NASCAR Sprint-Cup Series
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CUP: McMurray’s Bi-Polar Season Continues
Jamie McMurray won his fourth NASCAR Sprint Cup Series pole of the season Friday at Auto Club Speedway...
Tom Jensen  |  Posted October 09, 2010   Charlotte, NC
Jamie McMurray has endured a tough start to 2011. (Photo: LAT Photographic)
Jamie McMurray won’t win the NASCAR Sprint Cup championship this year, but he may set the record for most bi-polar season ever.

McMurray, the pole-winner for Sunday’s Pepsi Max 400 at Auto Club Speedway, has has a 2010 season that quite frankly defies easy description. To wit:

HIGH - Race No. 1: Winner, Daytona 500.
LOW - Race No. 3: 34th, Las Vegas.
LOW - Race No. 4: 29th, Atlanta.
LOW - Race No. 6: 30th, Martinsville.
LOW - Race No. 8: 30th, Texas.
HIGH - Race No. 9: 2nd, Talladega.
HIGH - Race No. 11: 2nd, Darlington.
LOW - Race No. 12: 32nd, Dover.
HIGH - Race No. 13: 2nd, Charlotte.
LOW - Race No. 14: 36th, Pocono.
LOW - Race No. 18: 39th, Daytona.
HIGH - Race No. 20: Winner, Indianapolis.
HIGH - Race No. 24: 3rd, Bristol.
HIGH - Race No. 27: 3rd, New Hampshire.

Add it all up and it’s a body of work that’s both impressive and erratic. McMurray acknowledged as much after winning his fourth pole of the year Friday at ACS.
VIDEO: Cup Qualifying - Fontana Jamie McMurray captures the pole at ACS. (Image: SPEED)

McMurray’s early season struggles mean that he didn’t make the cut for the 12-driver Chase for the Sprint Cup, despite the fact that four of the Chase drivers are winless and two others have won just one race each this season.

“Honestly, when it was 10 guys in the Chase, I was the 11th guy like two years in a row,” said McMurray. “Then they made it 12 and I was like, ‘This is great.’ Now I was the 14th guy.”

The problem was that all the poor early season finishes more than offset the big race victories.

“It’s all about being consistent and unfortunately for us at the beginning of the year, we had really fast cars, but we just weren’t consistent enough,” said McMurray. “We’ve got that consistency now. It seems like every week, on our bad day, we run 15th which is still pretty good.”

Asked if he favored a wild card Chase entry for the driver who wins the most races, McMurray was ambivalent.

“I don’t know if they need to make any changes,” he said. “It’s the same for everybody. If they want to have a wild card, I don’t think anyone would have an issue with that. I don’t know that 10 years ago anyone would have thought that we would have had a playoff system. I guess you just never know.”

Tom Jensen is the Editor in Chief of SPEED.com, Senior NASCAR Editor at RACER and a contributing Editor for TruckSeries.com. You can follow him online at twitter.com/tomjensen100 and e-mail him at Jensen is the author of “Cheating: The Bad Things Good NASCAR Nextel Cup Racers Do In Pursuit of Speed,” and has appeared on numerous television and radio shows. Jensen is the past President of the National Motorsports Press Association and an NMPA Writer of the Year.

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