NASCAR BLOG

Dale Earnhardt Jr. has decided that his team needs a little change and replaced his crew chief to try and get out of the funk that he’s been sitting in for the last several years which has become an especially big deal this season. His new chief, Lance McGrew, will be trying to get the crew to work more efficiently get him back into real contention. The biggest and most compelling reason for the change is that he was 40th in a field of 43 cars just last weekend. Instead, they want to push their team to perform well throughout the season. We hope that he will start competing, because the more exciting racers that are in every competition, the more fun the season will be!

At the Coca Cola 600 this weekend, there was just lots of rain. They stopped the race several times and slowed things down quite a bit before calling the race after about 340 miles, much shorter than it was supposed to be. David Reutimann ended up in the lead when they finally called the race and he was the winner. He hadn’t led a single green flag lap the whole afternoon. Other racers involved were not in the lead but raced decently. It’s sometimes hard to tell who’s actually supposed to win the race under those kinds of conditions, but that’s the way it goes sometimes. For Reutimann, he’s very happy indeed, having won his first race!

The Coca-Cola 600 at Lowe’s Motor Speedway is coming up this weekend, as it comes up on every Memorial Day weekend. It might be an interesting race this time because there are a lot of great racers still in the Sprint Cup this year. You might want to make sure that your racer is in there this weekend, because he or she probably is! The longest race is on the same weekend as the Indy 500, one of the other races that people look forward to a lot. Both races have a long history and are some of the longest in their respective sports. We are looking forward to great races and it’s going to be a lot of fun for us to see the best of the best battle it out, perhaps while we’re grilling outdoors this weekend. Get ready!

Bundled up with the Sprint Cup All Stars, we heard news that Jeremy Mayfield had been suspended indefinitely because of substance abuse. He was found to have used some kind of drug on a fairly frequent basis, though it hasn’t been publicised what he uses/used. It’s one of the tough situations that gives a lot of people concern about the situation of the sport and whether the racers are actually good role models for children and so on. So he is out of the sport for the foreseeable future and it will be interesting to see whether he’s able to clean up. There’s quite a bit of controversy about whether someone should have noticed this beforehand, as it could have been quite dangerous for the other racers in the field if that had happened.

The NASCAR Sprint Cup All Star race will be held this weekend. All the drivers who have won a race in last year’s Sprint Cup get a spot in the race. This race is always a really exciting one and we will be looking forward. Two of the main racers that we can expect good things from are Matt Kenseth, who keeps winning races. He also tends to appear at the end to take the win at the last second. He has won 5 top 10 places in races during the last few years. Tony Stewart is another one, a person who is really a hard-core kind of racer. He always says that he’s going to win and he seems to think that he might as well not race if he’s not going to win!

Mark Martin is clearly the oldest racer in the typical field for the Sprint Cup and other NASCAR competitions. He has been one of the best racers over the last several decades and it’s a lot of fun to watch him compete against some of the best in the sport. FOX Sports says that this year is going to be possibly the best chance for him to actually win the title. He has had some trouble looking like the other racers lately, and perhaps he shouldn’t try, but it’s going to be an exciting time for him since he’s been racing better lately than he has for most of the rest of his career, having won the Southern 500 and another Sprint race earlier this year. He’s a great team leader and will help his team stay in real contention over the course of this tournament. Get ready!

Kevin Grubb was a NASCAR driver for awhile in the early part of this decade and had an unfortunate life situation during that time. His former teammates and associates said that he was a nice guy and didn’t seem to be particularly troubled. He was, however, in a tough position with regards to drug problems. After he crashed at one race, he did not submit to drug testing and ended up leaving the sport altogether. In between then an now, about 2-3 years, not much was heard of him, but it was still surprising yesterday when it was reported that Grubb had committed suicide. There’s no clear reason for him to have taken his own life and the toxicology reports and other things have not yet been released. We’ll have to see.

Joey Logano is going to be looking forward to winning this weekend at Darlington Raceway this weekend in North Carolina. This weekend’s Diamond Hill Plywood 200 will be an exciting race in a great facility. Logano races with a Toyota team and the Darlington Raceway has been very good luck for them recently. In fact, this weekend, they’re hoping to make it 4 in a row. Logano is a great racer, but he’s never raced at Darlington before. He’s, however, quite confident that he can do much better than most inexperienced drivers. Anyway, it’s an easier track than some of the other ones in the circuit and it’s going to be an exciting race. It wont happen for a few days yet.

Right after the big crash and some other crashes at Talledega last weekend, NASCAR began making noises that they would watch for unsafe driving by their racers. There was a lot of other talk about that. But the bulk of the talk was about the problems with the Talledega speedway as well as Daytona, where the mechanisms in the car prevent the cars from going faster than a certain speed. This leads to a large buildup of racers, which can lead to more major car pileups with no notice at all. The upcoming races are expected to be less dangerous and a bit more lopsided. The racers who sustained damage last weekend will have to find a way to fix up their cars fast!