recent winner of the coveted Sprint Cup trophy, is certainly his own man, doing things his own way and to some extent still figuring out exactly what that way happens to be.

It’s new territory for Keselowski, who appears to be both candid and comfortable in his new role. He’s willing to weigh in on just about any subject, and equally capable of turning the tables and becoming the inquisitor.

Taking his turn behind the microphone Feb. 14 during the NASCAR Media Day Fueled by Sunoco at Daytona International Speedway, Keselowski touched on a wide range of subjects, from his role as representative for the sport to his penchant for social media.

The buzz generated by his 2012 tweet in the aftermath of Juan Pablo Montoya’s crash in the Daytona 500 — a social media first for professional sports — wasn’t pre-planned. Nor, he said, did he anticipate the response, which included a spike of 120,000 followers on the social media site Twitter.

“When that moment happened at Daytona, I just did it,” he said. “I didn’t think much about it. I thought it was something different and wanted to take a picture of it and send it out. If I tried to calculate that, I never could in a million years.

“I had no idea that the race would be red-flagged for a fire and that it wouldn’t be my car but a car in the distance and a huge explosion. … You can’t plan those things. What you can do is put yourself in a position to showcase how you feel about things. …  I think that when you do things out of that spot in your heart and mind that are authentic, it showcases who you are and what you think is cool. Other people appreciate that.”

A five-time race winner a year ago, Keselowski, 29, rode a pair of victories and eight top-10 finishes in the final 10 races to capture his first Cup title as well as the first for team owner Roger Penske.

Fifth in the final point standings a year earlier, few tagged the Michigan native as a serious threat for the title before the 2012 season got under way. But just as he had done the previous year when two of his three wins came after suffering injuries during a crash while testing, Keselowski proved more than capable. His message? Don’t underestimate his talents, or those of his team led by crew chief Paul Wolfe.

Comparisons have put him in a category with drivers of another era, more old school than high tech. Keselowski, though, said he isn’t so sure.

“I have my own way of doing things and there is a little pride thinking that some of that is back to the way some of the people earlier in the sport did it,” he said. “I think you have to fight to be relevant and you can’t do things that were done in the past and feel like you are going to be relevant to today’s fans. I think you can find a balance for that and I think that is what drives me in a lot of things I do. …

“You have to be relevant but you also have to stay connected to your roots. That is kind of speaking out of both sides of you mouth, but that is what our sport needs and what our fans expect.”

NASCAR’s Sprint Cup season gets under way Feb. 16 at Daytona with the running of The Sprint Unlimited, a 75-lap non-points race for which Keselowski failed to qualify. He doesn’t fault the format, admitting that “We didn’t earn our spot and we don’t play. It’s pretty simple.

“We spend our time and energy working on what we could do to win the championship, not winning a pole. If I could choose being in the (race) or winning the championship I would take the damn championship 100 out of 100 days.”

As for representing the series as champion, Keselowski said it isn’t something that he has spent a lot of time thinking about. No more, at least, than before he rose to the top of the sport.

“I am going to do my own thing,” he said. “If it works great and if not, then whatever. I am going to be my own person and look out for what is best for the sport. I have always felt that way, whether I was a champion or not.

“I feel like every driver has a responsibility to make the sport better and all it can be. I might have a louder voice now, but I took it seriously before I was a champion."

Posted on by Nascar

Plenty of happenings at NASCAR Media Day Fueled by Sunoco

DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. — Brian Vickers is a professional racer, but he doesn’t own a personal car. 

“No. I don’t like cars and I don’t really have a need for one right now,” Vickers said Feb. 14 during NASCAR Media Day Fueled by Sunoco at Daytona International Speedway. “If I had my choice, I would much rather ride. It works out great because my girlfriend loves to drive. Loves cars, loves to drive. I’m like, ‘Absolutely. Have at it.’ ” 

Vickers has more than enough time behind the wheel scheduled for the upcoming racing season, competing fulltime in the NASCAR Nationwide Series for Joe Gibbs Racing and running nine Sprint Cup races for Michael Waltrip Racing.

