Rating the Finger Lakes 355: 4 Stars ****

It took a race track covered in motor oil to produce an exciting finish, but the Sprint Cup Series drivers sure went nuts as they slid through the final two laps Sunday at Watkins Glen. The first 88 laps weren’t much different than the rest of the relatively boring season, but the wild and crazy finish gives this race a 4 Star Rating.

Kyle Busch had the race won until he ran up on oil laid down by Bobby Labonte’s #47 car and had to slow his pace to stay on the race track. Brad Keselowski caught him in Turn 1 on the final lap and promptly spun him out. Then the battle was on between Keselowski and Marcos Ambrose.

The remainder of the final lap looked like the track’s surface was dirt rather than asphalt. Keselowski and Ambrose swapped the lead several times as they both tried thrashed to get to the finish line first. Ambrose eventually won the battle and took the checkered flag for his second consecutive win at Watkins Glen.

Now, many folks will say an exciting final few laps does not make a good race. There is certainly truth in that statement, but it’s also true that races aren’t designed to be exciting the entire time. Some of the greatest finishes in NASCAR history have come at the end of an otherwise forgettable race. This week’s race gets 4 stars because it had the best finish of the season. Period.

The first 95 percent of the race was about as typical of a Watkins Glen race as possible. Several drivers fell out of the race early because of mechanical problems and teams made varying strategy calls throughout the race. Otherwise, not much happened.

Busch, Keselowski and Ambrose had the three best cars all day, so it was fitting they were the three to battle for the win. And boy, they battled.

Busch should’ve won the race. He beat Keselowski and Ambrose on the final restart and would not have been caught if the track had been dry. His spin on the final lap relegated him to seventh on the scoreboard and moved him to 14^th in the points standings, six points away from the second wild-card spot, which is currently held by Ryan Newman.

Maybe the biggest lesson from Sunday’s race is how the slick conditions made for such exciting racing, and how much the drivers enjoyed the battle.

Certainly Busch and Jeff Gordon, who also spun out on the final lap, would disagree, but Keselowski and Ambrose had a ton of fun sliding around for the win.

That type of racing has disappeared in NASCAR in the last five years or so. In the greatest finish of all time, Ricky Craven and Kurt Busch slid around Darlington Raceway in 2003 for the final 15 laps banging into each other and having a great time. Craven won the race by .002 seconds.

Unfortunately, that type of racing isn’t possible any more, even at tracks such as Darlington. Nearly every track on the NASCAR schedule has been repaved since Craven’s win in 2003. Atlanta Motor Speedway is just about the only track left that hasn’t been recently repaved and has an abrasive surface that is difficult to drive.

The fresh asphalt gives cars better grip and allows the cars to go faster, but it doesn’t make for better racing. Hopefully, the track surfaces start to give up grip in the near future and become more difficult to drive. That will make for better racing.

Next week the Sprint Cup Series heads to one of the tracks with the newest pavement: Michigan International Speedway. Speeds surpassed 200 mph in June, but that likely won’t happen this weekend with hotter temperatures.

Maybe Dale Earnhardt Jr. will win again. We’ll likely hear plenty about his win in June next week. Regardless, expect the big teams to dominate the front of the field. The quality of the car matters a lot at Michigan.

Have a great week, everybody

Rating the Heluva Good! Sour Cream Dips at the Glen: You Rate the Race!!

Light rain and fog covered Watkins Glen on Monday morning, but the Sprint Cup Series cars provided the lightning and thunder in a hard-hitting race that brought yet another first–time winner.

This week Monday Morning Crew Chief lets you decide the Rating of the Heluva Good! Sour Cream Dips at the Glen. Check out the Rating System page and put your rating on this one.

Marcos Ambrose deserves a huge congratulations for winning this race. He has been close in almost every road-course race since he entered the sport in 2008. He has scored a top-five finish in every road course race of his career, except 2010 at Sonoma when he infamously shut off the engine going up a hill. However, he still finished sixth that race. That is simply an incredible record he has put together.

