Dave Rogers, above, replaces Steve Addington as crew chief for the No. 18 Toyota.
Don't necessarily expect to rediscover him this season, even though he's got a new crew chief for the final three races.
"This week and the next three weeks are all about finding direction," said Dave Rogers, who took over for Steve Addington as Busch's crew chief this weekend in time for Sunday's Dickies 500. "We've got to look at the long-term goal here."
It's all a shakedown cruise for 2010, said Joe Gibbs Racing president J.D. Gibbs, who made the change on Busch's No. 18 team.
"It's so hard to do it starting at Daytona -- let's get a little advance," Gibbs said Saturday. "Let's just do it now. Let guys feel each other out."
"When I get back," Rogers said, meaning after the season finale at Homestead-Miami on Nov. 21, "we have the best engineering staff in the business. There's some brilliant people who work for Joe Gibbs Racing and what they want from me is … to give them direction of what projects I need to work on throughout the winter.
"That's the question I need to answer …"
"So far, so good," said Busch, who qualified a surprising -- even for him -- fifth for Sunday's race at Texas Motor Speedway. "That was cool. Dave and the guys have done a lot of work and Steve has been helping us as well back at the shop …"
If you ask me, that's about like Ricky Bobby's ex-wife and best friend inviting him to their wedding in "Talladega Nights" -- but whatever on the ever-soap-operatic Gibbs team.
And anyway, Addington is one of the nicest guys in NASCAR, which could have led to his downfall with the -- harrumph -- pretty intense Busch.
The whole thing "is probably my fault," Gibbs said, "for not sitting down earlier this year with Kyle and Steve and saying, 'Look, here's where we're going off track. Y'all get together.'"
How much of this switch had to do with giving the temperamental -- even if he's gone inside the hauler with his emotions in recent months -- Busch?
"I think it's a factor," Rogers said. "I don't think it's everything. … It takes more than just a change in atmosphere, but it will certainly help."
Rogers' most recent résumé includes success with both Busch and Joey Logano in the Nationwide Series, but his deeper background includes a failure that was a sort of crew chief's boot camp.
"Dave really put the 11 team together," Gibbs said of the formation of the JGR branch Hamlin now drivers for. But Rogers was replaced by Mike Ford in 2006 to bring Hamlin along as a rookie. "To not be able to enjoy that success was hard for him."
"I failed at the No. 11 car -- there's no doubt about it," Rogers said. "And I think you learn more from your failures than you do your successes."
The specific lessons learned?
"Leveling the emotions. Not getting as high when things are good and not getting as low when things are bad …"
Now if he can just pass that along to Busch, you might be seeing some bow-taking and counting off the wins on the fingers again … to open 2010 with a bang.
Sudden resurgence of the 18 to close out this season?
"I wouldn't be opposed to it," Gibbs deadpanned. "But the reality of it is, any good race team takes a little time. We'd just rather do it now instead of waiting till next year to kick it off."
The show didn't get interesting until late in the race, when drivers such as the flipping Mark Martin had real business to attend to.
If the boss won't talk
Don't take a walk
Sit down! Sit down!
-- Early 1900s union organizing chant
A case could be made that a de facto drivers' union is operating in NASCAR as we speak.
To wit: the sit-down strike on wheels they staged Sunday at Talladega.
Oh, they won't admit it -- they don't even think of it for what it is.
But they've shown they know how to knock NASCAR to its knees: strip the show away. No show, no NASCAR. At least not for long.
Lay the events bare, vulnerable to the chronic criticism of all nonracing enthusiasts that it's all just a matter of cars going around in circles ad nauseam except for the occasional wreck.
Make it all so blatantly clear that even the loyalists, the longtime aficionados, come to agree with the naysayers -- cars going around in circles, all right.
Forty years ago, their notoriously tougher predecessors had walked out on the inaugural race at the track that opened as a white elephant and remains so today. They call it a "boycott" now, but they struck at Talladega, showing Big Bill France he couldn't assume they were all damn fools who would run on tires sure to come apart.
Apparently there is no one left in all of NASCAR's administration who absorbed that lesson. So it is in the process of being retaught -- although not nearly as formally or forcefully as it was taught the first France generation by Richard Petty, the Allisons, Cale Yarborough, LeeRoy Yarbrough, et al.