• Brad Keselowski and Joey Logano, teammates at Penske Racing, are slated to spend a bit of time behind the microphone in the next few days.

Keselowski, the defending Sprint Cup Series champion, won’t be competing in the Feb. 16 running of The Sprint Unlimited because he didn’t win a pole last season, and isn’t a former winner of the non-points race. Instead, he will join the FOX broadcast team in the television booth.

“Maybe I will get to see a few things or maybe open my eyes on the broadcast side to make them better or maybe make me better,” Keselowski said. “It goes back to you put yourself in position where you can learn things and you never know what comes from it.”

Logano will serve as spotter for Coleman Pressley in the Feb. 18 Whelen-All American race, one of three that make up the inaugural UNOH Battle at the Beach. The following night, he will be in the booth with Speed officials for the K&N Pro Series event.

• Dave Blaney in a pink driver’s uniform?

It’s part of a Florida Lottery sponsorship for the Tommy Baldwin Racing team, and Blaney said while he wasn’t crazy about the color at first, he’s quickly warmed to the association.

“It’s a cool sponsor for us to have and I can’t wait to have the car out here in the 500,” he said.

• Some drivers discover that they have what it takes to race at the Cup level much sooner than others. For Ryan Newman?

“I was 38 days old,” the Stewart-Haas Racing driver, and former Daytona 500 winner, deadpanned.

• Carl Edwards doesn’t get pre-race jitters. But put him out front, or within sight of the leader in the closing laps?

“That’s when it gets really exciting,” Edwards, driver of the Roush Fenway Racing No. 99 Ford, said. “That’s when everything seems to slow down and you are hyper focused and I really like that feeling.

“I haven’t had that a lot recently.”

• It’s been four years since he qualified for NASCAR’s Chase For the NASCAR Sprint Cup and three years since he won a Cup race.

“It’s not humbling,” Juan Pablo Montoya said, “it sucks. 

“It’s not about humbling. I’ve won at everything I have been in, and I came to NASCAR and I’ve been good. I know I can do it. To run where we’ve run, it hasn’t been fun. It hasn’t been fun for Chip (Ganassi, team owner), or (teammate) Jamie (McMurray) or myself, or the crew chiefs, or the organization or Target. We know we have the right tools to make it work, and I think this year we’ve done enough over the winter that is going to put us in a better situation.”

• BK Racing driver Travis Kvapil said his team doesn’t have the resources of the bigger organizations competing in Cup, leaving the two-car group to figure out the new Generation-6 car with the only tools available.

“My ass, basically,” Kvapil said, laughing, when asked from where the team obtains its data. “We don’t have seven-post time, we don’t have wind tunnel time, we don’t have a lot of the behind-the-scenes data to kind of back things up and have a baseline. Seat of the pants, that’s what it really comes down to.”

• Kyle Larson is the real deal, and one of NASCAR’s next stars according to three-time Cup champion Tony Stewart.

Larson, 20, will compete full time for Turner Scott Motorsports in the Nationwide series this season. A development driver for Chip Ganassi Racing, Larson captured the NASCAR K&N Pro Series East title in 2012.

“You can bet the farm on it,” Stewart said. “I guarantee it. If not, you can take everything I own because I’m that confident.”

– Greg Biffle spoke with NASCAR.com about the new Generation-6 car and how his team is handling it. Watch the video below:

Posted on by

Season-opening exhibition has grown from its earliest days

It began with only nine cars, which must have looked lost on the vast two and a half miles of Daytona International Speedway. The first incarnation of the exhibition race that now opens the NASCAR season was just a 20-lap shootout, and to the drivers involved, all that mattered was the check waiting for them at the end.

“All we looked at was a chance to make more money,” said Darrell Waltrip, who in 1979 competed in that first edition of what’s now called the Sprint Unlimited, and will call Saturday night’s version from the broadcast booth. “These guys (today) don’t live in that world. We raced for money. That’s why we drove like we did. We were crazy. You’d run over a guy and be like, ‘That’s another five grand right there. The hell with him.’ ”

Times have certainly changed. Buddy Baker won that first Busch Clash 34 years ago, which was limited only to pole winners from the previous season, with one wild card thrown in. The event has gradually been transformed into a prime-time extravaganza, which will unfold on the high banks of Daytona once again this Saturday night. It’s been known by different names and endured innumerable format changes, but one thing has remained the same — it’s race cars on the race track, for the first time each year.

