Latest Headlines

Comments

Charlie Turner on One and Done: Coke Zero 400
Grand PRIX on Crossed Flags for NASCAR on the Fourth of July
Chris Lacey on Richie Evans vs David Pearson: NASCAR’s 64 Greatest Drivers Match Up
John Douglas Jr. on Richie Evans vs David Pearson: NASCAR’s 64 Greatest Drivers Match Up
Ryan Rantz on Fast Laps: Daytona

Sections

Matt, Jack and The Blick: Oh My!

by Steve Wronkowicz

I am co-host of the syndicated radio show: ON PIT ROW. Charlie likes to call me an "idiot". I'm not an "idiot"; I just prefer not to let the facts get in the way of my opinions.

February 27, 2009 1:15 pm CST 1 Comment

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to our RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

Matt Kenseth will attempt to do what no other NASCAR driver has ever done - win the first three races of a season.

Drew Blickensderfer, Kenseth’s new crew chief has been given a bunch of credit for Kenseth’s 2009 turn around. Of course the fact that Matty drives for one of the preeminent teams in all of NASCAR doesn’t hurt. Jack Roush and Roush-Fenway Racing have fielded top notch race cars in varied forms of motor sports.

Roush got his start in racing fielding pro stock drag racers and winning championships in IHRA, AHRA and NHRA. Roush then took is championship ways to the Trans-Am and IMSA Series and won 24 national championships and 12 manufacturer’s championships before moving to NASCAR with Mark Martin in 1988. His race teams have won two championships in the Cup series with Kurt Bush and Matt Kenseth.

Blickensderfer was a successful crew chief before making the move to the #17 team with Kenseth behind the wheel. Blickensderfer’s first crew chief position came in 2006 when he led driver Danny O’Quinn Jr. to rookie of the year honors in the Nationwide Series. In 2007 Blickensderfer took over as crew chief of the #17 Nationwide car and continued there to began the 2008 season. He then moved over to lead Carl Edwards’ #60 team. Edwards rallied to win seven of the final 19 races–including three of the last four.

Kenseth has 330 starts in the Cup Series and has posted eighteen wins, ninety top fives and 164 top tens to go with his one championship. He has led six percent of the laps he has raced in his twelve seasons, winning over $60 million.

NASCAR is a team sport; argued by some outside the sport, but true none the less. But which part of the team is the most important? Does the car owner, or the car itself, the crew chief or driver hold the biggest hammer when it comes to making a successful team? The Kenseth, Robbie Reiser, Roush combo led to a championship in 2003. Replace Reiser with Chip Bolin in 2008 and the combo couldn’t find victory lane. Move Bolin back to engineer, insert ‘The Blick’ and Matty is on the way to a possible NASCAR record breaking feat.

photo credits: Icon Sports Media

Filed under: Carl Edwards, Kurt Busch, NASCAR, Nationwide Series, On Pit Row The Fastest Two Hours on Radio, Roush Racing, Sprint Cup Series

Tagged with: AHRA, Carl Edwards, Chip Bolin, Drew Blickensderfer, IHRA, IMSA, Jack Roush, Kurt Busch, Mark Martin, Matt Kenseth, NHRA, Robby Reiser, Trans-Am

Digg This | Save to del.icio.us

THA TOAD DUZ VEGAS…”VIVA LOST WAGES” !

by Art Almond, Special To Bench Racing With Steve and Charlie

Awright y'all... I'm tha crazy dude that is known as... "Drawer-Dude" I draw funny pictures of this racin' cartoon character that I created... known as "PIT-ROAD-TOAD! You can see more Toad-Toons at my blog site... RACIN' RUCKUS

February 23, 2009 8:31 pm CST 4 Comments

Hey y’all… we goin’ tahh VEGAS! Can Kenseth do ahh repeat? Can Jr. Keep in his pit box ‘n not blow ahh motor? Can Kyle leave um sittin’? Can Gordon finally prevail? Stay tuned …the saga continues!

The Las Vegas Speedway is known as the “Diamond in the Desert”… however, it has another less official moniker and that is… “House of Roush”! This came from the past success of Roush drivers… Matt Kenseth… Mark Martin…and Jeff Burton.

Some cool facts about this 1200 acre complex are that it has a drag strip known as simply “The Strip”. The Las Vegas Police Department uses the facility for their pursuit and driver training. It is owned by Speedway Motorsports, Inc. The very first Winston Cup victory at the track belongs to non other than Mr. Mark Martin. This accomplishment came in 1998!

I created the cartoon in 1998 to commemorate the opening of the new facility.

Gitcha Sum!