While Ambrose broke through and finally got to Victory Lane, a good chunk of the rest of the field ended up back in the garage area with cars that were absolutely destroyed.




Those cars are more torn up than any car from the rest of the season combined, unless you include the car Brad Keselowski wrecked in a test two weeks ago at Road Atlanta, which is also a road course.

The drivers always talk about Watkins Glen being the superspeedway of road courses, and that certainly held true Monday. Ten or 15 years ago, Denny Hamlin, David Ragan and David Reutimann might have been seriously injured or worse from those hits, and it’s unbelievable they all happened in the same race.

Watkins Glen is likely going to receive plenty of criticism for not having safer walls, and the track deserves it. But, this is a problem across the sport. Pocono finally put up a fence and SAFER barriers down the Long Pond straightaway for this season, and Richmond has work to do to cover the inside wall on the backstretch where Jeff Gordon found exposed concrete in the spring race.

Why is it so tough to get these tracks to cover everything with a SAFER barrier? No matter how unlikely it looks that a car could hit a certain part of the wall, it will at some point. In Monday’s case, however, it’s easy to picture a car crashing where Ragan did.

It would be nice if tracks were actually proactive for once. Dale Earnhardt died before real safety improvements were made, Kasey Kahne nearly flipped out of Pocono before they put the fence up. Auto racing is simply too dangerous to take chances.

Finally, we can’t leave out the Boris Said-Greg Biffle scuffle after the race. A fight nearly broke out between the two, and Said certainly made his interview count afterward, calling Biffle an “unprofessional little scaredy-cat” and “a chump.”

Only Said would come up with gems like those. Just imagine Kyle Busch calling Kevin Harvick a chump.

Too bad Said won’t be around for the rest of the year, but he certainly made his final appearance.

Sights and Sounds of Raceday - Prerace

Here's just a little something to help start off what should be a great day of racing!



For more photos, check out the Monday Morning Crew Chief Facebook page.

Rating the Sunoco Red Cross Pennsylvania 500: 3 Stars ***

A long day in the occasionally damp Pocono Mountains turned out to be bliss for the Biff, as a Ford finally drove into victory lane in 2010. The second race at the triangle was similar to the first with a variety of storylines, some good and some bad. Overall, it adds up to a 3 Star Rating.

It was a rather busy week for NASCAR coming into the race. Jack Roush crashed his plane once again, Marcos Ambrose came out of nowhere and announced a move to leave the #47 team, and per usual, rain delayed the start of the race before cars finally set off on a 500-mile odyssey in Long Pond, Penn., that ended with Greg Biffle scoring an emotional win as he scored his 15th career Cup victory.

In what has almost become a requirement for the first half of a race, Jimmie Johnson dominated the field and jumped out to a commanding lead before Jeff Gordon caught him on lap 120, just before the first of two debris cautions flew.

After the field reset for the final stretches of the race, rain clouds started to build over Turn 3’s shoulder and the drivers cranked the intensity level up. As the field came off of Turn 1 and down the Long Pond Straightaway on lap 165, Jimmie Johnson bump drafted Kurt Busch, who then clipped the nose of Clint Bowyer’s #33 and pounded the outside wall before coming back across the track and sliding through the grass. That hit was hard, but nothing compared to the one Elliot Sadler took in the same incident.

Several cars behind the original incident, Sadler checked up when he saw smoke but was hit from behind by his teammate A.J. Allmendinger and slid through the wet grass before he slammed the inside barrier, which juts out for no particular reason, head-on and completely ripped off almost the entire front of the race car, including the entire engine. Remarkably, Sadler was OK, as safety workers came to his aid with the engine still smoking on the apron of the track. The safety measures in the car kept him from being seriously hurt or killed. That hit was so vicious I’m not sure he would have survived if he had been driving a Nationwide car.