This time around, there are plenty of unknowns. Fan voting will determine several aspects of the 75-lap event, including length of the three segments, the type of pit stop (if any) teams will have to make after the first segment, and how many cars (between zero and six) will be eliminated after the second segment. Although voting on the segment lengths ends at 11:59 p.m. ET Wednesday night, the other two aspects won’t be determined until after the race begins Saturday night — which will force participants to adapt on the fly.

“You don’t know what’s going to happen when they drop the green flag,” said former crew chief and current television broadcaster Jeff Hammond. “You’re waiting for a determining factor to make your decisions. Even though you’ve got a lot of scenarios you’ve run through, now that you know what you’ve got to do as far as changes or no changes, it’s going to put you and your team basically in a little bit of a box in making the right decisions and making the right adjustments to try to stay up front.”

That’s a far cry from what it was like in 1979, when Baker and Waltrip ran away from the field to finish 1-2. But the Sprint Unlimited is no stranger to breaking in a new race car, as it will do once again this weekend as the more brand-identifiable Generation-6 vehicle makes its debut. The sport went through something similar in 1981, after the “big body” cars were phased out to make way for vehicles with smaller wheelbases that more closely resembled what manufacturers were churning out at the time.

For crew chiefs like Hammond, those new vehicles presented a real challenge — there were problems to overcome involving turning radius, center of gravity, even getting a race tire underneath a smaller vehicle. For Waltrip the transition was seamless, as he showed by passing Benny Parsons low on the race track to win the first event featuring the Generation-3 cars.

“Benny was mad as a hornet,” Waltrip remembered. “They didn’t have any out of bounds then. He kept running me down, down, down, down, and I was on the flat. I guess I would have gone into the grass if he’d forced me into it, but I was not going to let up.”

That 1981 Busch Clash featured only seven drivers, and took all of 15 minutes. Although the race was eventually broken up into a pair of 10-lap segments with an inversion in between, the event essentially remained a 20-lap dash until a change in naming rights brought a new format.

The Budweiser Shootout debuted in 1998, with a 25-lap qualifying race for drivers who had been fastest the previous year in second-round qualifying — remember that? — and the victor joining the pole winners in a 25-lap main event.

The qualifying race was eliminated along with second-round qualifying. From there the format was shuffled often, with organizers experimenting with a variety of different segment lengths and eligibility requirements, and in a bit of foreshadowing even bringing the green-white-checkered rule over from the Camping World Truck Series. Last season’s 25-car field was the second-largest in the event’s history, and produced its closest finish as Kyle Busch nipped Tony Stewart at the line.

For this season, organizers are going back to the event’s roots by limiting the starting field to pole winners from the previous season, as well as previous winners of the race. Much has changed since those modest beginnings in 1979, but not the anticipation over seeing cars back on the track. Saturday night’s Sprint Unlimited will give fans their first look at the Generation-6 car in competition — and provide a first glimpse of the vehicle at Daytona since testing, which produced a multi-car crash.

“There’s so much apprehension, I think, going into this race because of what we saw in testing,” Waltrip said. “… It might get kind of crazy at the end.”

Posted on by NASCAR Wire Service

Joe Gibbs Racing driver looking to repeat his season-opener title

Last year Kyle Busch started the season off on a high note, winning the preseason event now known as The Sprint Unlimited by narrowly beating Tony Stewart to the finish line by 0.013 seconds.

As Busch and his competitors head to Daytona Beach for this year’s Speedweeks, Busch looks to defend last year’s Sprint Unlimited victory. However, with a new set of variables for the race (most notably the debut of the Gen-6 car and fan votes deciding several competition elements) it’s anybody’s guess as to who might find Victory Lane at the end of this year’s 75-lap exhibition race.