But this group strikes a lot more smoothly. They don't vacate the factory and leave it wide open for The Man to bring in nonunion labor. They use the old 1920s tactic of sitting down right there on the job, right in the factory, occupying the premises without producing for The Man.
So when NASCAR started pushing them around, they didn't take it any more, in their way, than the raw-knuckled crowd had in 1969.
"I guess they don't think much of us anymore," Ryan Newman said, his tone dripping with black understatement after being pinned in his upside-down car.
I don't care how rich and famous this generation of drivers may be. Nobody likes to be treated and talked-to disrespectfully. Nobody.
Jamie McMurray leading a single-file pack of cars is not what NASCAR -- or fans -- seem to have in mind for 500-mile races.
Ordered not to bump-draft -- the only tactic they had left to make Talladega racing any semblance of a show -- they sat down on the job, buckled in, and rode around, and around, and around, and around, and around … and finally they wrecked because a few of them needed to get something done -- such as Mark Martin and Jeff Gordon struggling to gain points on Jimmie Johnson in the Chase.
Without that, there might have been no show at all. Zero.
And the fans went wild … with rage … at lack of show.
Two years ago, after a similar sit-down strike over NASCAR's mandate of the COT at Talladega for the first time, I heard from deep inside NASCAR that officials knew the drivers were riding around and around that day, and that there wasn't a damn thing NASCAR could do to stop it.
Word, I heard, had gone surreptitiously around the motor coach compound on Saturday night: ride around.
On Sunday, after the meeting with NASCAR officials that so outraged the drivers, this demonstration was much more blatant. They didn't even pretend to make a show of it. They rode around single file. It was a picket line, missing only the hand-painted signs.
No show, no NASCAR. Not for long.
Call them spoiled if you will. Call them wealthy beyond any reason to complain. But 40 years and many millions of dollars can't change the human instinct to resent being treated like damn fools.
And that very wealth is what makes them so much more powerful than their angry predecessors. If every one of these drivers quit right now, for keeps, I can count on one hand the number who would ever have to work again for a living for the rest of their lives.
They don't have to race. NASCAR does.
NASCAR had better remember that.
NASCAR had better heed the black tones of Newman, Gordon ("I'm kind of glad we ran out [of gas] when we did because we were at least able to get back out there and destroy our car") and Martin ("Nothing," he snapped at a question about what he saw before he went tumbling).
My e-mail has been running the same as every one of my colleagues', at every media outlet I know: 100 percent outrage over the debacle at Talladega on Sunday.
One stands out, because it is from a former motorsports editor of mine at another publication, now retired on the West Coast. He just might be the most sophisticated and savvy race observer I've ever known.
Here's a fraction of his take: "Newman's, Martin's and even Gordon's sarcasm were the only honest, watchable moments in the entire endless [unprintable phrase]."
NASCAR had better recognize the dictatorship is over. Finished. NASCAR had better yield, somewhere, somehow, on plate racing -- or, as Johnson boldly suggested as the only alternative, tear down the banking at Talladega and Daytona.
And NASCAR had better yield on the Car of Tomorrow, bring back springs instead of bump stops, bring back spoilers instead of wings, bring back air dams instead of splitters. Then the drivers can race, if only just a little.
Keep up the despotism, the intransigence, and no, these rich, soft -- and very shrewd -- drivers won't strike. But they can sit down, ride around, and end all semblance of a show.
CONCORD, N.C. -- This is about consensus disrespect for greatness, which is a chronic neurosis with NASCAR and its following.
Never has there been a clearer confluence of names and careers than Jimmie Johnson and David Pearson, here, this week. Johnson's four-peat onslaught continues unabated yet uncelebrated, and Pearson, the best NASCAR driver ever, was disgracefully snubbed from NASCAR's first Hall of Fame class.
Johnson is the Pearson of his time. And Pearson was the Johnson of his time.
Pearson is long, long overdue to get his due. And Johnson is decades from getting his.
If they gave Cup points for poignant philosophizing, Jeff Burton would be an eight-time champion by now. So we can turn to him for wisdom on this subject -- especially for projection of Johnson's plight in the decades to come.
