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NASCAR Sprint-Cup Series
JENSEN: Expect The Unexpected
Don’t like the way things are in the 2009 NASCAR Sprint Cup season? Hang around. Like the weather on the East Coast, things are changing quickly...
Tom Jensen  |  Posted March 02, 2009   Harrisburg, NC
SPEED.com's Editor-in-Chief Tom Jensen. (Image: SPEED)

Don’t like the way things are in the 2009 NASCAR Sprint Cup season? Hang around. Like the weather on the East Coast, things are changing quickly.

All week long, the pundits were talking about Matt Kenseth’s hopes of becoming the first driver in the 61-year history of NASCAR to open the season with three consecutive victories. Unfortunately for the 2003 NASCAR Sprint Cup champion, his pursuit of the record literally went up in smoke a whopping six laps into the Shelby 427 at Las Vegas Motor Speedway. That’s all the time it took for the engine in his Roush Fenway Racing Ford Fusion to fail in spectacular fashion, one of three team cars to go kaboom on the day.

Kenseth’s failure was but one of several unexpected outcomes on a gorgeous sunny afternoon in Sin City. To wit:

• Bobby Labonte posted his first top-five finish since coming home third at Martinsville in 2006, some 78 races ago. Labonte finished fifth in his Hall of Fame Racing Ford Fusion.

• David Reutimann’s fourth-place run was his best-ever finish in a Cup car.

• Mark Martin’s Hendrick Motorsports Chevrolet Impala SS lost an engine for the second week in a row.

• The other three Hendrick drivers all made critical pit-road blunders, which ended up costing them dearly.

• An exploding left-front tire ripped the left-front fender off Jeff Gordon’s car. Despite that misfortune, he took over the Sprint Cup points lead for the first time since Atlanta on October 28th, 2007, 42 races ago. And he became the seventh driver in NASCAR history to lead 20,000 laps.

• Joey Logano, David Gilliland and Robby Gordon all posted top-15 finishes. Jimmie Johnson, Carl Edwards, Denny Hamlin and Tony Stewart didn’t.

• Speaking of Edwards, last year he won three of the final four races. This year, he has led a total of just three laps in the first three races.

• Not a single Cup driver has three top-10 finishes.

• And, most significantly, Kyle Busch started from the tail end of the Las Vegas grid because of an engine change, but managed to drive through the field to score his first Cup victory since Watkins Glen last August.


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