Rough track ‘tires out’ NASCAR drivers

Posted on Wednesday, July 30th, 2008 at 10:29 AM EDT.

NARRATOR: Tire wear has been an issue for NASCAR in the past, but never to the magnitude of Sunday’s Allstate 400 event at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway.   The race turned into10-lap sprints as NASCAR controlled the issue with mandatory cautions – competition yellows. The longest green-flag run was 12 laps.

There were 11 cautions during the race.  Several were competition yellows.  Others were a result of tire failure before a NASCAR-mandated yellow was scheduled to be displayed. Dodge teams were not exempt from tire problems.  Five of the teams had tire failures during the race. 

Elliott Sadler drove to a fourth-place finish, his best of the season. Kasey Kahne finished seventh–his 10th top-10 effort of 2008 and moved him up to ninth in the season point standings with six races remaining in the Race to the Chase which will determine the 12 drivers that will compete for the season championship and the Sprint Cup.

Ryan Newman finished 13^th, Bobby Labonte16th, Reed Sorenson was 17^th, Patrick Carpentier 18^th and Sam Hornish Jr. came in 21^st.

Sadler, by the way, led the Allstate 400 for one five-lap stretch, and his 4^th place effort gives him two top-five finishes in the last four races. 2008 is shaping up to be a banner year for the Emporia, Virginia, native, who was recently asked what he would like to do if he couldn’t be a driver.

Elliott Sadler-”I’ve always said, ‘I want to be a country music singer when I grow up.’ Because, those guys they’re always having fun, they’re on stage, they’ve got millions of people hanging on every word that they say during a concert and stuff like that, but when I grow up I’d love to be a country music singer if I wasn’t racing, which is what I tell everybody, but you have to have some kind of a little bit of talent to sing nowadays, and for some reason my voice just, it won’t make it. But, you can still dream and you can still hope.”

This weekend the Sprint Cup Series moves to the Pocono Mountains of Pennsylvania and the Sonoco Red Cross Pennsylvania 500.

The Craftsman Truck Series made a visit to O’Reilly Raceway Park in Clermont, Ind., last Friday night for a 200-lap event.  Stacy Compton started 20th in the No. 4 Dodge Ram and finished 23rd.  Dennis Setzer started 10th in the No. 18 Dodge Ram and finished 26th.

The series takes this weekend off and resumes action Saturday, August 9^th with the Toyota Tundra 200 at Nashville Superspeedway.

NASCAR superstar and Team Mopar® owner/driver Kasey Kahne earned a second-place finish in the United States Auto Club (USAC) Mopar Midget National Championship feature at O’Reilly Raceway Park last weekend.

Team Mopar driver Dakoda Armstrong drove his Midget to a $10,000 victory in a 400-lap USAC “special event” at Indiana’s Anderson Speedway on July 26. Armstrong, who celebrated his 17th birthday just 10 days earlier, had also set the event’s fastest qualifying time, running four laps around the quarter-mile oval in a total of 46.453 seconds.

Team Mopar and Don Schumacher Racing teammates Jack Beckman and Jerry Toliver paced all Mopar HEMI-powered NHRA Funny Car drivers with a pair of quarterfinals appearances in the Fram Autolite NHRA Nationals at Infineon Raceway in Sonoma, Calif., on July 27.

Team Mopar driver Joey Saldana and Kasey Kahne Racing added two more top-five finishes to their portfolio of solid results in the Advance Auto Parts World of Outlaws (WoO) Sprint Car Series. Saldana finished fourth at the I-96 Speedway in Lake Odessa, Mich., on July 25, and the next night drove his Budweiser/Open Joist machine to fifth at the K-C Raceway in Chillicothe, Ohio.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 30th, 2008 at 10:29 AM EDT and is filed under Motorsports and tagged Audio. You can follow any comments to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Comments are currently closed.