"You never get your just due in the era that you're in," Burton said the other day, speaking of Johnson. "Because the people you're competing against don't want to give it to you."
Truth is, Burton continued, "Anyone who should at the very least appreciate and respect what Jimmie Johnson and that team have done, they're not open-minded enough right now. They're just not going to."
Truth is, in my experience, they may never.
I mean the whole NASCAR realm, from deep inside the garages to the grandstands and beyond.
Pearson's plight is ominous for Johnson.
So who, you ask, deems Pearson the greatest ever? The serious, the savvy, the longtime, deep-inside observers of NASCAR -- Richard Petty foremost among them.
Never have I asked Petty who was the best of all time that he didn't launch into this soliloquy, or something very similar:
"Pearson. Pearson could beat you on a short track, he could beat you on a superspeedway, he could beat you on a road course, he could beat you on a dirt track.
"It didn't hurt to lose to Pearson as much as it did to some of the others, because I knew how good he was."
Never have I asked Pearson who was best that he didn't answer thusly, absolutely no brag about it, just fact: "Me. Can you think of anybody better?"
I never could. I can't now.
But somebody is making a run at him, and could approach or equal him before it's over: Johnson.
But you can see the Johnson travesty coming, because it is in motion today.
This tells you all you need to know: Johnson has 45 wins, and three championships with the fourth imminent, in not quite eight seasons. Dale Earnhardt Jr . has 18 wins and no championships in not quite 10 seasons.
And yet the masses swoon in their riotous worship of Junior, and turn their noses up at Johnson.
So it was with Pearson, when the masses were swooning over Petty, and Pearson beat him with considerable regularity: 63 times they finished 1-2, and Pearson won the heads-up duels 33-30.
"I always told him that was because he had a better car," Petty always says with an ironic grin because everybody knew it was the opposite.
In lesser equipment, running far fewer races, Pearson won 105 races to Petty's 200.
But Pearson was thought of, in his prime, as that guy who kept spoiling the Petty legions' days at the races. He kept beating the King. He was, perennially, the Other Guy.
Johnson is the guy who keeps beating everybody's favorite -- be it Junior, Tony Stewart, Jeff Gordon, Carl Edwards, whoever -- with great regularity. He is the perennial Other Guy.
He just doesn't have the charisma to be The Guy. Neither did Pearson.
Pearson was a plain-spoken, humble man, and that added up to very little charisma. Johnson is plain-spoken, humble. In both, you have to look deep to find the quiet self-certainty in pure driving performance.
There has been such a mushroom cloud outrage over Pearson's omission from the Hall that he'll probably get in next year -- NASCAR could not stand any further smudging of its Hall as unjust from the outset.
Johnson can four-peat, five-peat, six-peat. And all that will be said of him is that such dominance is bad for the sport.
So turn your backs on Johnson, NASCAR fandom. Just as your predecessors did on Pearson decades ago.
Your predecessors missed the career of the greatest NASCAR driver ever, because they were looking the other way.
And now you're missing the career of Pearson's only challenger among active drivers.
You were heard. Taken seriously. Given more than lip service by drivers as part of the victory-lane litany ordered by NASCAR this year.
You held sway.
Next year, races are going to start when they're supposed to: 1 p.m. ET for 28 of them, 3 p.m. ET for West Coast races, and 7:30 ET for night races.
David Hill, the colorful chairman of Fox Sports, will "hold up my hand and say, 'guilty,'" to initiating the time-tampering, he told a teleconference Wednesday. Further, he confessed, TV shouldn't have tampered with tradition in the first place.
Here's the thing about you at the tracks: You're going to show up at the crack of dawn, whether the race starts at 1 p.m., 2 p.m., 3:30 p.m., 5:30 p.m. or 8:00 p.m. It's long-cemented habit with you.
The longer you have to wait, the wearier you get. And the ornerier you'll be in the black-of-night traffic jams, trying to get out of there all at once after the race is over.
But, very sad to say, you, as a ticket-buyer, hotel-price-gouging victim and restaurant-line stalwart, might not have been heard, let alone held sway.
