February 18, 2016
March 23, 2009
No Contest-Kyle Dominates Bristol…
After a pit crew error cost him an almost certain win in the Nationwide race, Kyle took his anger out the next day on the Sprint Cup field, leading 378 of 502 laps on his way to an overpowering victory at Bristol Motor Speedway.
Busch not only spanked the field, he also verbally reignited his rivalry with “The Baby Jesus”. The smack started when NASCAR called yet another bogus caution for debris to help Dale Jr. get back on the lead lap.
Busch laughed maniacally through his commentary. ”Eighty-eight, lucky dog. Hahahahaha!”
Busch quickly knocked the #88 off the lead lap again but his focus had returned to keeping the competition behind him and winning the race. Further comment was reserved until the postrace where alas, it was as one-sided as the race.
“There’s probably too much pressure on one guy’s shoulders who doesn’t seem to win very often,” Busch said. “But for us, it’s a blast to go out there and do what we do.”
Jr’s reply: “…right now, he has every right to say what he wants and he’s been able to back it up on the track.”
March 13, 2009
Busch sweep in Atlanta…..
Kyle (missing 2nd and 3rd gear), came from 9th place on the restart with 8 laps to go to win the Camping World truck race, and Kurt simply dominated the Sprint Cup race leading 234 of 330 laps.
How dominant was Kurt Busch at Atlanta? He scored just the eighth perfect Driver Rating of 150.0 since the inception of the Loop Data statistic in 2005.
He had race-best stats in Laps Led (234), Average Running Position (1.5) and Fastest Laps Run (81). He was one of two drivers who ran all 330 Laps in the Top 15 (Kasey Kahne).
Busch, who now has four perfect Driver Rating scores, is the only Cup Series driver with more than one.
Great job guys!!!
March 3, 2009
Say goodnight, Gracie…
Kyle Busch notched the biggest win of his young career Sunday by driving from the back of the field to win the Shelby 427 at Las Vegas Motor Speedway. Kyle, a native of Las Vegas, held off Richard Childress Racing teammates Clint Bowyer and Jeff Burton in a three-lap shootout to the finish to capture his first win at his hometrack.
You Go Kyle!!!
February 22, 2009
Man of History
Kyle Busch dominated the Stater Bros. 300 at Auto Club Speedway on Saturday in much the same way he did in the San Bernardino County 200 hours before, becoming the first driver in NASCAR history to win two touring series events on the same day.
February 18, 2009
Nice job at Daytona Dale Jr.
Fox’s sauciest on-air subject Sunday came when its lead announcers ripped one of NASCAR’s biggest names. After Dale Earnhardt Jr. bumped Brian Vickers, which prompted a nine-car pileup, Fox’s Larry McReynolds said it was “totally uncalled for” and Darrell Waltrip chimed in: “I don’t care who you are, that’s totally wrong!“
“One guy [Earnhardt] who had problems all day on pit road made his problems our problems,” a disappointed Busch said. “It’s unfortunate that a guy who screwed up his whole day on pit road has to make our day even worse. It cost the best car a chance to win the race.”
The only thing Jr. had to say was that it wasn’t intentional and that NASCAR needs to change the rules because he can’t manage to fit his car inside the pit box like the other drivers.
January 30, 2009
January 4, 2009
Kyle Busch: The Spirit of Dale Earnhardt Sr.
The worst thing Kyle Busch did Saturday night at Richmond after booting Dale Earnhardt Jr. late in the Sprint Cup Series Dan Lowry 400 was apologize for what happened.
Certainly, had it been Dale Earnhardt Sr. behind the wheel of the No. 18 car Saturday, there wouldn’t have been any sort of apologizing for what happened.
It’s a sort of twisted irony that comes to the surface when examining just what took place Saturday night at Richmond International Raceway between Busch and Earnhardt Jr.
The spirit that earned Dale Earnhardt Sr. the moniker “The Intimidator” lives not in his namesake son, though that spirit does clearly burn deeply in the competitive drive of Busch.
