Rear View: Las Vegas

The third weekend of NASCAR's 2009 season is in the books and it's one for the history books. Sure, Matt Kenseth's bid to become the first driver to sweep the first three races of the season came up drastically short but the record number of yellows in both the Nationwide and Sprint Cup races will ensure the fans' memory of the weekend will last much longer than last weekend's events in Fontana.

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It's hard to maintain any enthusiasm for the Nationwide races. The series regulars have been overshadowed by Cup interlopers for so long that it's really like watching a Cup race. So when many of the Cup regulars took themselves out of contention with mistakes on Saturday it allowed many drivers who never get a mention on a broadcast to contend for a top ten. Although Cup drivers took the first three positions it was great to see drivers like Jason Leffler, Michael McDowell, Brendan Gaughan, and Justin Allgaier in contention at the end. Although he is a Cup driver the high attrition rate allowed Jeff Burton to drive a wrecked racecar to tenth at the end too. Just outside the top ten were Scott Wimmer, Kenny Hendrick, Morgan Shepherd, Kenny Wallace, and Tony Raines, all driving for independent and under-financed stand-alone Nationwide teams. In fact, positions eleven through 19 on Saturday were filled with Nationwide-only drivers and teams.

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It was surprising to see so many drivers take themselves out due to wrecks on Saturday. Kyle Busch, David Ragan, and Denny Hamlin all crashed on their own. Each was driving a car capable of winning. Busch pushed too hard early on and got loose under another car and took out polesitter Scott Speed. Rather than all of the buffoonery in the booth during practice coverage, it would be interesting to see SPEED's experts look at the aerodynamic differences between the spoiler of a Nationwide car and the wing on a Sprint Cup car. There were numerous instances of a car getting loose underneath another in the Nationwide race and fewer instances in the Cup race. Hamlin's crash late in the race was particularly brutal because neither he nor Mike Bliss could do anything to prevent it.

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RacingOne.com's Pete Pistone believes there were very few seats to be had on Sunday for the Shelby 427, but I disagree. While the crowd was definitely large, there were indeed thousands of empty seats in turns three and four, including entire sections of seats near the fence. It's hard to see those on television because they are camouflaged to appear full. I understand why everyone pays attention to how many people are in attendance at each event - especially with tracks angling for dates - but this argument is probably not going to be decided in a down economy. Empty seats will be seen at virtually every stop on the tour, particularly at tracks that have expanded their grandstands in recent years. It used to be heresy to think there might be a race at Michigan or Dover that would have empty seats but that's exactly what happened last year. Now even Las Vegas has found it's hard to sell out. Does that mean Bristol could also see some empties in a couple of weeks?

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Late in the race Darrell Waltrip pontificated whether Kyle Busch would be credited with winning from the pole or winning from 43rd after taking the green flag at the back of the pack due to an engine change. There were other drivers that qualified in odd-numbered positions that had to drop to the back so Busch wasn't at the tail end of that line when the green waved. Regardless of where he was when he took the green flag, Busch is credited with starting from the pole position so he becomes the first Cup driver to start first and finish first at LVMS.

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It's not too often you see Jeff Gordon make a mistake but that's exactly what he did trying to get to pit road under green late in the race on Sunday. Not only did his miss pit road but he locked the brakes up in doing so and then blew out the left front tire trying to get back to pit road. But in true Rainbow Warrior fashion, his team was able to make repairs to his car and keep him in contention. How often did Gordon have problems in the late 90s only to see Ray Evernham and crew rally on pit road and get Gordon back in contention to win? Gordon didn't pull it off on Sunday but to finish that well in a car that had been seriously damaged is a credit to the driver and the team.

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We saw Dale Earnhardt, Jr. throw away his chances at Daytona with an unforced error on pit road and his teammate Jimmie Johnson did it at Las Vegas by sliding through his pit during his last green flag stop. I wonder if Rick Hendrick will rent out a non-Cup racetrack somewhere just so his drivers can practice getting on pit road and getting properly into their pit stalls? Sure, Vegas has a difficult pit road entry but who said racing was supposed to be easy? And besides, there were many drivers that didn't have any problems at all getting onto pit road this weekend.

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Richard Petty Motorsports has crashed back to earth following an unlikely run at the front in Daytona. AJ Allmendinger and Reed Sorenson were 33rd and 34th respectively. Sorenson crashed on his own in the middle stages of the race. The only bright spot for the team was Kasey Kahne who finished eleventh after doing a masterful job of avoiding a crashed Aric Almirola on lap 144. I wonder if this team will make it through the season without a driver change. Team owner George Gillett already tried to improve his situation in the off season but a lawsuit meant he had to keep a driver he wasn't happy with. I remember a time when drivers were fired for non performance all the time. I bet the team's new contracts will all have a clause in them that allow just such a thing.

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Both the Nationwide and Sprint Cup races went well beyond their television windows as a result of the record number of caution flags. The Cup race went off the air sometime past 8:30 on the east coast, delaying the start of Fox's Sunday night primetime lineup. If the network's primetime lineup gets delayed often enough it could be the way we get back to a reasonable start time for Cup races.

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I've been a Mark Martin fan for his entire career, dating back to his championship days in the ASA. I expect Martin will be competitive in the No. 5 this season, but what exactly makes people think he will be a contender for the championship in that car? He wasn't ever able to score a championship during the peak of his career and that's when he was clearly the No. 1 driver for the Roush team. Now he's over 50 and can easily be seen as the fourth driver in a four-driver lineup. I don't think the No. 5 is or ever has been an R&D effort but that's not quite a championship caliber ride just yet.


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It was humorous to hear Mike Joy revise history somewhat with the tale on how Kyle Busch became known to some as "Wild Thing". Joy is usually the last one of the Fox crew prone to unnecessary hype and he is dead on in his recollection that Busch was extremely fast but somewhat out of control when he made his Cup debut at LVMS in 2004. And there can easily be comparisons made to how Busch was then and the fictional pitcher played by Charlie Sheen in the movie Major League. But those comparisons weren't made then. I had never heard of Busch referred to as "Wild Thing" until early last year when Darrell Waltrip tried to pin that tag on Busch for his spectacularly aggressive nature while winning several races. For most of Busch's career in NASCAR he's been known as "Shrub" since he is Kurt Busch's little brother. I'd like to hear Joy's recollection on how Tony Stewart came to be known as "Smoke".

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It sure did take a long time for the ServiceMaster track crew to clean up the mess after Paul Menard crashed on lap 270. I wonder if that's an indication on how long an actual ServiceMaster crew would take to clean up a routine spill in an office somewhere.

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Jeff Gluck of NASCAR Scene asks in his blog following the Vegas race if Kyle Busch could be the greatest of all time. There is no doubting Busch's talent, and his win totals in all three of NASCAR's top divisions bear that out. It used to be that winning in all three divisions was a difficult task, but Busch has managed to do just that in just three weeks so far in 2009. But the greatest of all time? Jeff Gordon was once seen as a lock to match Petty and Earnhardt in the championship column but has recently found it hard to win races. Three years ago that sounded absurd. Right now the planets are aligned and Busch is having his way with the competition. But let's hold off a while before we annoint him as the next coming of The King. It's hard to say what's going to happen in two years much less then next 15.