Filed under: Comics, Dale Earnhardt Jr., Hendrick Motorsports, Jeff Burton, Kyle Busch, Mark Martin, Matt Kenseth, Monday Morning Crew Chief, NASCAR, Nascaholics, One and Done NASCAR Fantasy Racing, Pit Road Toad, Roush Racing, Sprint Cup Series

Tagged with: Art Almond, Drawer-Dude, Earnhardt Jr., Jeff Gordon, Las Vegas, Matt Kenseth, Pit Road Toad

Digg This | Save to del.icio.us

Bobby Labonte Searches for Wins with Ask.com

by Charlie Turner

I'm Charlie Turner co-host of the syndicated, mostly NASCAR radio show On Pit Row. Thanks for stopping by OnPitRow.com and the Bench Racing with Steve and Charlie blog. Oh yeah, Steve is an idiot. Follow me on Twitter @onpitrow

January 22, 2009 7:11 pm CST No Comments

Bobby Labonte driving a Ford ? OK. I’m a Labonte fan. At least he’s driving something in the Sprint Cup Series.

Driving a Fusion for Hall of Fame Racing? That doesn’t inspire me much. I am, after all, a J J Yeley fan too and Hall of Shame didn’t do anything for J J ’s career.

But the car will be supported through a hybrid, satellite deal where Hall of Fame’s No 96 will be powered and pitted by Doug Yates’ Racing team, which also seems to mean support from Jack Roush and Roush-Fenway’s Ford factory team.

So given some of the scenarios I’d heard and read about concerning Texas Bobby, driving a car with solid support from one of the best organizations in the sport, is about as good as it could get I guess.

And that car will have full season sponsorship from NASCAR’s new “official seach engine“. Ask.com. Spiffy paint scheme too - flames and everything. He’ll get to debut the Ask.com no 96 Fusion in the Budweiser Shootout at Daytona International Speedway next month.

Maybe Labonte will relax a bit too, now that he isn’t “the Great Petty Blue Hope”.

Filed under: Bobby Labonte, Daytona International Speedway, Hall of Fame Racing, NASCAR, NASCAR Bidness, NASCAR Rumors, Roush Racing, Sprint Cup Series, Yates Racing

Tagged with: Ask.com, Bobby Labonte, Doug Yates, J J Yeley, Jack Roush, NASCAR paint schemes, Yates Racing

Digg This | Save to del.icio.us

How To Fix NASCAR: 3. Three-Car Limit by the End of 2010

by Chris Leone, Special To Bench Racing With Steve and Charlie

If OnPitRow.com was a NASCAR team, I’d be the development driver of the bunch. In the same way that young hotshots like Joey Logano have been driving since they were in grade school, I’ve been following and writing about all forms of motorsports since I was barely old enough to talk.

December 31, 2008 10:57 pm CST 2 Comments

Happy New Year folks, and it’s time for another installment of How To Fix NASCAR. Having already trimmed schedules and fixed NASCAR’s top tier development series, it’s time to ensure that the top levels of American motorsport move away from the elitism of Formula One, by ironically implementing something that that series has had in place for years: a hard cap of three cars per team (per series, seeing as NASCAR has multiple levels and F1 has… well… one).

The issue with a team cap lies in owners’ willingness to undo some of the expansion they have done over the past few years, expansion that many of them (like Jack Roush) can surely sustain. However, the sport is heading more and more in an elitist direction, where the top four or five teams are lightyears ahead of everybody else (like McLaren and Ferrari in F1). That only hurts the sport in the end, by stealing sponsors away from the have-nots: either they’ll sign for fewer races and less money with the haves, or put their money elsewhere.

Roush is already dealing with the elimination of his fifth car, probably Jamie McMurray’s No. 26, by the end of 2009. However, almost all of the other major players in the sport (Hendrick, Childress, Gillett after the merger with Petty, EGR) will still have four cars as well. Joe Gibbs has three, Roger Penske has three, and even Doug Yates is planning on three cars for next season. That’s a total of 30 cars among eight teams. That gives the newcomer a snowball’s chance in hell at signing a good driver, crew, or sponsor.

To limit teams to two cars would be a disaster, and probably turn out just like F1, with Hendrick like the Ferrari team and Roush akin to McLaren. The superteams would be able to shift five cars’ worth of resources and money to the remaining two teams, and we’d see races where only four cars had a reasonable shot at winning. But to limit teams to three cars would provide a fair balance: sure, the rich would shift their incredible resources to make their few teams stronger, but the drivers and crewmembers they released would go to smaller teams and, in turn, make them more competitive.