Now, much has already been said and written about the poor safety conditions at Pocono. This was nothing new, people were aware of these issues before the race began. What is unfortunate, however, is that nothing was done to fix these issues in the past five years or so. I’m always amazed that NASCAR doesn’t mandate every safety feature at a track. There are just certain things a sporting arena must have before a professional sport goes there. Every hockey rink needs glass a certain height off of the ice, just as every baseball field needs a screen behind home plate. If NASCAR was going to have tracks install SAFER barriers, it should have gone all the way and mandated SAFER barriers be put wherever possible. Race cars can smell an unsafe part of a track, and they will find it.

This race was actually similar to a restrictor-plate event at Daytona or Talladega. Speeds were near 200 mph, cars were bump-drafting all day, and there was a major wreck that will have people talking until the green flag drops at Watkins Glen.

People will continue to say Pocono needs to be taken off the schedule because of safety concerns, but many of them were also the ones that said the corners at Talladega needed to be flattened. The fact is Pocono Raceway has provided as much intrigue this year as any track on the schedule, both good and bad, just as Talladega has done in the past.

The series now moves from a tricky racetrack to a twisted one in Watkins Glen. Will Marcos Ambrose grab some redemption after the heartbreaking loss in Sonoma? It would be a heck of a way to say goodbye to his #47 at the end of the year. Likely, the big guns will be out in force again this coming weekend. Late in the season, the best teams tend to rise toward the top of the scoring pylon with more regularity week in and week out.

Rating the Toyota/Save Mart 350: 4 Stars ****

A rough and tumble weekend on the first road course of the season brought out the best in some, but also the worst in several others. The race in the valley gets a 4 Star Rating.

What a heartbreaker of a race for Marcos Ambrose, and all of the fans who were rooting for him to beat Jimmie Johnson. He has a way of losing races in dramatic fashion. Last year in Montreal he had the lead into the final corner before he got in too hard and Carl Edwards was able to sneak by for the win. This time he cut off his engine going up the hill and the car came to a stop. NASCAR then placed him seventh in the running order instead of first, where he had been.

Aside from the fact that it would have been really cool to see Ambrose win a race, the battle shaping up between him and Johnson would have been fun to watch. They were clearly the two best cars all day.

But, Johnson wins again, this time on a road course. I hope people realize and at least appreciate what they are watching. Johnson is going to be a first-ballot hall of famer one day and his stats will compare with the all-time greats. They already do in many ways, but when his career is finished everyone will love him the way they are starting to love Jeff Gordon. It is amazing how fan’s attitudes toward a driver turn around after a guy quits winning all the time. Johnson’s time will come. He may not be loved at the moment, but there will be a day when he will be looked at as nothing short of one of the best to ever be in the sport.

Speaking of Jeff Gordon, he had a rough day and caused several other people to have a rough day as well. While Gordon came home fifth, Clint Bowyer finished 31st after Gordon took out both he and Elliot Sadler, who finished 17th. Also, and most notably, Martin Truex Jr. finished 42nd after Gordon spun him out in turn 11 and then Truex got caught up in a big wreck on the next restart.

However, Gordon took full responsibility for all of the mistakes. Truex was pretty upset after the wreck and basically said he was going to pay Gordon back. But, the way Gordon reacted after the race may diminish the likelihood of a payback.

“There are some things that I'm not proud of that I did today; certainly with Martin (Truex, Jr.). I mean, I completely messed that up and I will try to patch that up,” Gordon said. “I feel terrible because Martin races a lot of guys clean out there. He had a good run going and I ruined that for him."

It will be interesting, though, to see if Truex holds a grudge and spins Gordon out at New Hampshire.

Gordon certainly wasn’t the only driver to make a few errors throughout the day. Juan Pablo Montoya intentionally wrecked Joey Logano coming down the back side of the course. Once again, Logano just got shoved out of the way. My question is, does Montoya’s wife where the firesuit in that family now too?

Now the series moves on to New Hampshire, another place where tempers tend to get a tad out of hand at times. The layout of the track makes for tough, close racing, and it is hard to pass. Plus, when Robby Gordon is coming off a second-place run, there might be flashbacks to the 2005 fall race at the track. Enjoy and have a great week.