Matt Kenseth came into the sport under the mentorship of Mark Martin and the two seem more and more similar every year. Kenseth is now a 10-year veteran and one of the most-respected drivers in the garage. He’s had disagreements with drivers in his younger days but those rough edges have long been polished. Kenseth is still competing and it wouldn’t be a surprise to see his son, Ross Kenseth, join the Roush stable when he turns 18 to bring us the latest father-son pairing in NASCAR.

What Kenseth lacks in flash he makes up for in tenacity. Before Kevin Harvick took the label Kenseth was often NASCAR’s best closer. How many people remember Kenseth finished 5th in the final points standings last year? Exactly. We haven’t seen the last of the fast Crown Royal #17 in victory lane this year.

Fantasy Pick’Em: 2010 Kobalt Tools 500

by Chris Leone, Special To NASCAR commentary and driver pictures, 2012 NASCAR schedule, video, Bench Racing With Steve and Charlie

I do weekly Fantasy Pick'Em columns here at OPR, as well as the occasional opinion and analysis piece. I also provide the IZOD IndyCar Series coverage. For more on that, head to my site, OpenWheelAmerica.com. My Twitter handle is @christopherlion.

November 11, 2010 12:09 pm UTC No Comments

The penultimate round of this year’s Sprint Cup Series season comes at Phoenix International Raceway. The Kobalt Tools 500 comes after a wild race at Texas that saw one Chaser flip off an official, two mild-mannered Chasers get into a fight, and Jimmie Johnson somehow lose the points lead to a determined Denny Hamlin.

Lucky for Johnson that Phoenix is up next. While Hamlin has a top five finish in half of his career Phoenix starts, Johnson has an eye-popping 4.9 average finish at the track. It’s augmented by 12 top-10s, and four wins (including the win in this race last year), in 14 starts. It’s one of the best records ever for any given driver at any particular track.

The statistics seem to say that Phoenix is a Hendrick Motorsports track, as the top three active drivers are Johnson, Mark Martin, and Jeff Gordon. So, for once in the Chase, I’m going to go on a limb and pick a non-Chase driver as my lead pick, seeing as I’ve already picked Johnson and Gordon in the past eight weeks, and both may be negatively affected by their crew swap this weekend.

That’s right – Martin’s my fantasy pick for the weekend. It’s really not hard to bet against a guy who hasn’t finished outside the top 20 at a track since his debut there, and that’s the case with Martin. In particular, he hasn’t finished worse than fourth at the track with Hendrick, winning in the spring race last year.

Martin has also picked it up in the Chase, finishing no worse than 14th since Dover and scoring a runner-up finish at Martinsville. Last week’s race at Texas yielded a third-place finish. The team has momentum on its side.

My second pick of the weekend is Jeff Burton, another ex-Jack Roush driver whose stock has been pretty high at Phoenix even after leaving the flagship Ford stable. He had a 25th place finish at the track in the spring, but before that, you would have had to go all the way back to 1996 to find a Burton finish outside the top 15.

Of course, Burton’s been in the news recently for a different reason – putting Gordon in the catchfence while under caution last week and then getting fought afterwards. It made for great TV, but it’s not exactly the kind of thing that gives a guy momentum heading into the final two races of the season.

My third and final pick of the week – the dark horse selection – is, after much deliberation, Juan Pablo Montoya. Montoya’s Phoenix debut ended in an auspicious 33rd place run, and he struggled at the track early in his career, contributing to a middling 17.1 average finish in seven starts.

But in his past two runs, Montoya’s made great strides. This time last year, he placed eighth. In the spring of this year, he led 104 laps, including most of the middle of the race, to finish a solid fifth. No, he doesn’t dominate the track like Johnson, but would he really be a dark horse then?

Fantasy Pick’Em: 2010 AAA Texas 500

by Chris Leone, Special To NASCAR commentary and driver pictures, 2012 NASCAR schedule, video, Bench Racing With Steve and Charlie

I do weekly Fantasy Pick'Em columns here at OPR, as well as the occasional opinion and analysis piece. I also provide the IZOD IndyCar Series coverage. For more on that, head to my site, OpenWheelAmerica.com. My Twitter handle is @christopherlion.

November 4, 2010 4:16 pm UTC No Comments

Tony Stewart practicing at Pocono

After everybody with a legitimate title shot managed to survive Talladega, the top three in points are now separated by under 40 points. Jimmie Johnson maintains the lead over second-place Denny Hamlin and third-place Kevin Harvick, but the margins are slim enough that anything can happen. Any of the three could come into the final two races of the year with the points lead.

