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Junior’s Stellar Season Continues

With yet another top-10 finish, at Charlotte – his seventh in the previous eight races – Dale Earnhardt Jr. now has nine top 10s in 2012. That’s more than any driver in the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series.

Earnhardt boasts another “most” statistic. He has completed all 3,888 laps this season, the only driver to do so.

Can the trend continue? Well…

Earnhardt has struggled at Dover of late, having failed to finish in the top 10 in each of the last eight Dover races. His last one, last October, he finished two laps down.

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NASCAR BECAME A WHOLE NEW WORLD WHEN GORDON/DUPONT ENTERED THE RACE

CHARLOTTE, N.C. (January 21, 2012) “A Whole New World” appropriately was the No. 1 song on the pop charts the year Jeff Gordon came on the NASCAR Cup Series scene in the rainbow-colored Hendrick Motorsports No. 24 DuPont Chevrolet and took the motorsports world by storm.

But the irony goes beyond the song title. Gordon’s first Cup Series start was seven-time champion “King” Richard Petty’s final Cup Series start at the season finale in Atlanta in 1992. The torch seemed to be passed that day as Gordon went on to accumulate four championships in his first nine full seasons and now is third on the all-time win list with 85 career victories. David Pearson is second with 105, and Petty reigns with a record 200 wins.

Continue reading “20 Years of Jeff Gordon and the #24 DuPont Chevrolet”

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Guest Column By Cathy Elliott

Thirty-five weeks a year, one of the most fun and challenging things about this column is the fact that it can often be quite speculative in nature.

Based on what happened the previous week or month in NASCAR, we have the luxury of utilizing what has gone before in order to predict what might happen next. Each week is an important link in a chain that begins when the season is tossed overboard in February, and ends in November when a champion lands to anchor it for the next 12 months.

But this is Week 36. As of this writing, mere hours separate us from the Ford 400 at Homestead-Miami Speedway, and NASCAR’s championship anchor is dangling so close to the ocean floor that the sand is already swirling. After the closest and most exciting year in recent memory, all that stands between this moment and the end of the 2012 season is the simplest of toddler math, countable on a single hand: one race, two drivers and three points.

Continue reading “Giving Thanks For NASCAR Now And Next Year”