By: Toby Christie

NASCAR going into this season said that they were going to loosen the reigns, and let the drivers police themselves, and settle confrontations however they see fit… I don’t think they imagined this.

Sunday Carl Edwards went too far. He let his emotions get the best of him, and he put the safety of his fellow drivers and the race fans in jeopardy.

On lap 323 of the race Carl Edwards was on the track for the one reason you are not supposed to be on the track. He didn’t have any position to lose or gain, he plain and simple went out for revenge for an incident earlier in the race on lap 40.

On lap 40 Brad Keselowski made contact with the back of Edwards’ car, which sent Carl into Joey Logano which basically ended any shot at the win for Edwards. Being upset is understandable, but after further review of the incident it seems that Edwards may have been more at fault than anyone in that lap 40 skirmish.

It was the latest incident in a saga that dates back to last year’s Aarons 499 at Talladega where the two made contact which sent Edwards into the catchfence while Keselowski basked in the joys of victory lane.

Lets fast forward back to lap 323 of Sunday’s race. Edwards found himself 156 laps down, and all over the Fourth place car of Brad Keselowski. Rattling Keseloski would have been one thing, but Edwards took the fued to the next level. Coming down the front straightaway Edwards tapped the back quarterpanel of the No. 12 Dodge, which sent it around immediately. From there all hell basically broke loose.

Keselowski’s car flew through the air, flipped upside down and landed on the outside retaining wall. The accident was extremely scary because the part of the car that impacted the retaining wall was the Driver’s cockpit area… Keselowski walked away, and the fans in the stands luckily weren’t injured at all, but this could have very easily been much much different.

Love or hate Keselowski, you can’t deny that he could have easily been killed, and race fans could have been injured and for what reason? So Edwards could settle a score? It was utterly uncalled for and NASCAR had to take immediate action.

NASCAR would call the no. 99 car back to the garage to be parked for the remainder of the event, but the damage was done. Edwards on this day took it too far, and gave a great example of why NASCAR began throwing out rules upon rules upon rules years ago.

No word yet on any further penalties for Edwards, but this will be an intriguing story to watch during the week. However in my opinion forcing Edwards to come to the garage when he was too far behind to gain any positions, is not penalty enough…

By: Toby Christie

Ron Hornaday cut a tire in Saturday’s EZ-Go 200 at Atlanta, which sent him to a 34th-place finish. After two events in 2010 Hornaday sits way back in 28th in points. To put his horrid start in perspective, his car owner Kevin Harvick, who won today’s race, has only ran one race this season and even he sits eight spots higher in the standings than the 2009 champion at 20th.

Ron Hornaday is officially off to the worst start of his NASCAR Camping World Truck Series career, but don’t jump ship on Hornaday just yet.

If I had to count on anyone to make a rally from this kind of start, it would be Hornaday, and it’s simple why. Ron Hornaday is arguably the best Truck Series driver of all-time with four championships and 45 victories on his resume… So he can only stay down for so long.

In 2006, Hornaday’s first year with Kevin Harvick’s team, he started off the season with two finishes outside the top 20, yet he would rally to finish seventh in the overall point standings. Impressive, but what’s even more impressive is that Hornaday’s worst finish in the point standings in a full season in the truck series is seventh. He has finished seventh twice (1999 and 2006). Outside of those two seasons Hornaday has finished the season in the top-five of the rankings every other year he has raced in all of the events.

So excuse me if I don’t sound panicked by Hornaday’s sluggish start, but the stats speak for themselves… Hornaday will eventually get hot, and be right back in the thick of things.

By: DJ DeSpain

Congratulations to Jimmie Johnson, and the entire #48 team, for winning a fourth consecutive NASCAR Sprint Cup Series championship. This is an accomplishment that has never been done before in the 62-year history of NASCAR. Not to take anything from that feat, but did the Chase format give him an additional advantage?

Not really. If anything, the Chase format does more harm than good.

NASCAR set up the Chase format to tighten up the points system after Matt Kenseth’s championship win in 2003, which he won despite having only one race win during the season. The idea was to have more drivers involved in the chance to win the championship by resetting the points among the top 12 (originally 10) drivers after the 26^th race.

While NASCAR’s intent was to intensify the championship chase, in reality all it does is take away the reward for being consistent. No longer is a driver rewarded for being consistent throughout the year with multiple top-10 or top-5 finishes. Instead, the mindset now is that the first 26 races are merely a fancy form of track testing to set up 12 cars for the last 10 races.

The talk this year during race telecasts was the points race towards the end of the season was the closest it had been in awhile. That statement was only true among the top 3 drivers after Texas, but it required Johnson to wreck before that was able to happen!