Of course, they’re, by extension, the best three fantasy bets this weekend. But where’s the fun in that? Let’s make some interesting picks. I’m going to cut down from five to three this week, seeing as I just eliminated the three best available choices anyway.

My personal pick for the weekend is Tony Stewart, who somehow I have managed to avoid thus far during the Chase. Perhaps that’s been a good call – he’s had terrible luck in the Chase ever since the final two laps of the Loudon event. He has little momentum to build off of from the past few races as he lingers in the bottom half of Chase points.

But Smoke’s Texas results tell a decidedly different story. Though his peak years at the track came in 2005 and 2006, as he led double-digit laps in every event and won the fall 2006 race, he showed some muscle this spring by leading 74 laps from the pole before a late race crash eliminated any hopes of victory.

If Smoke’s bad luck is a turn-off, though, don’t forget about Mark Martin, whose 12.8 average Texas finish is fourth best of active drivers. That’s especially remarkable considering that in two of the first three Texas events ever held, Martin finished 34th or worse; however, he did win the other one, the 1998 event.

One of four drivers to run in all 19 Texas events held thus far, Martin has 10 other top-10 runs to back up that 1998 victory. Five of them have come in the past seven Texas events. And while Martin has only led three laps at the track since the spring of 2006, he’s shown the ability to keep the car out of trouble and close enough to the front to score plenty of points.

Finally, if you’re looking for a potential surprise pick, consider Martin Truex Jr. and his solid 13.9 average finish at Texas. Only two times in 10 starts has he failed to finish in the top 15, and in one of those events he led laps before his engine gave out. No, it’s not the most orthodox pick, but with only three races left in the season, who expects anything to play out predictably?

Fantasy Pick’Em: Air Guard 400

by Chris Leone, Special To NASCAR commentary and driver pictures, 2012 NASCAR schedule, video, Bench Racing With Steve and Charlie

I do weekly Fantasy Pick'Em columns here at OPR, as well as the occasional opinion and analysis piece. I also provide the IZOD IndyCar Series coverage. For more on that, head to my site, OpenWheelAmerica.com. My Twitter handle is @christopherlion.

September 9, 2010 6:42 am UTC No Comments

This is it – we’re down to the final race of the Sprint Cup Series regular season, the Air Guard 400 at Richmond International Raceway. For those of you who want to hang out during this weekend’s live blog at Bleacher Report, I’ll be in charge, so feel free to stop by and enjoy yourself.

There’s usually a bit of drama in this race every year as the final drivers to make it into the Chase settle in. But Greg Biffle needs only to finish 42nd to be guaranteed in, while Clint Bowyer’s magic number is 28th. Don’t expect a surprise move by Jamie McMurray to make it (even though it appears that every time we don’t expect him to perform well, he does).

So who looks good for this weekend’s race?

My pick for the weekend is Kyle Busch, because not picking him at Richmond is to bet on the snowball in hell. True, he only has two wins in 11 starts, but nine top five finishes? Zero finishes off the lead lap? Over ten percent of a possible 4410 laps spent in front? Come on.

I suppose Mark Martin, based on his recent performance and the unlikely chances of him making this year’s Chase, can be considered a dark horse, right? Martin’s got 27 top-10s in 49 Richmond starts. Ironically, a 46-point penalty accrued lone win at Richmond, in 1990, was the difference between winning and losing that year’s championship to Dale Earnhardt.

Three more, to substantiate the column and make your fantasy prospects that much more interesting:

Clint Bowyer’s never finished worse than 18th at Richmond, making his Chase prospects look pretty good (well, on a “making it in” basis). True, finishing 12th four times isn’t wildly impressive, with his spring 2008 win his only top five finish at the track. But he gets the job done, at the very least, and that makes him a solid pick.

If Bowyer stumbles, though, and Jamie McMurray can’t pull off a Chase shocker, look for Ryan Newman to do everything he can to play the spoiler. Newman’s got 11 top-10s in 17 Richmond starts, marked by a win in this race in 2003. Be wary, though – Newman has finished better in the spring Richmond race than the fall one in each of the past six years.

Finally, if you want a true left-field pick, have a look at Marcos Ambrose. He’s got two finishes of 11th or better at Richmond. In a way, Richmond is a lot like the V8 Supercar circuits that Ambrose conquered down in Australia, featuring sharp turns with a lot of heavy braking. He’s no championship threat, but he can surprise with a decent finish. (By the same token, so, too, might Mattias Ekstrom, the Red Bull driver who has made a name for himself as the DTM touring car champion in Germany.)