A cursory search of Youtube on Sunday evening would turn up a plethora of replays showing the two drivers making contact in the corner while fighting for the lead, Clint Bowyer going below both to take over the lead and Earnhardt spinning off toward the wall while Busch kept on going in second place.
Some of the titles on those videos?
“Dale Earnhardt Jr. gets screwed out of a win”
“Kyle Busch spins out Dale Jr. ON PURPOSE”
It begs the question. When did Earnhardt Jr. become the biggest sympathy case of the Sprint Cup Series?
In a strange way, Earnhardt Jr. has seemingly become everything his late father wasn’t in racing. You can blame him for that in some respects and in some ways you really can’t fault him.
Earnhardt Jr. fits much more the mold of the average modern day Sprint Cup Series driver than his father ever did. Like so many of his contemporaries in the Sprint Cup Series today Junior seems much more marketing monster than hard nosed racer.
But it’s a fan base, hands down the most passionate and defensive in the sport, that has become somewhat pathetic in their somber whininess. A fact that suddenly makes Earnhardt seem much more like sympathetic sap than ultra successful competitor.
Did Earnhardt Jr. get “screwed” out of a victory Saturday night, one that would have snapped a 71-race winless streak for the Hendrick Motorsports driver? Nobody will ever know.
What did happen was that Earnhardt ended up the victim of hard nosed, full contact, short track racing for the lead.
Though the “Junior Nation” fan base – the souls that seemingly now believe it’s a god given right that if Earnhardt Jr. is leading a race then everybody else should back off – will surely crow that he was taken out, and say it was on purpose, just for good measure.
And in doing so they simply keep emphasizing their driver – the one with the bloodlines of one NASCAR’s most hardened legends – as a charity case in the sport. In their groaning all they do is proclaim Earnhardt Jr. as the man who shouldn’t get raced hard for the win simply because he’s Earnhardt Jr.
Yes, a victim of hard short track racing is what Earnhardt Jr. ended up being Saturday. He ended up a victim of a bruising, banging, entertaining brand of racing that helped fuel the meteoric rise of NASCAR through the 1980’s and early 1990’s.
Remember that style? Surely most fans of Dale Earnhardt Sr. must. It’s what made him a legend.
Earnhardt Sr. wasn’t called “The Intimidator” for all the times he ended up spinning off in a plume of smoke after getting hit. No, he earned that nickname for being the one never afraid to bang, never afraid to race door to door, trade some paint and let the chips fall where they may.
And Busch seems to embody all those same qualities that made the 7-time champion Earnhardt Sr. a megastar. Dale Earnhardt Jr. isn’t the Dale Earnhardt Sr. of the sport today. That’s a spot reserved for Busch.
The young man who unceremoniously got the boot from Hendrick Motorsports after last season to make way for Earnhardt Jr.’s arrival will never be confused for a points racer. His take no prisoners attitude, the checkers or wreckers desire, is something that’s been direly missing from the Sprint Cup Series for years.
And you can’t in one breath put Earnhardt Sr. on a pedestal as “The Intimidator” and in the same breath crucify Busch for taking the same firebrand attitude onto the racetrack that made Earnhardt Sr. what he was. It just doesn’t go both ways.
Yes, Earnhardt Jr. might be the most intimidating force in motorsports marketing today, but the checkered flag doesn’t go to the guy who cashes the biggest endorsement checks. Busch is proving that week after week this season.
December 26, 2008
Rick Hendrick: As crooked as they get.
WHAT YOU’LL FIND ON RICK’S BIO AT OFFICIAL NASCAR SOURCES
* Courageously owns 65 car dealerships under the Hendrick Automotive Group, which makes more than 2 billion dollars a year
* Courageously was the basis of Randy Quaid’s character in Days of Thunder.
* Courageously, his middle name is Riddick.
* Courageously owned a drag boat racing team that won three national championships from 1981-1983.
* Courageously owns five Winston Cup, three truck, and one Busch series titles.
* Courageously fought leukemia and is in full remission.
* Courageously lost his son, brother, and two nieces in a plane crash outside Martinsville in 2005.
