By Roger Diez
Nevada Appeal Motorsports Columnist
If the preliminary races are any indication, race fans are in for an edge-of-the-seat four-hour nail-biter of a Daytona 500 today.
Dale Earnhardt Jr. fans are particularly excited, because their hero is two for two so far, after an almost two-year drought. With victories in the Bud Shootout and the first Duel race on Thursday, can Junior pull off the hat trick at Daytona this year? It depends on two things, both of which are going to be key not only to today's race, but to the entire 2008 season.
The first critical item is drivability. The Car of Today, after getting mixed reviews in 2007, looks like it is going to provide some really exciting racing in 2008. But it is a handful to drive, as many drivers have attested to this past week, including Junior.
After years of development on the "old" chassis, that car had reached the point where it was relatively easy to drive. Not so the new piece, which takes all a driver's concentration, reflexes, and sheer driving talent . . . just like the old days of 20-30 years ago.
Daytona may be an extreme example of this, with NASCAR-mandated rear shocks and springs, giving teams less adjustability than they would like.
On the other hand, NASCAR has opened up the hated restrictor plate to compensate for the COT's increased drag, and this has actually given the driver more horsepower to work with and a way to regain lost momentum. This is going to give us a humdinger of a race today.
The second item, arguably more critical at Daytona than at other tracks, is teamwork. Teamwork won last Saturday's Bud Shootout for Junior, as his teammates lined up behind him to push him to the front. And in Thursday's second Duel race, Dale Jarrett made it into his final Daytona 500 largely due to the assistance of team leader Michael Waltrip and teammate David Reutimann, who pushed him up through the field and then guarded his back in the final laps.
Speaking of Waltrip Racing, Toyota is going to be a serious contender in 2008. In addition to the Waltrip cars, Joe Gibbs Racing scored the first NASCAR Sprint Cup victory for Toyota when Denny Hamlin took the checkered flag in the second Duel race on Thursday. Mark my words, it will not be Toyota's last win of 2008.
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It appears that the Champ Car/Indy Car war may be over, but with a less than ideal outcome. Rumors are flying, and an announcement is expected by mid-week. It appears that after a 12-year battle Tony George and the Indianapolis Motor Speedway have worn down the often mismanaged Champ Car organization. George's offer to provide teams with IRL-spec cars and engines is probably the final nail in the Champ Car coffin.
I spoke with a couple of local folks from Minden who are heavily invested in the Champ Car series. Katie Brannan does PR for the Pacific Coast Racing team and Richard Raeder manages the Sierra Sierra Formula Atlantic race team, defending series champions. Both of them told me that from the Champ Car/Atlantic side of things everything is up in the air with no official word coming out of the Champ Car offices and all the teams pretty much on hold.
"Our team owners have put a stop to all expenditures, and we have four chassis in-house that are pretty much paperweights at this point," Raeder told me.
Brannan said that PCM has spent $4 million on new cars and $100,000 on a recent Sebring test, and all may be for naught. If as many as five teams defect to the IRL, Champ Car's entries would drop to a dozen or so, not a viable series for any race promoter.
As for Formula Atlantic, series management is exploring other avenues, and the American Lemans series appears to be the best bet if Champ Car doesn't want to charge too much money for the series. And that is at the heart of the problem: too many people with large fortunes and even larger egos have brought American open wheel racing to the nadir of the sport's existence. At the moment this is still a breaking story, and I hope to have more information next week. But I don't expect good news.