Even if Busch isn’t the driver celebrating amidst confetti on Saturday night, he’s hoping to get a lot out of the race by learning how the new car performs — information he hopes to use throughout the season on the way to his first NASCAR Sprint Cup Series championship.

"We’re curious to see how the car is going to race and how it’s going to handle and what it’s going to react like."

—Kyle Busch

"We always look at The Sprint Unlimited race as a race to watch to see exactly what’s going to happen and what characteristics you have in your race car," said the driver of the No. 18 M&M’s Toyota Camry. "It’s a learning experience for everybody." 

Saturday’s The Sprint Unlimited marks the official debut of the Gen-6 race car, which NASCAR, the manufacturers and teams have been working together on for the past few years. Although drivers have tested the new cars on a select few racetracks over the past couple of months, it’s the first time the cars will see on-track racing competition.

With the introduction of a new car and rules package there is always going to be a learning curve for the drivers and teams, and that’s no different this year.

"We’re curious to see how the car is going to race and how it’s going to handle and what it’s going to react like," Busch said.

The new car is not the only new thing fans will notice about this year’s Sprint Unlimited. The exhibition race brings a fan-voting element that hasn’t been seen before in sports. 

The fans have until 11:59 p.m. ET on Wednesday, February 13, to vote on the length of the race’s three segments. The three choices are 30 laps, 25 laps and 20 laps; 35 laps, 30 laps and 10 laps; and 40 laps, 20 laps and 15 laps. 

Fans will have until the green flag drops on the start of the race to vote for the type of pit stop each team must perform after the first race segment. The three choices are none, two-tire change and four-tire change.

The fans can also vote on the number of cars that will be eliminated after the second segment. They have until the start of the second segment to cast their ballots. The choices are none, two, four and six.

Votes can be cast on NASCAR’s new official mobile app — NASCAR Mobile ’13 — or at NASCAR.com/SprintUnlimited. All votes cast through the NASCAR Mobile ’13 app will count twice.

In addition, fans at Daytona International Speedway this Saturday will be able to vote on how the starting positions for The Sprint Unlimited are awarded. The three choices are by number of career wins (most to least), 2012 NASCAR Sprint Cup final driver points standings and order of when they earned their pole position last year (2012 Daytona 500 pole winner on the pole; Ford EcoBoost 400 pole winner at the back). 

"I think that what’s going to be most confusing, or a little chaotic, is all the changes happening throughout the race with the fan votes and everything," Busch said. "I think that’s exciting for the fans. I think that’s a neat thing Sprint brings. I’m excited to see how all that plays out."

 

Aric Almirola among starting field for first time

Among the 19 drivers entered in this Saturday’s The Sprint Unlimited, only one, Aric Almirola, will be making his first start in the race.

The pre-season race returns to the model where drivers who captured a Coors Light Pole Award the previous season would qualify.

Almirola earned his first career pole last season for the Coca-Cola 600 at Charlotte Motor Speedway, qualifying him for the race that officially kicks off Speedweeks. He went on to finish 16th in the late-May race driving the Richard Petty Motorsports’ No. 43 Smithfield Ford.

Richard Petty Motorsports has both its cars in the exhibition race. Marcos Ambrose, who drives the No. 9 Stanley Ford, also made the cut for the field after taking the pole in back-to-back races at Michigan International Speedway and Auto Club Speedway.

"No matter the outcome, having some track time in a race setting should really help us for the 500 and help us figure out the new car in the draft," Almirola said. "The ‘Unlimited’ has always been an exciting race and the new format should add to that, so I’m looking forward to being a part of it this year." 

The 19 drivers entered are Almirola, Ambrose, Greg Biffle, Kurt Busch, Kyle Busch, Dale Earnhardt Jr., Carl Edwards, Jeff Gordon, Denny Hamlin, Kevin Harvick, Jimmie Johnson, Kasey Kahne, Matt Kenseth, Joey Logano, Mark Martin, Juan Pablo Montoya, Ken Schrader, Tony Stewart and Martin Truex Jr.