By Reid Spencer
Sporting News NASCAR Wire Service

(June 13, 2010)

BROOKLYN, Mich.—Denny Hamlin sucked the drama right out of Sunday’s Heluva Good! Sour Cream Dips 400 NASCAR Sprint Cup race at Michigan International Speedway—because his car was so vastly superior to the 42 others in the field.

“All we do is win, baby—two in a row,” Hamlin radioed to his crew just before crossing the finish line 1.246 seconds ahead of Kasey Kahne, the only other driver who could stay in the same zip code with Hamlin. “I can’t tell you how good this car is, man.”

Hamlin was more than good enough to win for a career-best fifth time this season and for the 13th time in his career. He backed up last week’s victory at Pocono with his fifth win in the past 10 races.

Polesitter Kurt Busch ran third, followed by Jeff Gordon and Tony Stewart. Jimmie Johnson finished sixth, with Hendrick Motorsports teammate Dale Earnhardt Jr. behind him in seventh. Jeff Burton, Greg Biffle and Joey Logano completed the top 10.

Hamlin’s victory tightened the Cup points race because of mediocre results from the top two drivers in the standings, Kevin Harvick and Kyle Busch. Harvick finished 19th, one spot ahead of Busch, and leads Busch by 22 points and third-place Hamlin by 47.

Stewart gained two positions to 11th in the standings.

If Hamlin stole the suspense from the race, a debris caution on Lap 182 of 200 threatened to restore it. At that point, Hamlin had a lead of more than nine seconds over Kahne.

“That’s what a nine-second lead will get you,” crew chief Mike Ford radioed laconically to Hamlin after the yellow flag flew.

The caution bunched the field for a restart on Lap 187, but after Kahne dogged Hamlin for the next five laps, Hamlin began to pull away by more than a tenth of a second per lap. All told, Hamlin led 123 laps. Kurt Busch led 60 laps but showed his strength early while Hamlin was moving forward from the seventh starting position.

“We had a strong car early on,” Busch said. “It seems like we lost a little bit of speed as the race went on, lost a little grip when the track rubbered in. … Denny Hamlin, once halfway rolled around, his car had really good grip.

“The track got rubbered in, and his car just kept gaining speed, and ours lost a little bit of speed.”

To Hamlin, the final caution was inevitable. Kahne said he saw a big piece of debris on the backstretch. Hamlin said he saw no debris.

“I knew a caution was coming, so I might as well back off and save my tires,” Hamlin said. “I knew that debris caution was coming. We’ve got to do what’s right for the fans, and they need to see a great race at the end. The best car won—and that’s all you can ask for.”

Nine Ford teams were running the new FR9 engine Sunday. Kahne said it made a difference.

“We had the new Ford engine, and it was night and day difference to what I had last week,” he said. “I’m really happy with the FR9 engine. For our first time racing it, it was a nice improvement. I think that bodes well for all the Ford teams. I think we will all run better now.”

Notes: Earnhardt’s seventh-place finish was his best since late March at Bristol, where he also ran seventh. Earnhardt climbed two positions to 14th in the standings, 81 points behind 12th-place Mark Martin. … Clint Bowyer ran 22nd, the last car on the lead lap, and fell from 12th to 13th in the standings, 43 behind Martin.

Guest Column By Cathy Elliott

‘Clichés’ earn that designation for a reason. Yes, they might be tired and hackneyed, but they’re also mostly true, which is why they are pulled out, dusted off and shoved up in people’s faces time and again. The final laps of the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series race at Pocono served to vividly illustrate that point.

Most of us played the game “Musical Chairs” when we were kids, so we know from experience that two bodies cannot physically occupy the same space at the same time. This also applies to stock cars.

While going for the same line at Pocono, the cars driven by Kevin Harvick and Joey Logano in the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series made contact. When that happens, ‘something’s gotta give.’

In this case, it was the No. 20 Home Depot Toyota. Both drivers were running near the front of the field at the time, but the incident spun Logano out. He ended up in 13th, while Harvick went on to finish fourth.

Some call it karma, while others refer to it as the Golden Rule, but whatever name you give it, it is a principle that repeatedly proves its veracity. We’re combining a couple of clichés this time, but most folks agree that ‘you need to give as good as you get,’ because ‘what goes around, comes around.’

Kevin Harvick certainly is having a good year. The driver of the No. 29 Shell-Pennzoil Chevrolet took over the lead in the driver standings at Richmond on May 1. A winner at Talladega in April, Harvick has posted five top five and 10 top 10 finishes and sits just 19 points ahead of second-place Kyle Busch headed into Michigan. Since his first season in the Cup Series in 2001, he has won a respectable 12 races.

