Hornaday's solid showing boosting title talk
It is still early, but Ron Hornaday is putting together the kind of Craftsman Truck season that has him thinking about a title, writes John Schwarb.
With just one-third of the Craftsman Truck Series season in the books, part of Ron Hornaday knows championship talk is premature.
The other part looks at races like Friday's at Dover, Del., and can't help it.
Hornaday's Chevrolet was so bad in practice and qualifying, he said, "It was driving me, I wasn't driving it." Yet some in-race adjustments started to take hold, plus some timely cautions and fast pit stops. Next thing Hornaday knew, he was in the clear and on the way to a 7-second victory over Stacy Compton in the AAA Insurance 200.
If all that sounds crazy, it should.
"I guess [team owner] Kevin Harvick put it right after the race," Hornaday said. "He said, 'This is how you win championships, when you're not supposed to win a race and you do.'"
Those are the breaks the No. 33 is enjoying right now. The win was the team's second in three weeks, and with it Hornaday chopped 44 points off Mike Skinner's championship lead, from 121 to 77.
"You say you don't worry about it, but that's what Kevin and DeLana [Harvick] hired me for, to win championships," Hornaday said. "The way I look at it, I've got a lot more room in the house for more trophies. Right now we've got to focus on winning races."
If that keeps happening and Skinner continues his season-long streak of top-10s, the series could be in for another tight points race. No one knows more about that than Hornaday, a two-time champion in 1996 and 1998 who won the latter by three points over Jack Sprague.
Early crash draws ire
The other Kevin Harvick Inc. Chevrolet at Dover qualified well but didn't hang around to enjoy it. Clint Bowyer, starting on the outside pole but clamoring for the lead on the first lap, tangled with Skinner and ended up in the wall, starting a chain-reaction wreck.
"Those guys on the front row decided to be knuckleheads right off the start and beat and bang on each other on the first lap," said Brendan Gaughan, whose Chevrolet was left in a heap and finished last. "I mean, I believe I was told for years, in order to finish first, you first have to finish. I would just like a chance to get a run at it past turn one."
After hitting the outside wall, Bowyer came down into Gaughan, who in turn collected Sprague, who was running directly behind Gaughan. Sprague returned later in the race to boost his Toyota up to 28th, small consolation for someone with an eye on the points race.
"I have no unearthly idea what happened," Sprague said. "I saw nothing except the 77 [of Gaughan] on my hood. It's unbelievable. These guys get paid a lot of money to drive these things, and you can't even make it a half of a lap. The two involved in it are way better than that."
High banks, high hopes at Texas
Germain Racing's Todd Bodine won the series title last year despite not winning any of the final 16 races. The drought has continued this year, now coming full circle. Bodine's last win in 2006 was at Texas Motor Speedway, and that's where the series runs Friday night in the Sam's Town 400.
"I love Texas," said Bodine, who has won three of the last five races at the track and is currently third in points. "It's a momentum track; you've really got to get up on top of the wheel. It is the perfect place for us to get back on it."
TMS is a 1.5-mile oval with 24 degrees of banking in the turns. Skinner, who will try for his seventh consecutive pole, won four straight poles at Texas ending with last year's summer race.
Spare parts
With a fifth-place finish at Dover for Bobby Hamilton Racing, Mike Bliss now has top-10s for three different owners this season. He finished 10th at California for Curtis Key in a Chevrolet, sixth at Charlotte in a David Fuge Ford and fifth at Dover in a Dodge. Bliss will make 10 more starts this season for BHR. … Aaron Fike recorded his third top-10 of the season at Dover in the Red Horse Racing Toyota, extending his lead in the rookie of the year race to 36 points over Willie Allen.
John Schwarb is a freelance journalist covering motorsports and a contributor to ESPN.com. He can be reached at johnschwarb@yahoo.com.