WHAT HE WOULD LIKE PEOPLE TO FORGET.
* Was responsible for keeping noted Yankee asshole Geoff Bodine employed, to the detriment of other racers.
* Despite being from country Virginia, and becoming rich in North Carolina, Rick hates rednecks and wants to crush any hope or joy they may have in their miserable, trailer-bound existence. Or at least, that’s my theory for why he signed Jeff Gordon and Jimmie Johnson.
* That plane crash? Might have actually been his brother’s fault.
* Was convicted of mail fraud in a bribery case with Honda executives way back in 1997. In order to get better allocations of cars, he gave BMWs (those zaibatsu and their wacky company loyalty), houses and several hundred grand in cash to Honda execs.
* Despite all that, he was only convicted on one count, over a 20,000 dollar bribe, and received a three year sentence, and a quarter million dollar fine, which luckily he had on him in folding cash that day.
* You wanna talk about weird luck? He was diagnosed with leukemia two weeks before he was indicted. This meant that not only was he convicted on the one count, his three year sentence was changed to a year of house arrest, leading to the first recorded case of a man saying, “Thank God for this leukemia”.
I guess it was a miracle, that right after his house arrest was over, his leukemia went into remission, and all the bone marrow drive stuff came off his race cars…yeah right. Rick Hendrick is the biggest crook to walk the face of the earth. If you don’t think his lukemia popped up conveniently to keep his tail out of jail and you don’t think he could buy a Doctor to say anything that he wants, you are possibly the most gullible person on the planet. Perhaps you should buy some Splitfire Plugs and start using Slick 50.
* He was also ordered not to have anything to do with his dealerships or NASCAR team for a year, which was no relief for NASCAR fans. His racer Jeff Gordon won 13 races and the Winston Cup, making sure to thank Rick (weepingly, at length) in Victory Lane, each and every single time.
* Then when Bill Clinton was about to leave office, he pardoned Hendrick, which meant that none of the above ever happened, and he’ll sue if you say otherwise.
* Under the “even a broken heartless shell of a website for moral reptiles is right once a decade” theory, Free Republic dug this out:
1. Hendrick was on the Board of Directors of NationsBank.
2. Hendrick’s friend Hugh McColl was the chairman of NationsBank at that time.
3. NationsBank merged with Bank of America
4. Hugh McColl became chairman and CEO of Bank of America
5. Rick Hendrick requested a pardon from Bill Clinton
6. Bank of America chairman Hugh McColl wrote a letter to Bill Clinton recommending a pardon for Rick Hendrick
7. On December 7, 2000, Hugh McColl announced that Bank of America would donate $500,000 to the Clinton Foundation
8. On December 21, 2000, Bill Clinton granted a pardon to Rick Hendrick.
Everyone considers this man “a GOD” ; the darling car owner of NASCAR. The fact is ……..he is a convicted felon ; guilty of price-fixing at his many automobile dealerships. Were it not for a pardon by outgoing President Bill Clinton, Rick Hendrick would have served time in prison for his illegal business dealings.
I also find it strange that, during the legal proceedings that lead up to his conviction, the media was filling us with “sob stories” about his terrible illness……life-threatening, in fact.
His drivers carried bone marrow donation decals on their race cars. It was played “to the hilt”…….all to detract attention from the seriousness of his crimes.
Suddenly — after his pardon by the President, Rick Hendrick experiences a “miraculous” recovery. Today — he certainly looks as though he is quite healthy, and eating well I might add! It sure is amazing what a Presidential pardon can do for the soul. I think it is disgusting…………another example of wealth above justice in America.
December 25, 2008
COT Failure Can’t Be Denied.
With the 2008 Southeastern 500 at Bristol, the Car Of Tomorrow officially turned One Year old, and some retrospectives on the project have been published, with quotes from drivers and a few others. When one looks back on this machine, though, the one word that has to be used in description is failure – failure of promise, failure of execution, failure of concept.