Let’s use Roush as an example, and assume that they would keep David Ragan, Greg Biffle, and Carl Edwards. McMurray has been rumored to go to Yates in 2010 for a while anyway, but assumedly they would also send over Matt Kenseth in this situation. A Yates team with Kenseth, McMurray, and the steadily improving Paul Menard would have a much better shot at reclaiming the team’s past glory than Menard, Travis Kvapil, and David Gilliland. And with three fully sponsored cars, Roush could concentrate on building up the other struggling Ford team, the Wood Brothers‘ No. 21.

How about the other superpower of the sport, Hendrick Motorsports? Sure, you could say they wouldn’t suffer much, if only Mark Martin ended up leaving the team after 2009. But some other team could certainly use his leadership and skill, and you know he wouldn’t be unemployed for long. Neither would crew chief Alan Gustafson. I’m thinking they’d end up at Stewart Haas, personally - it’s already going to become Hendrick 2.

At RCR, I suppose getting rid of Casey Mears wouldn’t provide too much help to a smaller team, but at least it’d potentially reunite Clint Bowyer with Jack Daniel’s. (I’m sorry, General Mills, but I don’t think anyone sees Clint as a cereal guy.) The only question is, would Mears be any more than damaged goods? Assuming this were to happen, it would be his sixth team in seven years (Ganassi’s No. 41 in ‘05, the No. 42 in ‘06, Hendrick’s No. 25 in ‘07, the No. 5 in ‘08, RCR’s No. 07 in ‘09 and ‘10…). I suppose that at least it proves he’s a commodity, but the guy already has more firesuits in his closet than some teams have won races.

While this wouldn’t have much of an effect on the Camping World Truck Series, it would limit Nationwide Series owners to only running one car for the owners’ championship (see the last installment). Because running a car for the owners’ title would require a minimum of one unshared car to go alongside it, and no less, the three-car teams would have to run two cars for the drivers’ championship, opening up even more spots for development drivers to hone their skills.

So on and so forth down the line, very good (but not spectacular) drivers would be cut from the sport’s most prominent teams, landing on their feet with second-tier teams with much less talent behind the wheel. Those guys would then get bumped down to the third-tier teams, and so on and so forth. Not only would the guys who really don’t deserve their rides disappear, the driving talent, skilled crewmen, and the sponsors would disperse to level out the playing field.

Before anyone says anything: We all know that the only reason the sponsors all flock to the superteams is because current NASCAR rules don’t really limit where they can go. Roush can just create another team in Nationwide or CWTS if a new sponsor wants to join his operation, or sign them for a handful of races with Edwards or Kenseth. Under this system, those spots would vanish pretty quickly. Since many of the companies who want to get involved in racing do so because they feel that NASCAR fans are an important target market, those sponsors will stay in the sport. They’ll just find other teams to work with.

Of course, some of you are still probably asking, “How does this change anything if the top drivers would just go to their old teams’ satellite operations?” By adding a truckload of extra talent and sponsorship dollars to these satellite teams, they find themselves in a situation where they may no longer be so far behind their providers. With a little luck and some decent results, these teams will have the resources to break off and race on their own again.

That’s all for this installment. I’m going to go watch the New Year’s Eve TV specials. See you in two weeks!

Filed under: Earnhardt Ganassi Racing, Gillett Evernham Motorsports, Hendrick Motorsports, Joe Gibbs Racing, NASCAR, Penske Racing, Richard Childress Racing, Robert Yates Racing, Roush Racing, Sprint Cup Series, Stewart Haas Racing

Tagged with: How to fix NASCAR

Digg This | Save to del.icio.us

Tight in Turn Two and Headin’ for the Flag

by Charlie Turner

November 14, 2008 10:03 am CST No Comments

It’s late in the race. The last round of pit stops is done. As always, regardless of where you are in the standings actually, you need every possible place. The car is far from perfect. In fact it’s real tight in turn two. Now what?

The best of the best will make it work. Winning drivers, championship capable winners find the lines that others don’t try. They get the most out of it, and keep the thing off the wall, and other cars. Top crew chiefs will have a tactic to suggest, part of an overall strategy that merely mortal box-toppers fail to find. Elite team owners are like master painters in that they find the perfect mix of disparate hues and blend them into a work of mechanical-performance art. But which part of the masterpiece is the key?

That question is the theme of the Bench Racing blog’s Tight in Turn Two post this week.

Looking at all three major series and picking one individual from all of the drivers, owners, sponsors or crew chiefs, who is your NASCAR Most Valuable Player?