Harvick and his wife DeLana have also enjoyed success in the NASCAR Camping World Truck Series, winning a couple of championships with their Kevin Harvick Inc. team. It is pretty safe to call Harvick a NASCAR veteran at this point in his career.

Until now, Joey Logano’s primary claim to fame was his age. Relative to other drivers in the Cup Series, he’s young. In fact, last year he became the youngest driver in history ever to win a race in NASCAR’s premier series. Now 20 years old, he has nine top 10 Cup Series finishes to his credit, and was the series’ 2009 Raybestos Rookie of the year.

With an aw-shucks, boy-next-door kind of vibe working, Logano has earned a reputation for being a nice, easy-going young man, one who is slow to anger and usually ‘turns the other cheek.’

But following the incident at Pocono, neither cheek was turned. Logano pulled his car onto pit road and came after Harvick full-face and straight on, looking ‘mad as a wet hen.’ At least I guess that’s what he looked like, having never seen a wet hen. Alive.

The result was something a lot of fans don’t care for; a melee ensued. Instead of allowing two drivers to settle their disputes mano a mano, crew members often get in between them, there’s a lot of pushing and shoving and yelling, and nothing gets accomplished.

“You get out of the car, you want to talk to the guy and see what’s going on. And there’s 6,000 crew members around him … I don’t know how you’re supposed to settle something when you can’t even talk to the guy,” Logano said after the race.

Well, ‘with age comes wisdom.’ Harvick’s take on the incident was, “That’s just racing. Hate that it happened and we’ll just go on and keep at it. … You can’t talk to him. He’s 20.”

At 34, Harvick is hardly ready for the front-porch rocker, but in all fairness, Logano did take a shot at DeLana, saying, “His wife wears the firesuit in the family and tells him what to do, so it’s probably not his fault.”

Feisty — and business-savvy — Mrs. Harvick promptly responded by having merchandise produced bearing the phrase “I wear the firesuit in this family,” sure to be a big seller with female race fans. Apparently, ‘when the going gets tough, the tough sell T-shirts.’ I’m paraphrasing that one a little bit, but it was too good to pass up.

Although unfortunate, the entire Harvick/Logano mini-feud has been awfully entertaining, and in the end was chalked up simply as ‘one of those racing deals.’ The Harvicks earned a few bucks at the souvenir hauler, and Logano earned some respect for standing his ground and speaking his mind. ‘It’s a dog-eat-dog world’ out there on the racetrack, and a guy can’t just ‘roll over and play dead.’

Cute little puppies can grow up to become big, fierce dogs, remember. And sometimes, they do bite back.

The opinions expressed in this articles are solely those of the author and not this website.

By Lee Montgomery
Special to the Sporting News NASCAR Wire Service

(June 12, 2010)

SPARTA, Ky.—Joey Logano remained perfect in the NASCAR Nationwide Series at Kentucky Speedway, winning the Meijer 300 from the pole on Saturday night.

Logano had lost the lead on two restarts late in the race but was able to power back to the top spot each time.

The first was with 44 laps to go when Mike Bliss took the lead, but after an extended caution period, Logano got back out front on Lap 169 of 200.

The second came when Brendan Gaughan charged around the outside after a restart on Lap 175, but Gaughan slipped off Turn 4 a lap later, and Logano again regained the lead.

Logano then held off a late charge from Carl Edwards to win for the third time at Kentucky.

Logano, 20, has won the pole and the race every time he has raced at the 1.5-mile track. The victory in 2008 was his first in one of NASCAR’s national series.

NASCAR Sprint Cup Series double-duty drivers swept the top three positions, as Edwards finished second and NASCAR Nationwide Series points leader Brad Keselowski was third. Edwards moved up one spot in the standings to second, and is 272 points behind Keselowski.

Gaughan finished fourth, with Reed Sorenson fifth. Rounding out the top 10 were Steve Wallace, Scott Wimmer, Justin Allgaier, Scott Riggs and Raybestos Rookie Colin Braun.

By Reid Spencer
Sporting News NASCAR Wire Service

(June 12, 2010)

BROOKLYN, Mich.—Aric Almirola passed Todd Bodine and Kyle Busch three-wide through the middle with seven laps left in Saturday’s VFW 200 and held on to win the NASCAR Camping World Truck Series race at Michigan International Speedway.

Bodine finished second and retained his series lead by 55 points over Almirola, who won for the second time this season in Billy Ballew’s No. 51 Toyota. Busch ran third, followed by Ron Hornaday Jr. and polesitter Austin Dillon, who overcame a late pit-road penalty to post his second straight top five.