The late, legendary Smokey Yunick used to say of NASCAR fans, "You can treat 'em like crap, rain on 'em, sunburn 'em, starve 'em, cover 'em with dirt and tire dust, keep 'em waiting for hours in the heat or the sleet, run 'em clean out of beer, and they just won't go away."
For all that, you wouldn't have won this one.
But here's your power.
Here's the thing about you at home. You are a TV viewer, part of the mightiest public force in American society today.
If you're in the Eastern time zone, chances are you go to church, come home and have Sunday dinner, and sit down to watch NASCAR on TV at 1 p.m.
But whether you're in church or sleeping in, you're ready for action after lunch.
Emphasize action. Creature of habit that you are, you still sit down at 1 p.m. … and you wait … and wait … and wait.
The latest gossip about Dale Earnhardt Jr., or the latest video of Jeff Gordon and family, are fine, in their place, but …
Action.
Ned Jarrett, the broadcaster who was the very voice and face of NASCAR's rapid rise into the mainstream in the 1980s and '90s, told me recently that the thing television networks should remember, simply but overwhelmingly, is that "Fans just want to watch the race."
Jarrett is still concerned that you have too many people talking at you on too many topics during a race telecast. But that's an issue for another day.
You won this one. You forced it. This was not a purely charitable act by the networks nor by NASCAR, whose ratings have been sinking by and large.
They recognize that in their expeditions foraging for new audiences in the late-afternoon hours, they not only weren't making headway but had run off and left the core constituency.
You knew that, have been e-mailing me about it in droves for years, and you didn't just feel forlorn, but furious.
Now they've turned around and are coming back to meet you, and your biorhythms, in 2010.
There is little risk involved. Look at the NFL, which has remained steadfast and successful with its 1 p.m. and 4 p.m. kickoffs.
And there's a meteorological bonus built in: fewer rainouts in the summertime.
Take Watkins Glen last July. I sat there for hours watching the radar as a massive and ferocious front moved down from Canada, across Lake Ontario and into New York State, while everybody at the track dabbled and lounged around, waiting for a 2:30 p.m. start.
Just seconds before the command to start engines, the lightning started. Then the deluge. Then they came back and ran Monday. Nobody won that one -- fans, networks, teams, NASCAR itself.
If only they'd started at 1 p.m. (actually it'll be a little after, what with prerace ceremonies), they'd have had half the race in by the time the tempest hit.
Bring the same storm down from Toronto at the same time on race day next year, and they'll get it in.
Now if only NASCAR would listen to you about that confounded COT …
LOUDON, N.H. -- The other 11 drivers enter the Chase game-faced. Juan Pablo Montoya comes rollicking in, always running on the edge of laughing.
If sheer cool can win a championship, Montoya is a lock. I've never seen a driver enter NASCAR's playoffs feeling less pressure, having a better time -- and yet more calculating of what it will take to win the Cup.
"Oh, yeah, I'm loving it," he said Friday. "It's kind of nice having like zero pressure right now. It's cool."
I keep sensing that Montoya knows something the rest of us in and around NASCAR don't. But maybe that's just the joy he exudes at having figured out a system that was foreign to him until three years ago, when he phoned Chip Ganassi from Europe and said in the voice of a kid asking for a new toy, "I want to drive that car!" meaning Ganassi's No. 42.
Lately Montoya has been unabashedly points racing, tiptoeing through the latter races of the regular season, just to make sure he got into the Chase. Now, we shall see … Now, "you gotta go for broke," he said soon after not just winning the pole for Sunday's playoff opener, the Sylvania 300, but winning it with a track-record speed of 133.431 mph.
Then, as he is wont to do, Montoya hedged back and forth on the all-out charge for wins versus playing it smart and, perhaps, points racing some more, even deep into the Chase. He has learned a lot from one of his closest friends in the garage, Mark Martin, whose mantra is that the Chase won't really take shape until the halfway point.
"I think the first five races you definitely have to get a top-10 every week," Montoya said. "Ideally a top-5, but I think if you can get the first four or five races a pretty good average with good finishes" -- now the hedging to the other view -- "and if you get a chance to win you've got to take them now."
