Kahne Flips 410 Sprint Car Out Of Williams Grove/ Edwards Wins a Gibson Again

I’ll get to “Concrete Carl” winning at Nashville in a second but first I want to touch on Kasey Kahne flipping his World of Outlaws 410 sprint car out of the track at Williams Grove speedway in Pennsylvania this past weekend. When Nascar gets an off weekend some drivers spend it leisurely lying around on a sandy beach somewhere sipping margarita’s and looking out at the blue water. Some are world travelers like Jeff Gordon who is somewhere in Europe this time. Kasey Kahne however is like Kenny Wallace, Tony Stewart and Kenny Schrader; they go looking for some dirt track action to fill their time.  The World of Outlaws sprint car series, billed as the wildest show on dirt, didn’t disappoint the fans at Williams Grove Speedway this past weekend. During his heat race, Kasey Kahne got tangled up with his former driver Craig Dollanski in turn two and Kahne hit the wall and then flipped completely out of the track clearing a 20 foot tall catch fence. Kahn was uninjured but his sprint car was totaled.

            I don’t know if Dollanski was just not hooked up or didn’t see Kasey but it looked to me that he just came up the track and pinched him into the wall. This incident has raised questions about whether or not highly paid athletes should have clauses in their contracts prohibiting activities outside of what they are being paid to do. I’m pretty sure that Ben Roethlisberger now has a clause in his contract that precludes him from riding motorcycles after he has had one if not two wrecks on them. So what do you think Rick Hendrick thought when he saw the video of his future superstar driver flipping a winged sprint car out of the ball park? I’m not sure what I would do if I was in that position, I mean if you clause the guy out of everything but what you are paying him for you take the chance of breaking his spirit so to speak. Do you let your horses run or to you reign them back some and protect your investment? On the other side of the coin you have the myriad of short tracks in this country that are still out there trying to stay afloat in a worsening economy. These tracks depend on the “Big Boys” showing up at their facilities from time to time so they can sell out the grandstands and pay the bills.

            These local short tracks are where Nascar got its start. It is a tough decision to make and I’m not the one making it so I won’t pretend that I know what is going to happen when Kasey gets over to Hendrick Motorsports next season. If you see Kasey Kahne out at a local dirt track next year and he is actually climbing into a sprint car then you will have your answer. I’m not sure that there will be any reporters asking these questions when next season starts as a lot of time will have passed. As a fan of the sport of motor racing across the board I say let them do what they want on their off time. I still think that if Dale Earnhardt Junior would get in a dirt late model he would learn to drive a loose sprint cup car much better.

            So we are on to Carl Edwards winning another Gibson guitar at the Nashville Super speedway this past weekend in the Nationwide series federated Auto Parts 300. That has to be the best looking trophy in the entire racing world! I just love the work that Sam Bass does on those Gibson guitars. There was one other interloper in this race Saturday night and that was Brad Keselowski who finished 12th. I don’t get it with these guys still coming down to this lesser series and taking the purse home with them? Couldn’t they just let them have one weekend where a Nationwide regular driver could have won the race and taken the money home? I understand that there were contracts possibly made before Nascar handed down the new rule precluding anyone committed to another series from earning points here, so I hope that this is the last year that we see this. Kyle stayed home this weekend so why did the others decide to go? This in a way works just like the Kasey Kahne story doesn’t it? Are we to hamstring drivers form competing in any race that they want to run?

            I don’t have all the answers and won’t act like I do, there is enough of that going around if you listen to the Nascar channel on Sirius/Xm radio. I swear some of you guys that call in on those shows need to engage your brain, if you have one, before you call in to those shows. Here lately I end up turning the channel after I hear “ Next up, Your calls till the end of the show”!

            Did you see the light crowd at Nashville? They couldn’t sell out a 30,000-seat facility in a metropolis like Nashville? I never got the scoop on what they were asking for the tickets but I would bet it was still too much and I’ll bet the extreme heat had a lot of folks from the Nashville area watching from their easy chair in full A/C.

