Some Three Race Observations
by Michael Daly-Staff Writer
03/06/2008

The 2008 NASCAR season has now run its first three races and there have been several themes permeating this opening stanza of the season. With Atlanta beckoning, some observations on the first three events this year -

ROUSH RACING HAS PASSED HENDRICK AS NASCAR'S BIG TEAM - Not that anyone expected Roush to keep struggling as it was for awhile, but the resurgence of Roush in general and Carl Edwards in particular has been somewhat striking, especially given Roush's admitted lackadasical approach to testing the COT. Once they got serious about it, the results speak for themselves.

That seriousness shows in David Ragan's surprising improvement. Let's face it, most of us had given him up for dead career-wise after a poor rookie season, but his Vegas effort can only raise some eyebrows as the meat of the season approaches and he returns to his home track at Atlanta.

Of the other Roushketeers, Matt Kenseth keeps on keeping on while Greg Biffle somehow manages to get largely overlooked even when he posts a solid effort. The weak link remains Jamie McMurray and it showed in another forgettable finish at Vegas.

HOW MUCH IS JUNIOR HELPING THE HENDRICK EFFORT? - It's worth asking because the entire Hendrick effort ran mediocre at Daytona and Junior never got off the ground at Fontana. He rebounded with a solid second at Vegas but the inconsistency shown so far wasn't what people had in mind for him or the other Hendrick cars. Not that they're running poorly - far from it - but so far the explosiveness a lot of people expected really hasn't shown up yet.

TOYOTA HASN'T IMPROVED AS MUCH AS EXPECTED - True, Brian Vickers has posted some decent efforts early in this season, but the infusion of Joe Gibbs Racing into the effort has only boosted Joe Gibbs Racing. No one else in the Toyota effort has shown any improvement and one has to wonder how much inter-team cooperation really went on here with Gibbs and the other Camry campaigners.

Of course it is too much to expect Michael Waltrip Racing to improve, but Bill Davis and Dieter Mateschitz should be running better than they presently are.

DODGE SQUANDERED ITS DAYTONA MOMENTUM - After their spectacular finish at Daytona, Dodge has been largely MIA. Kurt Busch worked like crazy to get a lap back at Vegas and then crashed. Kasey Kahne and Elliott Sadler have been the most consistent Dodges with solid efforts pretty much all around and Bobby Labonte and the Petty #43 have been better than their 11th at Daytona and 17th at Vegas really show. Ganassi has been up and down, with more down than up.

THE COT STILL HASN'T PROVEN BETTER - We've had some good racing so far, but to credit the COT for it (as Larry McReynolds has tried to do) is giving this car way too much credit. Its inability to turn has been a chronic problem and the result has generally been that the cars won't respond in dirty air any better than the old car - if anything the pattern has been that aeropush was worsened with the COT. It has also been a big problem for tires, with numerous blown right fronts at Vegas - always a sign of both a bad tire design and a worse downforce package.

AT LEAST THERE WAS SOME OUTSIDE-THE-BOX THINKING - An apparantly flippant remark by Michael Waltrip led to a follow-up by Fontana's beleagured head Gillian Zucker that maybe her speedway should be changed to a restrictor plate track. The idea was dismissed quickly, but is worth taking seriously given that the last twenty years have seen the plate tracks surpass everything else in terms of competitive racing and given that those races sell out more consistently than the others - even Vegas showed some emptiness in the grandstands. If they're going to change racetracks - and we still hear calls to bank up some tracks - then go all out and bank them up to make them restrictor plate tracks.

NASCAR HAMMERS ROBBY GORDON WHEN PERHAPS IT SHOULDN'T HAVE - Even Jack Roush acknowledged that NASCAR's penalty on Robby Gordon was preposterously excessive, and it is striking that Gordon seems to have rallied most of the garage area behind him in this dispute. It helps illustrate the continuing discrepency of punishments handed down to the big teams versus the smaller ones, a discrepency that angers a lot of people.

There we have it after three races, with the meat of the season still to come.

Questions? Comments? Contact Michael Daly at stp43fan@hotmail.com

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