Jeff Gordon is a five-time winner at LMS, scoring his very first of 82 NASCAR Cup victories in the 1994 Coca-Cola 600. (Photo: LAT Photographic)
For Hendrick Motorsports, Lowe’s Motor Speedway represents what can best be called a home-field advantage.
Twenty-five years ago, Rick Hendrick built his first shop for All-Star Racing on a hill just a couple of miles from the 1.5-mile superspeedway. In the time that’s elapsed since 1984, All-Star Racing has grown from Hendrick himself, a single car and a handful of trusted employees, to Hendrick Motorsports, a dominating four-car team, eight Cup championships and more than 550 workers.
So when the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series comes to LMS every May and October, the Hendrick bunch has the race dates carefully circled. And the results show it. Hendrick drivers Jeff Gordon, Jimmie Johnson and Mark Martin have won a whopping 14 Sprint Cup races at this track, and Dale Earnhardt Jr. was five top-five finishes.
This year, the Hendrick juggernaut comes with two additional weapons, the Stewart-Haas Racing Chevrolet Impala SS entries driven by Tony Stewart and Ryan Newman. Stewart, of course, won Saturday night’s NASCAR Sprint All-Star Race in an SHR car that has a Hendrick chassis and a motor, and a former Hendrick engineer, Darian Grubb, atop the pit box.
But the show isn’t entirely Hendrick this weekend. In fact, this week’s “Five To Watch” leads off with someone who has nothing to do with Hendrick Motorsports.
1. KASEY KAHNE, Richard Petty Motorsports. Kahne is the defending 600 winner and has three points-race victories at Lowe’s Motor Speedway, plus a win in last year’s All-Star race. Kahne has had a difficult 2009 season so far, with a best finish of fifth at Bristol. But as he proved here last year, he can go from stone cold to red hot anytime he rolls off at LMS.
And 600 miles doesn’t bother him a bit. “To me it's really no big deal,” Kahne said. “500 miles is a long race. You find that out at Darlington and things like that. But at the end of 500, I was ready to go another 100 at Darlington also.”
2. TONY STEWART, Stewart-Haas Racing. Even before he won the All-Star race, Stewart was the hottest driver in the Sprint Cup Series. In his last six points races this season, “Smoke” has two seconds, two thirds and a fourth. For his career, Stewart has one victory and six top-five finishes at LMS. He should have had a second one last year, but a flat tire with three laps to go wiped out a 5-second lead in the Coca-Cola 600, giving Kahne the victory.
This time, Stewart comes in with no pressure, having far exceeded expectations already. “We didn’t have expectations,” Stewart said. “That was the great thing. We literally sat down and said, ‘We’re going to take it a week at a time, do the best we can each weekend, come back on Monday, talk about what we did right, what we did wrong and see how we can make it better for the next weekend.’ So, we didn’t really set expectations. We’ve come to the racetrack with the attitude that we’re going to try to go out there and win the race. We’re going to the do the best we can, and what we have at the end of that weekend is what we’ve got and we’re going to go home and figure out what we can do to make it better the next week.”