That said, I asked him if storming to the pole here might be an early indication that that chance might present itself Sunday.
"It's great" being on the pole, he said. "But you know how these races go. If it was a 10-lap shootout, would say, 'hahahey, we're lookin' gooood. But there's like 300 laps or something. It's a bunch of laps."
I pointed out that Jeff Burton led every lap on the quirky, 1-mile New Hampshire Motor Speedway in 2000.
"The chances of my leading every time coming out of the pits are pretty slim," Montoya said. "So you've got to have a good car for traffic."
Even with all that, his blown domination of the Allstate 400 at the Brickyard in July is fresh in his mind. Even after leading 116 laps, pit stops be damned, he was caught speeding on the pit road late in the race and wound up 11th.
So he's figured out the luck involved, the rule of "circumstances" -- as the NASCAR sage Richard Petty calls the way things fall -- and now Montoya asked rhetorically, right on the edge of laughing, "You can't change what's going to happen, can you?"
Crapshoot racing is fun compared to Formula One, from whence he came in 2006 when he tired of the politics and the mountainous BS, because "In Formula One when you've got the best car you're gonna win, and when you don't have the best car you don't win. It's that simple. Here, every week, you've got a shot at winning …"
Montoya has yet to win an oval-track race in NASCAR, but Indy in July, plus a third-place finish at Atlanta two weeks ago after leading 31 laps, indicate he's on the threshold.
"You always try," he said of winning, "but you always try being smart."
And then he hedged again, the philosophic pendulum swung back, and he said, "I think here you can go a little bit more out of control."
Out of control, or on the edge of it, was the way Montoya won seven F1 races under the raised eyebrows of the stodgier other drivers and media, who found him overly aggressive for the glamorous single-file promenade of Grand Prix racing.
Now he has reached some mental compromise, having worked out the math of the NASCAR points system. But if he reckons at a given moment that he can "go a little bit more out of control," then the Chase could take on a new kind of pizzazz, and he could make a run at becoming the first foreign-born driver to win the Cup.
But the international prospects have zero appeal to him.
"If I win the Cup, cool. That's it."
But a first? "No, that's not a big deal for me. I don't get any special treatment or anything. I wouldn't mind getting some, but I don't."
Again he went right to the edge of laughing -- was a little more out of control.
Big Bill France, who had the vision to found NASCAR, also had enough common sense not to defy the weather.
In July, he would start the Firecracker 400 at 10 a.m., knowing full well that if he went up against the afternoon thunderstorms along Daytona Beach, he would lose. Every time.
Fans wait for the rain to stop Sunday at Watkins Glen International. It never did, and the Sprint Cup race was rescheduled for the following day.
He scheduled some races by the long-range forecasts in the old Farmer's Almanac. It seldom steered him wrong.
That wisdom seems lost on his posterity. NASCAR keeps flouting the weather, and losing. Just asking for it, and getting it.
Two rainouts in a row now. Can we make it three? The long-range forecast for Sunday at Michigan International Speedway is partly cloudy, but we shall see. Another midafternoon start in the summertime on the North American continent, another risk of thunderstorms, another shot at racing on Monday.
One young crewman, trotting out of the drizzly garage area at Watkins Glen on Sunday evening, yelped, "I'm LOVIN' this Monday morning racing." The wry connotation was that he might as well get used to it.
Soon afterward, one fan commented in an ESPN Conversation, "Rainy days and Mondays always get me down."
A few more weekends like the past two, and those words, borrowed from the late Karen Carpenter, might become bumper stickers and T-shirts.
And that was one of the milder comments. TV viewers -- not to mention the fans at the tracks, who, by and large, can't come back on Mondays.-- are up to the gills with rainouts.
Little could have been done at Pocono on Aug. 2-3, with intermittent rain in the morning, other than for NASCAR to have demanded in advance that racetrack officials repair the "weepers," the cracks in the pavement that let water seep through, maddeningly, after rain has stopped.
Watkins Glen was another matter. I sat for nearly three hours and watched a massive weather front on the radar come down from Canada, mosey on across Lake Ontario and right at us. It was obvious the front was going to hit the Finger Lakes region of New York almost precisely at the scheduled starting time for the race. The lightning began only seconds before the command to start engines.
