According to SPEEDtv.com's Tom Jensen, the weather combined with poor decisions by NASCAR, empty seats and boring racing made for a forgettable weekend...
Tom Jensen
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Posted February 26, 2008
Harrisburg, N.C.
The jet dryers were out on the track several times attempting to get the Auto Club 500 in on Sunday. (Harry How/Getty Images Photo)
Brutal. Just brutal.
There isn’t any other way to describe this past weekend at Auto Club Speedway in Southern California. Rains, poor decisions by NASCAR, tens of thousands of empty seats and the usual quality of racing – boring – at the 2-mile Southern California track made for an utterly forgettable weekend.
We left Rockingham behind for this?
What made the sorry excuse of a weekend at California even harder to swallow was the knowledge of how good NASCAR racing can be, something fans were reminded of just a week earlier at the most spectacular Daytona Speedweeks in recent memory, a weekend that had all the elements California lacked: An upset winner, tense competition, great storylines and some fine racing.
Don’t worry, I’m not going to yammer on about how bad the California weekend was for the whole column — if you watched the races, you know what I’m talking about — but since the weekend has pretty much alienated the few loyal NASCAR fans left in Southern California, it’s time for some big changes.
Moving the date away from the rainy season would help, but so would rebuilding the track to create a configuration that made for more compelling on-track action. How about turning California into another Richmond, a 0.75-mile track big enough to race on without cautions every 20 laps, but small enough to foster tight racing?
Hey, if Bruton Smith can spend a few hundred million dollars for extreme makeovers at Las Vegas, Infineon and Atlanta, the France family, who has more money than God, can afford to make Auto Club Speedway into a great track and not an embarrassment.
‘Nuff said.
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As for the NASCAR season so far, the balance of power doesn’t appear to have shifted radically. The top five finishers in Southern California on Monday were Roush Fenway, Hendrick, Hendrick, Gibbs and Roush Fenway cars combined to lead 226 of 250 laps. These three teams have controlled the sport for more than a decade and I don’t see that changing much, Penske’s 1-2 finish at Daytona notwithstanding.
Although it’s still very early in the season, one team that does seem as if it’s vastly improved for 2008 is Gillett Evernham Motorsports, which suffered through a dreadful 2007 season amidst ownership changes for both the team and Dodge’s parent company. Kasey Kahne’s improved mood and consecutive top-10 finishes suggests he’s much happier with his cars this year than he was last year.
Speaking of happy, no one seems to be having more fun this year than Kyle Busch, who leads both the NASCAR Sprint Cup and Craftsman Truck Series points and is second in Nationwide points as well. “The Shrub” wants to make a point this year, that point being that Hendrick Motorsports made a mistake in kicking him to the curb in favor of Dale Earnhardt Jr.
Although it’s way too early to make a call as to who got the better of that deal, this may actually be a rare instance where both teams benefited. Earnhardt’s move from Dale Earnhardt Inc. to Hendrick got him onto a team that provided him with both competitive equipment and a functional family atmosphere, while Joe Gibbs Racing is used to dealing with high-strung drivers. For Busch, being freed from the button-down atmosphere at Hendrick might be a better fit for him. Time will tell.
Not surprisingly, Toyota’s fortunes have improved substantially since signing JGR, but Tony Stewart said after Monday’s race that the team has detuned its motors slightly in order to ensure reliability. Expect them to pick it up as the season goes on.
So now it’s on to Las Vegas, a better track, and hopefully better weather and better racing. See you there.
Tom Jensen is the Senior NASCAR Editor 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 numerous television and radio shows to discuss NASCAR racing. Jensen is the President of the National Motorsports Press Association.
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