Charlie: Pick one and just one of the above to start your 2009 NASCAR team. How’s that for tough? I’ll take Rick Hendrick. It’s about leadership. He brings the best of the best together, makes sure that they have whatever it takes to be at the top of the NASCAR game. He keeps his teams relatively happy all the while never settling for mediocrity from any of them. And then he’ll gamble to make it all better. Dumping Kyle Busch for Dale Earnhardt Jr. Changing Jeff Gordon’s crew chief. Bringing in Mark Martin and convincing him to return to full-time driving. The best owner in NASCAR is the MVP.

Bruce: I hate second round draft picks. All the good players get snatched up! But let’s play it in your court and I am going to stick with a car owner.. they do make the calls, put the teams together, pull the money in, and support the processes they’ve developed.

So who would I go with? Man, that’s tough. I’ve looked at the top 10 in owners points across the three series, Trucks, Nationwide and Cup. I came up with the inevitable 2nd stable for my choice of the Cat in the Hat, Jack Roush. It’s a pure numbers game, but across all three series, he’s got the breadth of performance. Across all three series his shop has 117 top 10’s, 73 top 5’s, 17 wins. I thought maybe these numbers were skewed because of the number of starts his teams had across all three series, but it broke down to a win every 12 starts, a top 5 every 3 starts and a top 10 every 2 starts. He’s got the edge and focus to see a broader picture and he’s almost got a Cup under his belt this year - but that’s OK if it doesn’t happen this year… I think as they actually come up to speed in the COT, next year will be their year… if Johnson or Ky Busch don’t break out next year and have a better year!!

That’s what we think. What do you think? Let us know in the comment section of this post.

Then head over to - if you haven’t already been there - to Bruce’s NASCAR Bits for Bruce’s topic of the week, which is more of a rant this time. All the better. Bruce isn’t happy about ABC’s decision to preempt the Phoenix Cup race and move the end to cable. That just get’s him started though. Check it out.

With that said, just what informational outlets do we have that don’t inundate us with online ads, or focus on what we really want in the world of NASCAR? Are we being diluted to the point of over-saturation?

Photo credit: Icon Sports Media, Inc.

Filed under: Dale Earnhardt Jr., ESPN, Hendrick Motorsports, Mark Martin, NASCAR & the Media, Nationwide Series, Roush Racing, Sprint Cup Series, Turn 2 posts

Tagged with: Dale Earnhardt Jr., Hendrick Motorsports, Jack Roush, Jeff Gordon, Jimmy Johnson, Mark Martin, Most Valuable Player, NASCAR owners, Rick Hendrick, Tight in Turn Two

Digg This | Save to del.icio.us

Cousin Carl is Good–But Can it Continue

by Steve Wronkowicz

I am co-host of the syndicated radio show: ON PIT ROW. Charlie likes to call me an "idiot". I'm not an "idiot"; I just prefer not to let the facts get in the way of my opinions.

November 3, 2008 10:49 pm CST No Comments

Carl Edwards did what he needed to do again at Texas and gained some ground on Jimmy Johnson.

The problem is whether he was able to gain enough ground to keep his championship hopes alive. There is still a bit over one hundred points separating the two and all JJ has to do is get a couple of seventh place finishes at Phoenix and Homestead to gain his third consecutive title.

Edwards‘ win came on a late race gamble by crew chief Bob Osborne to not take fuel and slow the #99 down to conserve fuel. Cousin Carl had this to say about that decision:

Never had Bob yell at me for going too fast, but he did tonight. I just was so nervous that we were missing something. I thought there’s no way we can go this slow, save this much fuel, and still be leading this race. They did a really great job, though. That was cool. You know, of all the ways you can win a race, fuel mileage isn’t the most exciting one. But we had I believe a dominant car all day. The car was very fast. We got behind on that last pit stop. It was very cool to still win the thing.

The other sub plot from Texa involved a couple of non-Chase drivers. Juan Pablo Montoya and David Gilliland got into a couple of shunts that resulted in Gilliland pulling a full “Scott Speed” on JPM and sent him into the wall at 180mph.

And that leads to this weeks BUZZ ON PIT ROW:

Who are you believing–Montoya’s “He wrecked me” or Gilliland’s “I miscalculated”?

Give us your thoughts and we could use your comments on this week’s ON PIT ROW. You can listen from 5-7pm ET at www.onpitrow.com. Or call us direct at 877-502-8255 and you could win a Kevin Harvick bobblehead if your call is deemed The Shell Gunk Free Call of the Week.

photo credit: Icon Sports Media

Filed under: Carl Edwards, Chase for the Cup, Jimmy Johnson, Juan Pablo Montoya, Kevin Harvick, NASCAR, NASCAR Fantasy Gaming, Roush Racing, Scott Speed

Tagged with: Carl Edwards, david gilliland, Jimmy Johnson, Juan Pablo Montoya

Digg This | Save to del.icio.us

« Previous Articles