Texas Rain, Thompson Race
The opening weekend of April saw rain plague NASCAR’s weekend at Texas Motor
Speedway while bright sunshine and somewhat chilly temperatures greeted the
opening of the Featherlite Modified Series at Thompson, CT. With the sunshine up
north, the action was there for all in attendance.
Among those running in the Icebreaker’s Mod Tour feature were a couple of
names from NASCAR’s big league past. In 2001 Roush Racing selected Chuck
Hossfeld for one of their Craftsman Trucks, but by halfway through last year
Hossfeld was gone from the team. At Thompson Hossfeld turned up in Bob
Garbarino’s Mystic Missile #4 and finished a respectable eighth.
Dating back a lot further in NASCAR history is Ken Bouchard, the 1988 Winston
Cup rookie of the year. Kenny runs a racing school and occasionally competes in
Grand National North and the Mod Tour. This weekend Kenny turned up in the #91
Mod and finished 24th after another car did a slide job and clipped his nose,
damaging his handling, and also after a rock smashed his windshield – and given
that the windshield is clear thick-ply plastic of excellent strength, it was an
exceptionally hard hit by that rock. Kenny nonetheless felt good about being
able to race again and will turn up at Stafford at the end of April.
Jerry Marquis ultimately won in the Boehler Racing Chevrolet, but the
uniforms on the crewmen gave away what Jerry confirmed in the post-race
interview – the #3 Mod will become a Dodge. Throw in the strong Fords of
Stafford grad Todd Szegedy and "Polish Paver" Charlie Pasteryak that
started in the front row and led much of the day, and one can see a major shift
in the marques of choice in the Mod Tour, as well as in WRS short tracking with
the growing number of Taurus short trackers turning up.
Also in action was TV Tim Deroin, still working cameras for TNN – this even
though it is no longer The Nashville Network of Lorianne Crook-Charlie Chase
fame; TV Tim works Monster Truck events for TNN and also does Boston sports
coverage. TV Tim didn’t have a good day, finishing last, but he’ll also be back
when he can.
The race itself was an interesting affair, as such events tend to be. The
Tour doubles up the leaders on restarts in the event’s first half, and with
several cautions in that span the lead changed hands several times as a result.
The big moment came after 92 laps. Ted Christopher gagged while passing
Marquis and Eddie Flemke – sporting sponsorship from Ron Bouchard’s Auto Stores,
an appropriate action by the 1981 Talladega 500 winner – dove underneath; they
both promptly crashed out of the lead. Terrible Ted still finished seventh. He
was driving his own #13 Chevy after Gary Cretty sold his team to Rene Dupuis, a
rather surprising development for one of the strongest teams the Tour had seen
in years, both in its 1999 title with Tony Hirshman and in its 2000-1 runs with
Teddy and in Mike Stefanik’s one-off Thompson run in a Cretty Dodge in 2000.
Teddy shook off the Tour finish, jumped into his SK Chevy, and finished third
in the SK-class feature won wire to wire by Chuck Docherty.
The other big moment of the Tour feature was the crash between Todd Ceravolo,
subbing for Mike Ewanitsko in the #17, and Wade Cole’s #33; Ceravolo smashed
into Cole near Turn Three and wound up on his hood.
In all, while noticeably calmer than last October, Thompson lived up to its
name by breaking the ice.
Meanwhile in Texas, rain postponed matters until Monday, and NASCAR may be
thinking of harsher penalties after Matt Kenseth changed engines, started last
as a result, and won. That’s the second time this year this has happened, and no
doubt teams are looking at that and thinking, "we’d better burn up our
engine on Saturday and get a fresh one for Sunday." NASCAR had better act
now and put a stop to it.
Passing was somewhat easier than expected, but that’s not saying much at a
track that has never hosted a memorable stock car race in its six seasons. The
work the track undertook to carve out a higher groove was washed out by the
endless rain, and that also hurts, for it showed more than anything how serious
Texas is to get their track into good racing shape, and the track deserves kudos
for putting in the efforts they did and will certainly continue to do.
If you thought Chevrolet had a much hope with the nose change in the Temple
Of Doom, maybe now it is official that Chevy is DOA in Winston Cup this year.
While it’s certainly too much for Chevy haters to ask that Chevy will fail to
win a Winston Cup race this year, it nonetheless is quite difficult to imagine
the Bowtie brigade getting anything going right now.
Of course Chevy’s designated champion Jeff Gordon finished second at Texas,
by far his best effort there ever, but his status as Chevy’s designated champ
only further underlines how poor Chevy’s program is this year; it was
unrealistic to expect him to win, and given his status within GM’s program it
was even less likely that any other GM machine had any shot. That Fords led
almost the whole race is the most graphic stat on Chevy’s abysmal effort of all
this week.
The other GM stalwart, Tony Stewart, finished fifth. The week off proved
enormously beneficial after the crash at Darlington and the physical beating at
Bristol.
The hard-luck team was Robert Yates’ #88, leading 134 laps and then throwing
it away in near-Keystone Kops fashion; apparently the Saturday-Sunday rains came
back for one short burst – i.e. the cliché when it rains, it pours. It
certainly did that when Jarrett ran out of gas.
So the Winston Cup manufacturer scoreboard reads – Roush Racing three, Dodge
three, GM one. Throw in Jeff Burton’s two Grand National wins and Jason Keller’s
Rockingham GN win, and Ford has six big-league NASCAR wins to Dodge’s five
(counting Robert Pressley and Ted Musgrave’s Truck wins for Mopar), Chevy three,
all in Grand National (curiously, the role was reversed at Texas; there Chevys
led the whole race and Fords were the ones looking like walking wounded), and
Pontiac its lone win by Tony Stewart at Atlanta.
Can one think of a harder luck winner than Jeff Purvis?
When you’ve watched Purvis race as long as I have, one has to be stunned that
his Texas win was just his fourth in Grand National, and those four are split
among three teams. His first two came in 1996 with the team with which he is
still synonymous – James Finch. It was another five years, a brief stint in a
Dennis Adcock Chevy at Nashville in 1997, a 1999 season with the now-defunct
Gary Bechtel team, and eighteen months with Joe Gibbs Racing that ended when
sponsorship woes shuttered his team despite being high in GN points, before his
third win came, in Richard Childress’ #21 last year.
Now he drives Clarence Brewer’s #37 and has a win there, and Nashville
beckons along with perhaps his best track, Talladega.
What’s the newest technological toy to play with in the sport?
Computational Fluid Dynamics.
Speedway Scene during the bye week did a piece on how Chip Ganassi brought
CFD engineering to Sterling Marlin for the Dodge program, and noted that such
technology until now had been almost an exclusive realm for the factories
themselves – one unnamed Detroit honcho even expressed amazement that teams were
now using such technology, and also noted that it is enormously expensive.
And it’s coming to a Winston Cup race team near you – Kyle
Petty notes how Robin Pemberton is bringing such to his organization, and by
the end of the year there won’t be a team at the Winston Cup level, with the
possible exception of a few low-rung outfits that the factories wrongly ignore
anyway, that isn’t implementing CFD programs.
Thus continues the sport’s technological arms race – and they wonder why it’s
so hard to pass on the racetrack.