February 5, 2009
By Doug Demmons
NASCAR fans have been longing for more competitive races, for someone other than a Hendrick/Roush/Gibbs/Childress driver to win.
They want to cheer Cinderella Jones and the underfunded car he bought at a fire sale from a defunct team as he powers to the front past factory-sponsored, wind-tunnel-perfected behemoths driven by spoiled pretty boys who never raced on dirt.
Well, be careful what you wish for. You might just get it this year.
Or something vaguely resembling it.
There is a whole new crop of Sprint Cup teams and drivers itching to take advantage of a crack in the heretofore impenetrable castle walls built around NASCAR’s elite teams. With so many teams having been weeded out by the cratering national economy, opportunity has presented itself.
There are at least 15 new teams approved for competition by NASCAR in the Sprint Cup Series. These are not multi-million dollar conglomerates whose drivers shuttle to races in King Air jets. These guys are gamblers rolling the dice at the NASCAR craps table and hoping for a seven.
These teams bought some cars from a team that folded, signed an engine deal with someone else, found a vacant building around Charlotte and hired some of the hundreds of unemployed crew members willing to work for peanuts.
All they need to do now is make a big splash somewhere so they can attract a big-name sponsor and make the gamble pay off.
This is where the more competitive racing comes in -- maybe.
These teams do not have all season to fine-tune their operations. They cannot spend week after week learning how to squeeze a tenth of a second more in speed here and there.
Neither can the established drivers starting the year in underfunded cars with only a handful of races guaranteed -- guys like AJ Allmendinger at Richard Petty Motorsports or Aric Almirola at Earnhardt-Ganassi.
These guys need to run up front in a hurry. Time is of the essence. If the best they do is finish 35th they won’t be around for Homestead.
So you’re likely to see some drivers letting it all hang out, so to speak. And the most likely place for one of them to succeed is at one of the restrictor-plate races at Daytona and Talladega.
Talladega, especially, is the sort of track where Scott Riggs driving for the new Tommy Baldwin Racing or Jeremy Mayfield in the new team he co-owns, can easily win the pole. The pole at Talladega last April was won by Joe Nemechek in a Furniture Row car that did little else the rest of the year.
But at Talladega the top 35 teams don’t worry about qualifying. They worry about race set-ups. So the little guys go to qualifying built for speed and power just to get into the race.
Once you’re in the race and you find some drafting partners anything can happen -- and frequently does. Talladega gave Paul Menard his career-best finish last year, so don’t be shocked if Almirola wins that race with one of those Earnhardt-Childress engines that Menard and Regan Smith drove to the front last October.
Or maybe one of them will pull out a third-place finish at Atlanta or a top 5 at Las Vegas. Stranger things have happened.
Call it The Year of Living Dangerously.
Doug Demmons is a writer and editor for the Birmingham News ~ he writes daily and weekly auto racing columns ranging from NASCAR to open wheel to Formula One, local tracks and more... you can read Doug's columns online at Blog of Tommorow
The thoughts and ideas expressed by this writer or any other writer on Insider Racing News, are not necessarily the views of the staff and/or management of IRN.
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