Looking at the point systems comparison below, it can be shown that the old system was clearly closer than the Chase format.  By not performing a “do over” point reset, Jeff Gordon and Tony Stewart had a better chance of catching Johnson instead of Mark Martin. Going into Homestead, Stewart would have been 17 points behind Johnson in the old point systems format while Mark Martin had 108 points to catch Johnson in the Chase format.

Not only that, Kyle Busch would have finished the season in 9^th position while Brian Vickers drops down to 16^th, which would have been fair given Vicker’s lack of performance during the Chase.

Why would this be important? Sponsor dollars. By arbitrarily locking out teams from the top 12, it hurts the teams that perform well after the 26^th race because the media focuses more on the top 12 teams during the last 10 races. To prepare for 2010 during the off-season, Joe Gibbs Racing, would be able to get more sponsor money by being able to say that Kyle Busch was a top 10 car instead of a top 35 car.

Overall, the other NASCAR race series get by fine without a “do over” points system.  Johnson and his team would have won either way, but at least the old system was fairer to all participants.

By: Lisa DeSpain

If you ask Sprint Cup teams and the powers that be in NASCAR, you will hear that the ban NASCAR put on testing this year has been a win-win situation. An unqualified success. Has it really? To be fair, it has saved teams significant money, and allowed them to work longer on the cars at their home shops in the off season, rather than taking up that time traveling to testing tracks. However, how can you get information on, and a feel for, a track like Atlanta, without testing at Atlanta? When crew chiefs and teams could test on a NASCAR sanctioned track, they got racing data on the tracks they would see later in the season. Not to mention that the drivers got to practice on tracks with which they may have had limited, or no, experience.

I started thinking about the challenges IRL and Formula One drivers face as they come to NASCAR as rookies. There are many differences between driving open wheel cars, and driving Cup cars. Cup cars are heavier and harder to drive. In the IRL, drivers tend to give each other more room because of the fact that the cars can’t take as much punishment as Cup cars. Bump drafting is not something IRL drivers have seen much. Cup races are longer than IRL races, and have much more going on for the drivers and crews. With everything else to which the driver has to adjust, what happens if the race is at a track the driver has never seen? Crew chiefs can only offer so much advice. Experience must handle the rest.

Sam Hornish, Jr. once remarked that at his first race at Bristol, he had one and a half hours of practice before he had to qualify on a track he had never seen. Apparently, he hadn’t had the opportunity to test at Bristol. I remember someone on Raceday, I think it was Kenny Wallace, but please correct me if I’m wrong, saying that it’s taking about three years for these IRL and Formula One drivers to get up to speed. That’s a huge learning curve. Guys who came up in NASCAR back in the day, and as late as last year, had the opportunity to test on every track at which the Cup series races. This year, with the ban on testing at any sanctioned track that has Cup, Nationwide, Truck, or Camping World East or West events, rookies have no way to gain experience with the tracks on which they compete, except by competing.

I’m not knocking the testing ban. It has done what it was designed to do, and allowed teams to save money and have a little more down time in between races. However, in my humble opinion, the testing ban might be doing a disservice to the rookies by not allowing them the chance to get the experience they need on these tracks. Football players practice every day. They run plays hundreds of times, and view films of plays hundreds more. At least the playing field doesn’t fundamentally change from week to week. Every track on which NASCAR competes is idiosyncratic and, unfortunately tracks on which testing is allowed cannot substitute for the real thing.

At one point, NASCAR was entertaining the idea of allowing more practice time for rookies on the competition tracks. Since NASCAR does not check with me before it institutes these policies, I’d like to know if they’ve thought any more about that. I guess I’ll just have to wait for Robin Pemberton’s call. (Thursday’s good for me, Mr. P!) In the meantime guys, just don’t hit Tony Stewart or Dale Earnhardt, Jr., ok?

Please join us on our Facebook page at facebook.rubbingsracing.com to comment on this article.

By: Toby Christie

There once was a day where a pole position was such a prestigious achievement.  For that week you were the driver who laid down the fastest lap.  Back in the day it was a huge deal and a lot of people would pack the grandstands to see who would lay down the fastest lap.

These days it seems the drivers don’t put nearly the effort into qualifying as they used to.  Maybe its because the current qualifying sessions are outdated and now boring, we’ve worked so hard to spice the racing up that we’ve forgotten all about qualifying.

How can we make qualifying more exciting for the fans?  There are three obvious ways to spice up qualifying.

1. Make Sure Qualifying Actually Happens

Five times thus far this season qualifying has been rained out leaving the field to be set by the rule book.  The fact that NASCAR has not decided to make a backup plan to get qualifying in the next day is a huge mistake.

Every time a qualifying session is rained out the points leader starts out front and gets an all but automatic five bonus points to his season totals, while others, who may be faster on the given week, are stuck further in the field.

