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CUP: Sunday Kansas Notebook
Written by: Ben Blake   http://www.racer.com
10/01/2006
Kansas City, Kan.
 


Spins abounded in the slick Kansas track - here, Ryan Newman almost takes out "chasers" Burton, Harvick and Gordon. (LAT Photo) ยป More Photos

Heat, a rock-hard Goodyear tire set and a tricky sealant in seams in the pavement brought half a dozen single-car spins in Sunday's Banquet 400 at Kansas Speedway, most of them in Turn 4.

The temperature, as predicted rose to 94deg, 2deg above the record for the date, making the track slick and the handling chancy. The temperature was 60deg during qualifying Friday and not much warmer during Saturday morning's final practice.

Whatever the reasons, Robby Gordon, Ryan Newman (twice), Reed Sorenson, David Gilliland, Elliott Sadler, Denny Hamlin and hometown favorite Clint Bowyer looped their cars in the fourth turn. Because the field stayed largely spread out around the track most of the day, there was seldom any danger of involving other cars.

Turn 4 was most costly to Bowyer, who had 43 of the 267 laps before spinning o Lap 172. Bowyer, the only NASCAR driver from Kansas, had been the subject of much attention this weekend and was hoping for a better day. He did come back to finish ninth, with a slightly damaged car.

"[Scott] Riggs kind of took my line and made me run whre I didn't want to run," Bowyer admitted. "I was too loose to run high, and I was trying to make something work that I knew better, and I paid for it."

Hamlin, second in points, spun on Lap 153 after running as high as eighth. Hamlin, second in points, finished 18th but maintained second in points, with many of the rest of the playoff contenders also experiencing trouble at the end.

Why Turn 4? "The tire, in my opinion, was too hard, and you had to loosen your car up," said Mark Martin, who finished third. "It had a real huge swing [in handling] from being full of gas to empty gas, so you had to start out ridiculous loose.

"Then there were the tar strips. I almost crashed early in the race up there because the tar strips were slick. Later in the race, I don't think they were as slick, but I never ran across them again. I just stayed away from them."

Winner Tony Stewart more or less agreed.
"The seams were a little bit tough today, and it wasn't because of the transitions in the seam, it was just the material that they use,- whether it's a caulking or whatever it is.

"When it got hot, it got really slippery, so you had to be really careful every time you transitioned across those seams. Other than that, it about bit us three or four times."

Several teams reported trouble in making their cars handle, for whatever reasons. Most puzzled seemed to be the teams of two of the playoff contenders, Matt Kenseth and Kevin Harvick.

Kenseth, struggling to find traction through three playoff races, was pretty awful all day. Kenseth, who finished 23rd, puttered in the 20s most of the afternoon, making multiple pit stops in attempts to correct the problems.

"I probably drove about 800 miles, but I don't know what we had wrong," he said, still puzzled. "They changed everything on it today. The car was real good in the tunnel, it was aligned right, but it was terrible loose all day. No matter what we changed, it didn't fix it.

"I'm real proud of my guys. I think they changed tires about 20 times and moved the rear end and set the toe-in and did all kinds of stuff, so they did a great job. We just didn't have it."

Harvick could not get the right feel either. He would gain with fast pit stops or two-tire stops, then drop back into the 20s. He ended up 15th and stands fifth in points.

He was lucky at the start, barely missing Newman's first spin on Lap 11. That cost him a lot of track position, and nothing he could do would put him back in the running.

"I blame it more on track position than anything else," crew chief Todd Berrier said.

"The pace was just so slow today, so much slower than it was yesterday. The car was totally terrible. We had to change the right rear spring to stiffen it way up. We doubled the rate a bit, moved some stuff and changed just a million things to get it better. Not what you want to do, but obviously we had to do it."
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