You sit and watch the weather come, and watch NASCAR officials sit there dawdling, staring at the radar screens without changing the schedule by a minute, then you start to figure many fans, who for years have been calling for emergency early starts to beat the weather, might be right.
By Monday, local fan Brian Ciaravino, who owns his own business and was able to come back for the postponed race, was wondering why they hadn't rescheduled the start for 10 a.m. instead of noon, noting that the humidity was building so that he feared another round of afternoon thunderstorms.
He'd been on the grounds since 7:30 a.m., as he had been every day of the race weekend. Had NASCAR called for an emergency noon start on Sunday, instead of 2:20 p.m., "I'd have been there," he said. A 10 a.m. start rather than noon on Monday? "I'd love it," he said.
As NASCAR has gone more and more to mid- and late-afternoon starts, and to night racing, I've noticed that NASCAR fans still tend to show up at the tracks early in the mornings, regardless. It's a habit formed through the decades.
Should NASCAR, on a given Sunday, see that rain was inevitable by 2:30 p.m. and call an emergency 10 or 11 a.m. start to beat the weather, I think cheers would go up from the incoming crowds. Fans would know NASCAR was trying to do something for them, the people who bought the tickets and traveled to the race, and therefore -- assuming you want to be fair about it -- those who deserve the highest priority.
But even TV viewers often complain vehemently about Monday starts, because they have to go to work and can't watch the race.
The assumed reason for the midafternoon starts is the West Coast TV market. How many woefully missed sellouts at Fontana and small gatherings at Sonoma will it take for NASCAR to realize that Californians largely don't care about the sport?
And from Californians who do, I've gotten plenty of e-mail over the years indicating that they're long accustomed to getting up early on Sundays to watch sports events in the East, and wouldn't mind doing so for NASCAR any more than they mind it for the NFL.
The other long-proposed alternative, developing rain tires for Cup cars, still seems a long way off at best. The difficulty is that the 3,400-pound cars are just too heavy for rain tires. Once the track went from wet to damp, treaded tires would tend to burn up through the corners due to the high friction and heavy weight.
Last year, Nationwide cars ran on rain tires on the road course at Montreal, but no tests have even been conducted on the current Cup car for rain tires.
With enough engineering and development, over time Goodyear probably could come up with adequate rain tires for Cup races. But neither the tire maker nor the sanctioning body is showing any inclination to go to such expense.
So the only real answer in the summertime is flexible starting times, and/or earlier starting times.
As it is, the midafternoon starts are ticking off fans nationwide, two ways: forcing them to wait hours longer for the race to start than they want to even on a fair-weather day, and subjecting them to rainouts on the stormy afternoons.
The other element of nature that Big Bill France never defied was human nature -- the wrath of his fans.
WATKINS GLEN, N.Y. -- Another summer Sunday in the Northeast, another rainout for NASCAR. Last week Pocono, this time Watkins Glen. Again, the Cup cars didn't turn a wheel on the scheduled day.
Persistent drizzle on the Finger Lakes district of New York forced postponement of the Heluva Good! Sour Cream Dips at the Glen road race until noon Monday.
This time, officials got to within 10 seconds of the command to start engines before lightning forced fans and teams to take shelter, and then the rain started.
At 4:04 p.m., NASCAR officials determined they couldn't get the track dry in time to run the full 90-lap, 220-mile race in adequate daylight. The road course is not lighted for night racing.
In a rapidly emptying garage, the only person with a smile on his face was Darian Grubb, Tony Stewart's crew chief.
Not that Grubb wasn't annoyed at the rainout, and not that the second in a row made it any worse.
"Every week's a new week," he said. "It's always annoying."
But on the brighter side, "It's going to be an interesting race tomorrow," Grubb said. "It's going to be hotter, and slick. It'll be fun to go."
Stewart will start 13th, but is a master of slippery tracks in general and road courses in particular, so, Grubb predicted, "It could play right into our hands."
The weather forecast for Monday isn't great, with a 40 percent chance of rain, but the predicted high is 86 degrees, after a weekend when drivers practiced and qualified on a cool track with ambient temperatures in the low 70s.