            One more thing before I go, look for a post soon on the fact that Nascar has decided to take the truck and Nationwide series away from Lucas Oil Raceway Park outside of Indianapolis and move them both to the big track. Citing that they are not filling the track with enough fans is how I think it was described as the reasoning for the move. I have thoughts on that but that is for another day.

            For the full field rundown on the weekend’s results head on over to Nascar.com

Stay safe

TW

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No Mustang For Sprint Cup

Ford Motor Company had been all in on sending the Mustang to the Sprint Cup when Nascar redesigns the cup car for the 2013 season but now they have announced that they are going to stick with the Fusion. They claimed that they wanted to continue to have the Mustang as their iconic brand car in the Nationwide series, but I think that Ford didn’t want to spend the money to help develop the Mustang in the Cup series. I’d bet you a bunch of cash that Chevrolet is going to come with the Camaro in 2013, their number two muscle car behind the Corvette, so why in the world would you come back with the family car? The new Ford Mustang looks awesome in the Nationwide series but the fan base for that series is a lot smaller than the cup series so why not have the muscle car in the top series? I don’t want to dump on the Nationwide series but when it comes to putting people in the seats and viewers in their recliners the Cup series is king. In my opinion Ford is more concerned with selling the Fusion than the Mustang maybe because the fusion isn’t selling as well as the mustang. I’m just guessing so I may be way off but as a fan of the Ford Mustang it will be embarrassing to see the Fusion go up against the Camaro.

            Some news from the Whelen Modified series, Ryan Newman has been disqualified from the July 16th Nascar Whelen Modified series race at New Hampshire motor speedway for rules violations. Newman’s Modified car was confiscated by Nascar after the race and taken to the R & D center for further inspection and it was there that it was found that the intake manifold did not seal completely to the heads. It seems that crew chief Mike LaRochelle used metal shim type gaskets on the intake, which are not permitted by the Nascar Whelen Modified tour. I don’t know much about intake performance but it must have been something hot because crew chief Mike LaRochelle has been suspended from all Nascar regional touring events until December 31st 2011 as well as car owner Kevin Manion being suspended in the same way. There have been fans commenting on blogs and news sites over  complaining that it was just sorry that a big time Nascar driver and car owner had to cheat to beat the poor little touring series guys. I didn’t see anything about fines so I’m pretty sure that Newman and company are not all that concerned with it as they don’t really run that car all that often. The penalty apparently is pretty strong, as I read through blogs about it I find that stripping a driver and crew chief of a win after the fact is a pretty big deal. There must have been some real advantage to the metal shim intake gaskets.

            There is no Sprint Cup race this weekend but both of the lower series are in action at the Nashville Super Speedway this weekend starting with the truck series on Friday night. Nashville is a 1.333-mile D shaped oval with 14 degrees in the turns and I believe a concrete racing surface. It is owned by the Dover Motorsports Group, the same people that closed Memphis and Gateway, so this is where they are putting half of their marbles now, split between Dover and Nashville. There may be a light on at the end of the tunnel over there at Dover Motorsports Group as they announced that there will be reduced ticket prices for this weekends racing, I tried to look and see what the prices were but couldn’t get into the track’s web site. If they are successful at getting people in the stands at Nashville this weekend I will get off their back to a certain extent but on the flip side of that it will mean that they really didn’t care about the fans in Memphis and the St. Louis area because they didn’t budge on the ticket prices for either of those tracks in their waning seasons. I am biased for Gateway because that track is an hour away from me so I hated to see it go away. The action on the track was fantastic, it was just built in a bad location; next to a huge garbage dump and on property that already housed a NHRA drag strip and the Nascar track was built on the existing parking lot so parking and traffic became a nightmare.  My only hopes are that someone with a lot of cash buys Gateway and fixes the problems. I’m not bitter just disappointed in what I feel was gross mismanagement of two great racing venues. I’ll be watching the races at Nashville this weekend because I love the action but I will also be paying attention to amount of fans in the seats. I’m curious as to how much they chopped the ticket prices.

Stay Safe out there and get out and see a race. Try a short track and support the roots of Nascar.

TW

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