How can we still qualify if the rain cancels Friday’s session?  Well it is simple…  Push qualifying to bright and early Saturday morning, especially at tracks such as Pocono and Indy where there is no Nationwide race at the track that weekend.

2. Make Qualifying Matter Again

This one will probably never happen because NASCAR loves the top 35 rule, but half of the intrigue of qualifying used to be to see who would go home.  These days however the top 35 in points are guaranteed a spot even if the top 10 fastest cars somehow were lower than 35^th in owner points and that is wrong (Ask Boris Said).

I understand NASCAR created things like the past champion provisional because Richard Petty missed a race once, and they created provisionals to prevent big names from missing the show, but now before qualifying even begins we know over 80 percent of the drivers that will compete Sunday.  This is ridiculous and needs to be changed.

We should also give a few bonus points for the pole, maybe five bonus points for each pole, this would make each driver give it their all every Friday.

3. Shorten Up The Session

At tracks such as Daytona, Talladega, Indianapolis, Pocono, Infineon, and Watkins Glen qualifying takes around two hours, because it takes roughly a minute per lap, per car to get around these tracks, this makes watching paint dry instead sound appealing.

How can we fix this?  Send two to four cars on the track at a time spaced out by 10 to 20 seconds apart. This will cut the session at least in half, and giving fans more than one thing to focus on at a time.  It would be much like the F1 qualifying procedure, except instead of giving a time limit to the group of cars on track we would just give each cars two laps to lay down a quick lap.

In the past few years NASCAR has made huge changes to make races and the point standings more exciting, such as The chase for the cup and the double file restart rule, it is now time for them to address the troubling state of qualifying.

What do you think, give us your feedback on Facebook (facebook.rubbingsracing.com).

By: DJ DeSpain

Four races now into the “Race to the Chase” (and be sure to read my article on that phrase!) and Kyle Busch is out of the top 12 like Tigger on a bouncing binge. Kyle finished Chicagoland and Indy out of the top 30 and his best finish was 7^th at Loudon, the first race of the “Race to the Chase” series. Since Sonoma, he dropped from 9^th place in the standings down to 14^th.

This is a major difference compared to this time last year when he was in 1^st place, 253 points ahead of Dale Earnhardt Jr. after Indianapolis.

Now heading into Pocono, he hopes to get back into the top 12 but this track has never been kind to him. In his nine-race Pocono career, Busch has only two top-10 finishes and five finishes outside the top 20 (including a 43rd-place finish in last season’s June race). In terms of Driver Rating, it is his third-worst track. In terms of average finish, it’s his fourth-worst.

Is his attitude the cause for this recent slump? There are still moments when he will lash out at his team when things are not going his way, such as his overheard comments on the radio at Chicago calling his car a piece of junk. Kyle has never been considered one who plays well with others, being released from the Hendricks organization in 2007 seems to be proof of that alone.

Kyle has been compared to Tony Stewart when Stewart was starting his career and going through the same issues. But Stewart has something Busch doesn’t and that is two championships. Recently though, Kyle Busch claims that he has his temper under control, even joking that he’s following Coach Gibbs’ “playbook on life.” It appears that Kyle is beginning to understand that he has the talent but he has to acknowledge that talent alone can’t get him to the top.

Kyle has to grit his teeth and bite his tongue or else he’ll find himself bounced not only further down from the points but possibly bounced out of another ride.

What do you think, give us your feedback on Facebook (facebook.rubbingsracing.com).

By: Toby Christie

Much like the popular girl who walked the halls of every high school in America, NASCAR seems to love drama.  Much like the girl in high school, they make very little effort to stop the chaos that they start.

On Sunday Juan Montoya led 116 laps out of the 160 that were ran in the Allstate 400 at the Brickyard. It looked as though barring a huge mistake, Montoya would easily coast to his second career victory… Then the unfathomable happened. Montoya was clocked going too fast down pit road. Why would a car so dominate and so fast even chance speeding down pit road during green flag stops? Nothing about it makes any sense.

Juan Montoya who came into the race not wanting wins, but just consistent finishes was very displeased on the radio after the penalty.

“Thanks for screwing my day NASCAR, I hope Mike Helton is listening to this because we got robbed,” Montoya said.

The penalty sent Montoya back to the 12^th position, and he was never able to fight his way back to the front finishing 11^th. Conspiracy theorists immediately lashed out at NASCAR, saying the conclusion we were heading toward was “too boring”.  Not to mention how coincidental that Montoya was wiped out of the equation, while the battle for the win came down to two superstars of the sport (Mark Martin and Jimmie Johnson)

Montoya’s crew chief Brian Pattie held his composure following the disappointment, even finding a silver lining by saying, “The car was fast, I’m proud of my guys and proud of the guys at the shop. We made one error, but I guarantee the 48 and the 5 knew we were here. So we’ll go to Pocono, and we still have to make the Chase.”

