For anyone who listened in to the team radio chatter Monday at Chicagoland Speedway, it really was an interesting dynamic at times. On one side, you had drivers upset at the crew chief and crew, but then on the other you had a driver acknowledge his trust in his team over the radio.
Now when I was a crew chief, I never wanted my drivers to sugarcoat things to me. Don’t make it sound better than it truly is. At the same time, I would make it clear to the driver that he accomplishes nothing by beating me and our team down over the radio. I understand the guy is out there racing his guts out and frustrated we maybe haven’t given him a good enough car.
Ripping us up on the radio, however, isn’t going to fix the problem. Working together is.
That’s why I was so impressed with Brad Keselowski and his crew chief Paul Wolfe throughout Monday’s race.
Paul is a rookie Sprint Cup crew chief who -- oh, by the way -- is also in his first NASCAR Chase for the Sprint Cup. Let’s face it, Brad was losing it big time at one point in Monday's rain-delayed race. Paul convinced Brad to get his head back in the game. Brad did and they came home with a top-five finish by working together. They got the Chase started off on a very high note.
Now on the other side of the coin, there was Kurt Busch. Please understand that I love Kurt to death. I still maintain we have not seen the full potential of what that man can do behind the wheel yet. We all have heard Kurt’s meltdowns on the radio. His screaming at the team or the team screaming at him on the radio doesn’t get anything resolved. Cussing out your team on the radio does not make them want to work any harder. Just tell them what the car is doing and work together to try and make it the best you all can.
Now we have a lot of past Sprint Cup champions in the 2011 Chase. To a man they will tell you that what makes a championship team is the driver and the crew taking a bad day and making it into at least a good day. You saw some of that on Monday. You saw race-winner Tony Stewart and his No. 14 Stewart-Haas Racing bunch take a good car and turn it into a great car.
Now, what the guys like Jimmie Johnson and Matt Kenseth, who ran out of fuel, cannot do is get down on themselves or their team. They have to leave Chicago realizing they had a good race car. For them, the circumstances just didn’t prevail in their favor.
They were in a box no matter which way they went with their pit decision. If they pitted under green, they would have lost a bunch of spots and a bunch of ground on the field. If they decided to roll the dice and risk it but didn't make it, as happened, well it is the same result – they lose a bunch of spots and a bunch of ground. So they were forced to pick the lesser of two evils and decided to go for the win.
Now for the likes of Kyle Busch and Jeff Gordon, that’s a whole other story. They took what was becoming a pretty rough day and actually made it worse by the time the checkered flag came out and they had also run out of gas. It was really confusing to me about Busch's camp. That group is normally spot-on when it comes to things, but Monday they really had a rough day on pit road.
Unfortunately this is like a repeat of Kyle’s history in the Chase. He carried so much momentum into the Chase, only to once again stumble in the first race. So whether you are one of those drivers that had a good run with a bad finish, or one of those guys that had a bad race with a bad finish to go with it, you have to accept there is nothing you can do about it. It’s over.
The race this weekend is at New Hampshire Motor Speedway. The drivers and teams have to focus on that. Now true, in the back of their minds, they know they don’t have any more mulligans to fall back on. They’ve had their one bad race and so now the pressure is on to perform for the next nine weeks.
We also can’t lose sight on the impact of the new points system. We don’t have a template or a model of how this new system might alter things, obviously, because we’ve never raced a Chase under it. So that will be something worth watching as well.
We still have races at Martinsville Speedway and Talladega Superspeedway coming up. Those are the places where you can get caught up in someone else’s mess in an instant and your day is ruined. I guess when it comes to the Chase, we could say that a bad day at either of those places could ruin your championship hopes.
There are still nine races to go. I still believe this is going to be one of the most exciting championship battles we have ever had in the history of NASCAR Sprint Cup racing.