WATKINS GLEN, N.Y. -- There just might be more drivers capable of winning here Sunday than for any NASCAR road race I can remember. The era of oval-track stars giving up on turning right is fading fast.
The event is officially called the Heluva Good! Sour Cream Dips at The Glen, about as awkward a mouthful as the profitable practice of title sponsorship has made yet. But, all things considered, this could indeed be a helluva good race.
Jimmie Johnson won the pole for Sunday's Cup race at Watkins Glen, but a road course win still eludes the three-time defending series champ.
"In the old days it was going to be Mark Martin, Rusty Wallace and Ricky Rudd, and you could count on that," said Boris Said, now an ESPN analyst and the longtime tutor and guru of road racing techniques to the long-resistant Cup drivers. "Now, there are 15 or 20 guys who can win here, easily."
The difference in the Cup regular on a road course from 10 years ago is "night and day," Said said. "I remember 10 years ago when I substituted for Jimmy Spencer ... my first time ever in a Cup car. I had to come from the back after the driver change. It seemed easy to pass these guys.
"And now -- to get into the Chase they can't afford to give up those points. So they've all worked at it. I've always said these guys are the best drivers in racing. But road racing is really just a different discipline. And a lot of these guys, like Kevin Harvick and Kasey Kahne, guys I've worked with, were terrible when they started and then after the test they're faster than I am.
"So it's like showing a duck water," Said continued. "Once you give them a few things that are different, and how to do it, they work at it."
Said Ambrose, who grew up road racing in Tasmania, Australia, and Europe before turning to NASCAR: The Cup drivers "don't do it a lot but they've had good training, they've had good experience now in the two tracks that we go to and they're forced to contend with.
"Kasey Kahne winning at Infineon [in June] surprised many," Ambrose continued, "but it didn't surprise me because you can just tell that he can drive the wheels off a race car whether it's on a road course or an oval."
Overall, "The depth is huge," Ambrose said. "The road course ringers that come in haven't had the impact like they used to five or six or seven years ago ..."
Said Martin, NASCAR's preeminent road racer of the early 1990s who has since been deluged with competition: NASCAR drivers have improved "significantly" on the serpentine circuits.
When he was winning here -- three in a row, 1993 to 1995 -- "it was much easier to put a whipping on two-thirds of the field then than it is today," Martin said. "That's because the whole field has pretty much the same access to all the knowledge that we do [he learned his expertise from his car owner of the time, road racing specialist Jack Roush] and the drivers have all really stepped up to the plate."
So have the team engineers and mechanics, with much stronger road racing specialty packages -- especially brakes, which Kahne credits a great deal for his win at Sonoma.
"The biggest key to success to this racetrack for success, other than staying on the road, is brakes," Said said. "They really pay a big dividend."
Jeff Gordon, NASCAR's all-time winningest road racer with nine wins -- four here and five at Sonoma -- dominated in the late 90s and kept winning into this century.
But, "We don't have the advantage over the competition that we had at one time," Gordon said. "Especially with this car [the COT] -- this car makes the competition so much tighter and so much closer that it's hard to get an advantage."
Watkins Glen is a much higher-speed circuit than Infineon, with more places to pass, and "I think especially the double-file restarts here are going to be pretty interesting," Montoya said. "I think they're going to be pretty wild. But you know, it's all about surviving."
With this many contenders, and double-file restarts, Heluva Good! might turn out to be an appropriate race name indeed.
Ed Hinton is a senior writer covering motorsports for ESPN.com. He has nearly 35 years' experience covering NASCAR, open-wheel racing and other major sports for several metro daily newspapers and two national publications.
Ed joined ESPN.com in 2008, most recently having been senior reporter for motorsports at the Tribune Co. newspaper chain, where his work appeared in the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times, Newsday, The Baltimore Sun, the Orlando Sentinel and other papers. Previously he was a senior writer at Sports Illustrated and a national writer for The National Sports Daily.
Ed has written two books and won numerous awards for motorsports and general sports writing, including the Scripps Howard Foundation First Amendment award.
Ed holds a B.S. degree in journalism from the University of Southern Mississippi, and also attended the University of Mississippi.
Ed Hinton
