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NASCAR Sprint-Cup Series
JENSEN: Back At It
What better way to get back to NASCAR Sprint Cup Series racing than with the Allstate 400 at the Brickyard?...
Tom Jensen  |  Posted July 20, 2009   Charlotte, NC
SPEED.com's Editor-in-Chief Tom Jensen. (Image: SPEED)
It was nice having a week with no NASCAR Sprint Cup race, but now it’s time to get back at it, and what better way than with the Allstate 400 at the Brickyard?

Mercifully, it appears Goodyear has solved the tire problems that turned last year’s race into a fiasco, so I’m expecting an exciting event this year. Points leaders Tony Stewart and Jeff Gordon both grew up in Indiana, Stewart a native and Gordon a transplant who spent his formative years wheeling sprint cars throughout the Midwest. Stewart’s teammate Ryan Newman is a Hoosier, too, making it three Indiana drivers in the top seven in Sprint Cup points.

If you’re a racing fan and you’ve never been to Indianapolis Motor Speedway, you definitely need to put it on your bucket list and make it out there. The track is 100 years old and it feels like it. Every time I walk into IMS, I get the same kind of shivers that I get from walking into Wrigley Field or Fenway Park. It’s a place where the history and tradition practically oozes up out of the track surface. This, folks, is the real deal.

Hopefully, we’ll be in for a great race this week. Almost certainly, it will be a quantum leap over last year’s debacle.

The Indiana connection, I suspect, will be the biggest storyline of the week. Can Gordon win a fifth Brickyard, Stewart a third or Newman his first?

Here are some other things I’ll be keeping an eye on this week:

1. Which Kyle Busch shows up? Will we see the unstoppable Busch who has won or finished second in the last seven NASCAR Nationwide Series races, or will we see the Busch who hasn’t finished better than sixth in his last nine NASCAR Sprint Cup starts? Without doubt, the folks at Joe Gibbs Racing put the off-week to good use and that Busch and the No. 18 crew will come out on fire at the Brickyard.

It would not surprise me at all if this is the week when Busch gets back on track in the Cup series in a big way. That said, if he has another awful week like he had in Chicago, I think the team is in deep trouble.

2. Will Roush Fenway Racing finally get untracked? Historically, the Brickyard hasn’t been one of Roush Fenway Racing’s best tracks, or one of Ford’s best tracks, either. In fact, in the first 15 runnings of the Brickyard 400, Fords have only won three times, the most recent coming a full decade ago, when Dale Jarrett won this event for the second time in 1999.

Roush Fenway hasn’t won a single Sprint Cup race since Matt Kenseth swept the first two races of the season at Daytona and Southern California. They are seriously due to win a race, and soon. This would be an excellence place for a reversal of fortunes.

3. What about Mark Martin? The ageless Martin has had a truly bi-polar season, with a series-high four race victories, but six finishes of 31st or worse. Martin’s renaissance has been enjoyable to watch, but his up-and-down finishes have resulted in him bouncing in and out of the top 12 in points in recent weeks.

With only seven races left until the field is set for the Chase for the Sprint Cup, Martin can ill-afford another bad run this weekend, especially given that he’s just 11 points ahead of 13th-place Greg Biffle.

4. Can Jimmie Johnson continue his recent dominance? For the first few years of his career, Indy was one of Johnson’s worst tracks, a place he struggled mightily to get around at. Then, all of sudden, it seemed as though the light bulb went off and Johnson won the Brickyard 400 in 2006 and again last year.

If you want to be the man you’ve got to beat the man, and until someone proves otherwise, the three-time defending Sprint Cup champion is the man. Look for him to be good again this weekend.

5. Is there an upstart winner out there? One of the very best things about this season is that the fact that already there have been three first-time winners: Brad Keselowski at Talladega, David Reutimann at Lowe’s and Joey Logano at New Hampshire.

Looking at the top 25 in NASCAR Sprint Cup points, there’s only one driver in that group who is winless for his Cup career: Marcos Ambrose. Without question, Ambrose will win a race before too long, possibly before this season ends. The Brickyard would be a heck of a place to score his first victory.

See you all at Indy.

The opinions reflected herein are solely those of the above commentator and are not necessarily those of SPEEDtv.com, FOX, NewsCorp, or Speed Channel

Tom Jensen is the Editor in Chief for SPEEDtv.com, the former Executive Editor of NASCAR Scene and a contributing Editor for TruckSeries.com. He is the author of “Cheating: The Bad Things Good NASCAR Nextel Cup Racers Do In Pursuit of SPEED,” and has appeared on television and radio shows to discuss NASCAR racing. Jensen is the past President of the National Motorsports Press Association. Jensen is the 1997 National Motorsports Press Association Writer of the Year and has won numerous national and state awards for news reporting, columns and feature writing. The Answer Man is back at SPEEDtv.com. Tom Jensen answers your questions during every race week and looks forward to hearing from you - please e-mail it to



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