“I didn’t think it was the greatest place to be,” Almirola said of his middle position after a restart on Lap 93 of 100. “But I knew we were going to run wide open through the corner. We were either going to crash, or we were going to make it out the other side—because I knew how important clean air was.

“I knew that was my only shot to get out in the lead, and if I didn’t get out in the lead, there was no chance of us winning the race. So I went down in Turn 1, and I knew I was going to run a shorter distance than Todd (who was on the outside), so I just tried to hang tight on Kyle’s door and get him loose, which I did.

“By the time we got off Turn 2, I was almost clear of Todd, and then when we went through (Turns) 3 and 4, I cleared him. So I think that was the move of the race, as far as I’m concerned.”

In a race that featured a track-record 20 lead changes, Almirola didn’t go to the front until his pass on Lap 93. Bodine had held the lead for a restart on Lap 89 and had begun to pull away when Nelson Piquet Jr. spun through the frontstretch grass to bring out the fifth and final caution of the afternoon.

“Maybe it caught me a little off guard,” Bodine said of Almirola’s pass for the lead. “Aric’s a hell of a racer, and they had a good truck when it counted. On a short run like that—especially as many laps as we rode around under caution, with the tires cooling down—everybody’s handling pretty good for three or four laps, five laps.

“I really believe that, if this race was 10 laps longer, I probably would have beat him—but, guess what, there weren’t another 10 laps.”

Notes: The race was red-flagged for 40 minutes, 12 seconds because of a rain shower that caused the third caution on Lap 34. … Timothy Peters finished sixth and remained third in the standings, 165 points behind Almirola. … Matt Crafton retired after 83 laps with an engine failure and fell three spots to 10th in points.

1 2 Kurt Busch Miller Lite Dodge
2 1 Jamie McMurray GE Reveal Chevrolet
3 48 Jimmie Johnson Lowe’s Chevrolet
4 9 Kasey Kahne Budweiser Ford
5 31 Jeff Burton Caterpillar Chevrolet
6 24 Jeff Gordon DuPont / National Guard Job Skills Chevrolet
7 11 Denny Hamlin FedEx Ground Toyota
8 39 Ryan Newman U.S. Army Chevrolet
9 00 David Reutimann Aaron’s Dream Machine Toyota
10 42 Juan Pablo Montoya Target Chevrolet
11 19 Elliott Sadler Stanley Ford
12 20 Joey Logano Home Depot Toyota
13 56 Martin Truex Jr. NAPA Auto Parts Toyota
14 6 David Ragan UPS Ford
15 18 Kyle Busch M&M’s Pretzel Toyota
16 16 Greg Biffle 3M Ford
17 14 Tony Stewart Old Spice / Office Depot Chevrolet
18 77 Sam Hornish Jr. Mobil 1 Dodge
19 99 Carl Edwards Aflac Ford
20 7 Robby Gordon SpeedFactory.TV Toyota
21 5 Mark Martin GoDaddy.com Chevrolet
22 98 Paul Menard Sylvania / Menards Ford
23 78 Regan Smith Furniture Row Racing Chevrolet
24 47 Marcos Ambrose Clorox / Kleenex Toyota
25 33 Clint Bowyer Cheerios / Hamburger Helper Chevrolet
26 43 A J Allmendinger Insignia HDTV / Best Buy Ford
27 88 Dale Earnhardt Jr. AMP Energy / National Guard Chevrolet
28 21 Bill Elliott FordParts.com Ford
29 82 Scott Speed Red Bull Toyota
30 71 Bobby Labonte TRG Motorsports Chevrolet
31 29 Kevin Harvick Shell / Pennzoil Chevrolet
32 83 Casey Mears Red Bull Toyota
33 12 Brad Keselowski Penske Dodge
34 38 Travis Kvapil Long John Silver’s / Ice Flow Lemonade Ford
35 09 Landon Cassill Phoenix Racing Chevrolet
36 37 David Gilliland Taco Bell Ford
37 87 Joe Nemechek NEMCO Motorsports Toyota
38 13 Max Papis GEICO Toyota
39 17 Matt Kenseth Crown Royal Black Ford
40 46 J J Yeley Promise Village Dodge
41 64 Todd Bodine Little Joe’s Autos Toyota
42 34 Kevin Conway # Extenze Ford
43 26 David Stremme Air Guard Ford

Did Not Qualify: # 66 Dave Blaney; # 55 Michael Waltrip; # 36 Johnny Sauter.