Even in keeping his cool nobody can ignore that the penalty was a very controversial call.

Lately it seems NASCAR and controversy go hand-in-hand.  There are always the suspicious “debris cautions” that spice the race up, or the “judgement call” yellow line passes, but would NASCAR deliberately sabotage a driver who is heading to victory?  I honestly think they wouldn’t and all NASCAR has to do to shut the nay-sayers up is let the race telecast display the cars speed heading down pit road.  This is an easy fix to a suddenly huge problem, but NASCAR has shot down this idea in the past…

Are they maybe hiding something? Or is it quite simply that any publicity is good publicity, especially in this weak economy?  One thing is for sure, NASCAR is the ultimate drama queen.

Let us know your thoughts, join us on Facebook and write on our wall, your thoughts (http://facebook.rubbingsracing.com)

By: Lisa DeSpain

I was sort of sad to hear about Michael Waltrip’s semi-retirement next year. I came to NASCAR a little late in life. I’ve only been a fan for about 7 years, so I haven’t been there to witness all the classic rivalries and the winning seasons of some of the great drivers who have become legends.

I’ve never really seen Michael win too many races. I know him more as a commentator than a driver. I used to love Speed Channel’s “Mikey Miked” segments! He’s hilarious, and a lot smarter than most people give him credit for being.

Growing up in it as he has, he knows a great deal about this sport. I have a feeling that he will end up a commentator part time, kind of like what happened with Kyle Petty when he went to a limited driving schedule.

Michael is also a pretty astute businessman. Have you ever seen his race shop? It’s part race shop, part carnival! He has interactive stuff everywhere that really draws the fans in and gets them excited. He actually makes money at his shop by catering to the tourists. Hey, if the fans are coming, you might as well make some money and give them their money’s worth! I thought it was awesome! My husband is rather old-school, and was shocked and appalled that it was more like Disney than NASCAR. I was reminded of P.T. Barnum, and laughed myself silly!

I’m truly sorry for the fans who love to see him race. I agree with those who say that he might be like Mark Martin, and come out of retirement to race more after he gets things squared away on the business side of his teams. Remember, at heart, he’s a racer. That’s what he has done all his life. It’s the family business, so to speak.

He will not be able to stay out of the car for long. You might not see him as much in Sprint Cup, but I’m willing to bet that he might run a few Nationwide races at some point, just to get his racing fix. Nothing is set in stone. Mikey fans, just keep saying to yourself…”Limited Schedule”.

He hasn’t totally shut the door. I’m sorry for his fans, but he is making a great business decision. He has picked up a pretty fine driver in Martin Truex, Jr. for the #56 car, and he has a great crew chief in Bootie Barker. I wish Michael Waltrip Racing much success in 2010.

Joey Logano gets his first Cup victory at New Hampshire Motor Speedway, making him the youngest driver in NASCAR history to win a race in the premier series. Many people have been complaining that he gets this win due to NASCAR calling the race with only a handful of laps left and Jeff Gordon marching towards the front.

My thoughts, get over it. This is not the first time a driver wins a race due to rain, in fact it’s not the first time this year. If Gordon, or better yet, Dale Earnhardt Jr. got a win this way, ending his losing streak, do you think anyone would be complaining then?

Get over it people. NASCAR did nothing different then they have done in the past. I don’t like rain shortened races, but they are a part of the series, and it is in the rule book. If you want to eliminate them, take a page out of the Formula One book and put rain tires on these guys with wipers and let them go.

Congratulations Joey. I expect this won’t be your last victory!

Tony Stewart maneuvered the “Tricky Triangle” and survived the fuel milage gamble to win his first points race as an owner/driver.

This is the first of many that I see in his future. With Rick Hendrick funneling parts to him, and the team he has surrounded himself with, this won’t be the last time we see Smoke in Victory Lane.

I personally think this is great not only for Stewart-Haas Racing, but for NASCAR in general. Long gone have been the days of the owner/driver being able to survive, much less sit in the points lead and have victories under their belts. No, Stewart is reviving legends from the past, most notably and most recently, Alan Kulwicki.

Kulwicki was the last owner/driver to sit in the cat’s bird seat, back in November of 1992. His legacy is one of triumph and accomplishment as he drove the “Underbird” to the Championship with calculating precision. Down to the last lap, he knew exactly where he needed to be in order to take home the big trophy.

We will have to wait and see if Stewart’s magical year will end with the same result. Right now he is sitting pretty, but with today’s “Chase”, there is no telling how the final outcome will look.