The Car of Tomorrow — or Car of Today or current car or whatever you want to call it — has received major criticism from the first time it pulled in to Victory Lane. That happened in March last year at Bristol when Kyle Busch collected his only win of 2007, then, rather coarsely, proclaimed how bad the new car really was. At first glance, it appeared to be typical Kyle. But you know what, looks like he was right.
The Car Of Tomorrow was introduced with several promises – that its design would reduce the aeropush; that its one-size-fits-all aerodynamic package and "Claw" supertemplate would reduce costs to teams by reducing the need for different cars for different tracks – the "20 cars for 20 different tracks" mantra was commonly uttered – and it would be a safer racecar.
The COT’s failure at the first two promises is undeniable by now. The aeropush is worse now than it was before, which was to be expected with the gapped airdam design. The car’s design concept of cutting downforce – by some accounts in half – was also dubious in reducing aeropush because cutting downforce has never worked at improving raceability, a lesson the failure of the old 5&5 rule in the old car should have taught everyone in the sport.
The use of a wing instead of spoiler blade has also proven dubious with stability with the wing being hurt in dirty air in a way it wasn’t with the old large spoiler blade. The end result is that dirty air is more of an enemy to passing now than it was before.
The cost reduction promise has also failed, with teams spending more and more on chassis changes and setups, in the process going to F1 level in the technology arms race of chassis pieces, and as shown by the Carl Edwards brouhaha after Fontana and Vegas, teams have even gone to finding creatively illegal ways to channel air for downforce.
The net result of all this is that competition has not been improved at all. Not only is the racing no better than before but prospects for new winning teams or comeback winning teams have decreased dramatically with the COT – and the phenomenon of good teams needing billionaire investors just to keep racing appears to be escalating. Jeff Gordon before Bristol made a comment about how in the back of the pack the teams had gotten closer competitively, but this is damning the COT with faint praise and it illustrates just how fraudulent the project’s promises truly are.
I don’t buy the entire ‘safety’ argument either. These cars were deliberately built to keep them closer together on tracks. Deliberately building a car that is such an aerodynamic disaster, that it can only run in tight packs of 43 cars on certain high-speed tracks? The last time I checked, that wasn’t the safest way to run a race, with forty-three 3500-pound cars all traveling at 190+ mph, only inches apart. Gee, one would think that they were trying to cause more accidents.
Even in the realm of safety the COT has shown cause for concern, with several drivers being shaken in side impacts against SAFER barriers, something largely overlooked in the post-Vegas harangue about unpadded inside walls after Gordon’s melee there.
Another failure is in parity. If enhancing ‘parity’ was a strong concern in the design of the COT, in making sure everyone got the same car, how is it that the same few teams are still dominating every event? Because no matter how much you try to ensure that nobody dominates, or gets too far ahead, somebody is going to work harder AND smarter than the other guys.
If NASCAR insists on its paranoid quest for ‘parity’ they might as well just adopt the IROC series way of running things, and just toss the drivers out into 43 cars all built by the same shop. Oh, wait, IROC didn’t work out too well, did it?
Parity again raises its ugly head….if I hear the term ‘clean air’ ever again, I am going to toss my cookies at the TV screen. This is yet another failure of the COT, the fact that if someone gets into the lead…it’s almost impossible to pass the guy. These cars have soooo little downforce, that the moment someone gets behind another car, what little downforce assistance they were getting in the corners disappears completely, the cars slide up the track…and then whoever is in the lead continues to stay in the lead, at least until a pit stop. So much for the ‘parity’ argument, again. COT = fail.
The worst part of the issue is that all the testing done before the COT debuted showed the project was not going to work – literally nowhere did the COT show any improvement in raceability during testing and the problems the project was addressing were eminently solveable with bolt-on pieces – NASCAR wanted more drag on the cars, it could have gone with a 7.5-inch spoiler and roof spoiler. Yet NASCAR pressed forward with the project anyway, as though it thought it could make it work despite evidence.
It hasn’t, and right now the sport is stuck with a racecar that has not lived up to any of its promises and has no potential to ever live up to them. Whether the sport eventually corrects so colossal a mistake remains to be seen.
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