I'll start off this week with a quick update on some of our local racers. Dallas Colodny was involved in a first lap incident in the Late Model race at Toyota Speedway in Irwindale last Saturday but recovered to finish 11th. Younger brother Hunter took his Legends car to a fifth-place finish, his best result of the season so far. The previous week he had another top 10 result, finishing in seventh.
Meanwhile, Dave Sciarroni also finished fifth last Saturday in the Legends race at All American Speedway in Roseville. And 18-year-old Kyle Gimple of Reno, a karting veteran who cut his racing teeth at the track in Stead, is the new champion of the Skip Barber Western Regional Series, scoring six wins, 11 podium finishes, and a track record at Mazda Laguna Seca Raceway in Monterey. Gimple will run the rest of the season in the Ford Mustang Challenge series, beginning this weekend at Virginia International Raceway.
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This has been a very fraught year for racing weather-wise, and last weekend we had the second Monday Sprint Cup race of the season at Texas Motor Speedway. It was exciting to see Jeff Gordon showing some of the fire that won him four championships, even rubbing fenders with teammate Jimmie Johnson. Unfortunately, Gordon's dominant car fell victim to a big wreck. Teammate Mark Martin said it best in a press conference later, "I don't care how good my car is running. I just want to be lucky." Amen, Mark.
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And it looks very much as though rain will be a factor this weekend at Talladega, with a good chance that today's qualifying session will be rained out. As of last night, NASCAR was holding to their schedule, and also debating whether or not to use a smaller restrictor plate for qualifying and the race. Cars are nudging the 200 mph mark, and after last year's last-lap incident with Carl Edwards flying into the catch fence, NASCAR is thinking that maybe slowing them down a bit would be the thing to do.
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If qualifying is indeed rained out, points leader Jimmie Johnson will start on the pole for Sunday's race. He has won once at Talladega, but also has six DNFs there. Teammate Gordon has six Talladega victories including both 2007 races, but has not finished well since. No Roush Ford driver has ever won at Talladega, although Carl Edwards came very close last year before he took flight. Among the Roush drivers, Edwards has four Talladega DNFs, Greg Biffle has five, and Matt Kenseth has not finished in the top 10 there in six consecutive races. Talladega also is the track that has seen the most one-win wonders in NASCAR, probably because of the fact that the "big one" often scrambles the field and takes out a lot of contenders.
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Another hot topic in Sprint Cup world is Shell's announcement that they would be moving their sponsorship from Kevin Harvick's Childress Racing Chevrolet to a Penske Dodge with driver Kurt Busch for 2011. Brad Keselowski will move to the Miller Lite "Blue Deuce" next year, and Penske also will keep his third car for Sam Hornish, Jr. Also, much has been made of the Jimmie Johnson/Jeff Gordon "rivalry" since their bumping incident and subsequent radio chatter at Texas last Monday. Johnson talked about a bogus fistfight in a press conference, and then went on to say that the two drivers still are friends but are going to continue to charge hard on the racetrack.
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Johnson appears to be on his way to an unprecedented fifth consecutive championship unless Gordon or somebody else can stop him. Johnson has scored three wins and five top-five finishes so far this season. Among the Chase contenders only four have remained in the top 12 since the season started at Daytona: Johnson, Jeff Burton, Biffle, and Harvick. Biffle has the best top-10 stats, with seven in the first eight races, one better than Johnson. And Denny Hamlin is the only driver besides Johnson who has more than one victory, with his win at Texas taking his total to two.