You know, back in the 1980’s, my NASCAR on FOX partner, Darrell Waltrip, used to dominate at Bristol. In fact, at one point in his career, Darrell won seven Bristol races in a row.
That meant for three-and-a-half years, no one won a race at Bristol other than Darrell.
We are seeing that kind of domination starting again with Kyle Busch. It just seems that a driver and a team can get their arms around this place and hold onto it for awhile. In this situation, you actually need to put more on Busch than his team because he has dominated with his Camping World Truck team, his Nationwide team and his Cup team.
That means three different teams and three different crew chiefs, so that is pretty exciting.
The other interesting thing I am seeing happening is actually something everyone was predicting in the preseason.
Most folks back then believed Carl Edwards and Busch would be the biggest threats to knock defending champion Jimmie Johnson from the top spot. In four races so far this season, we are seeing that happen.
Sunday saw Busch finish first, Edwards second and Johnson finished third. Don’t get me wrong, Jimmie had a really good run. It was probably Jimmie’s best race in the four races we’ve had this season. He led the most laps of anyone Sunday but Kyle and Carl finished ahead of him. I just think we are going to see these three drivers at it a lot in 2011.
Sunday also saw the continuation of Paul Menard being the brightest star of the Richard Childress Racing camp. He’s well up in the top 10 in points. He led laps at Bristol Motor Speedway. He came home with another top-10 finish. Martin Truex Jr. was another new face we saw up front at Bristol.
He led a number of laps but then, unfortunately, the handling went away on his car and his team could never get it back.
Dale Earnhardt Jr. came home 11th Sunday at Bristol. He is very quietly putting together some really good numbers. He and his Hendrick Motorsports team actually were off a little bit at the beginning of the race and went a lap down.
They got the free pass and as a team worked together to get a great finish by the end of the day. Now the downside is that for the second time in four races, Earnhardt was busted by NASCAR for speeding on pit road.
That team simply has to eliminate mistakes like that if they are going to move forward. Sure, in Phoenix they got a top-10 finish, but they had to overcome a loose wheel plus a pit-road speeding penalty. They have to get this out of their system. Unfortunately, pit road has been Dale Jr.’s Achilles heel for the last two or three years.
I was also impressed with Kevin Harvick and his race team Sunday. They were one of those cautions late in the race. They had a lot of damage. They kept making repairs to the car and actually Harvick brought the car home in sixth place. That’s a perfect example of never giving up. Kevin mentioned in his postrace interview that for his team, being able to overcome that kind of adversity and bring home a top-10 finish proves they are a championship-caliber team.
I think we also need to tip our hat to NASCAR and Goodyear for the decision they made on the tire issue we saw on Friday. We had a huge wear issue -- the track was not taking the rubber. The rubber was not going down on the concrete. Both NASCAR and Goodyear acknowledged we were in a little bit of trouble with our right-side tires.
Nobody panicked and we got through Friday. Both sides called an audible on Saturday and brought a different right-side tire in.
Following that, tires were not even a story on Sunday. Everybody worked together to get through what was a really bad situation on Friday and it became a non-issue on Sunday.
