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NASCAR

With Daytona over, NASCAR has more routine week in Calif.

By SceneDaily.com

Feb 19, 2009

With the fireworks that restrictor-plate racing at Daytona International Speedway can bring behind them for a while, the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series drivers are setting their sights on a more normal race weekend.

This weekend, they enjoy a more typical three-day outing at Auto Club Speedway, site of Sunday’s Auto Club 500. The 2-mile track in Fontana, Calif., offers more of the style of racing that will dominate the season and offers teams a chance to measure themselves against one another more realistically.

The 1.5- and 2-mile tracks are the heart of the racing schedule and those which a team must master if it is going to win a championship.

Roush Fenway Racing’s Carl Edwards won this event a year ago and has an average finish of 6.67 at the track. Joe Gibbs Racing’s Kyle Busch earned his first Cup win there in 2005, but he hasn’t had as much fortune in the time since.

Busch says that it’s a difficult place to handle.

“It’s really a hard race track to get hold of, now, especially when it’s hot and the sun is out,” Busch says. “There are two completely different types of racing when you run the top versus the bottom groove. You can run from the top to the bottom, but when you run the bottom, you really feel like you’re puttering around the race track.

“You feel like you aren’t making up any time on the bottom, but when you are running the top groove, you feel like you’re getting the job done. The guys who run the bottom have a little bit more patience and handle it better than the guys who are on the gas on top.”

The problem, says Dale Earnhardt Jr.'s crew chief Tony Eury Jr., is that the track is really flat and has no grip. He says it’s hard to get the car to handle over the full course of the race – and that doing so will be the key to winning this weekend.

In addition, teams view this as the first racing they will get to do this season when they see how they measure up to the competition. Because of the nature of restrictor-plate racing, Daytona offers events where drivers are dependent on one another – and where large crashes often mar the action.

Auto Club Speedway is different. Its significance in heightened by the fact that there was no preseason testing this year at tracks that host races in the NASCAR Sprint Cup, Nationwide, Truck, East and West series. Therefore, this is the first look teams will get at one another in these type of racing conditions.

That is something they are all anticipating heading into the race weekend.

“We run at California and Las Vegas back to back, and they’re both big race tracks,” Richard Childress Racing’s Clint Bowyer says. “You have to be good at that style of track or you’re going to get behind the eight ball pretty quick. These two races will give us a good sense of where we’re going to stack up against the competition.”