Rating the Pennsylvania 400: 1 Stars *

A Sunday afternoon destined to be cut short by rain ended in tragedy with a big thunderstorm at Pocono Raceway. Jeff Gordon happened to sit in first place as the rains came, but the final race of the year at Pocono gets a 1 Star Rating.

The race really doesn’t matter following the death of a fan and injuries to nine others who were struck by lightning at the racetrack after officials ended the race on lap 98, and there is no way it could get a higher rating amid such a devastating event.

With that in mind, let’s take a look at what happened before the storm Sunday at Pocono.

After a season filled with about every different type of disappointment imaginable, Gordon made a withdrawal from the luck bank when Jimmie Johnson, Matt Kenseth and the rest of the frontrunners tried to make it through Turn 1 sideways on the final restart.

Sure, Gordon and his team worked hard to get him in position to sneak through for a win, but he still caught one heck of a lucky break.

The same thing happened for Ryan Newman at Martinsville when Clint Bowyer took out Johnson and Gordon in Turn 1 on the final restart. Now Newman and Gordon are tied for the final wild-card spot, with Gordon winning the tiebreaker because he has more top-five finishes.

Maybe the final wild-card spot should be renamed the lucky card if one of those two drivers makes the Chase based on their lone win.

Sunday’s race actually had a fair amount of action for a rain-shortened event at Pocono. Yes, Johnson jumped out and paced the field by four seconds or so for a while, but the leaders stayed close during several runs, especially compared to most races at Pocono or most of the races this season.

Perhaps it’s fitting a Hendrick Motorsports car won the race because that organization again dominated the day. Dale Earnhardt Jr. charged to the front early in the race and would’ve been in strong contention for the win if his transmission hadn’t broke. Kasey Kahne had the second-best car at the start of the race and then Johnson made his usual run to the front.

Hendrick Motorsports could have placed four cars in the top five if not for bad Johnson and Earnhardt Jr.’s problems.

With all of the crazy issues throughout the day, Kyle Busch came out as the biggest loser. A problem with the back of his car sent him into the Turn 1 wall on lap 19 and he finished 33^rd. More importantly, he scored just 11 points and now sits 15^th in the points standings with one win. He came into the race 11^th in the points and in position for the second wild card. He is now 12 points behind Gordan and Newman for that spot.

Either way, a big-name driver is going to miss the Chase this year.

Next up for the Sprint Cup Series is the road course of Watkins Glen. Marcos Ambrose and Juan Pablo Montoya will likely receive all sorts of attention and people will say they have a chance to make the Chase if they can win that race.

Well, technically they would have a chance, but neither car is running well enough these days to pose a real threat to the drivers currently in the wild-card positions. It would be great for Ambrose or Montoya to get a win, but let’s not push the issue too far.

Kahne, Gordon, Newman or Busch will be the wild-card drivers this year. Even Carl Edwards would have to mount a charge in an incredibly short amount of time to make the Chase.

He likely won’t win next week at Watkins Glen, so that means he has just Bristol, Atlanta and Richmond to make the Chase. He could catch fire and win two of those three races, but there is little reason to think that will happen based on his performance so far this season.

Anyway, have a great week and pray for those who were affected by the lightning strike at Pocono.

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.

Rating the Good Sam RV Insurance 500: 2 Stars **

The incredible storylines just keep coming this season as Brad Keselowski wins just days after a horrific crash at a test earlier in the week that broke his left ankle. However, the race took forever and the real battles didn’t happen until the very end. Race #2 at Pocono gets a 2 Star Rating.

Good strategy put Keselowski up front after a rain delay of nearly two hours, but after the rain Keselowski ran a perfect race to bring home his second win of the year after holding off a hard-charging Kyle Busch.

NASCAR couldn’t have asked for a better scenario to play out as the season heads toward the Chase. All of a sudden there are guys like Keselowski, Paul Menard and David Ragan in serious contention for a Chase spot.

That would have been unthinkable in past years. Guys like Greg Biffle and Clint Bowyer are supposed to fill out the Chase field, not newcomers and guys that have been second-tier drivers for several years.

Also, who would’ve guessed Keselowski and Menard would be two of the contenders for the Sprint Summer Showdown? All of a sudden they, a charity and a fan could each have an extra $1 million if they win Labor Day weekend at Atlanta. Maybe a regular suspect will once again grab a win and make the world feel normal again.

There is just something different about this season. In a normal year, Kyle Busch would have jumped out on the final restart and driven away, or he would have at least run Keselowski down, passed him and driven on to a relatively uneventful victory.

Not this year. This year anybody can win. Keselowski’s win Sunday is the sixth “surprise” win of the season, a win by somebody that doesn’t typically fill up the prerace shows or receive attention once the Chase starts to take shape.

Last year there were only five surprise wins, and that’s if you include Jamie McMurray’s three wins and Juan Pablo Montoya’s win at Watkins Glen.

One would think this crazy stretch of different winners will come to an end soon, but Watkins Glen is often a crap shoot. People may have thought a Penske Racing car might win at Pocono, but that would almost certainly have been Kurt Busch’s #22 car, especially with Keselowski trying to drive with a broken ankle.

Shoot, most people wouldn’t drive their passenger car with a broken ankle, much less spend what turned out to be five-and-a-half hours slogging through 500 miles while driving as fast as possible around one of the most difficult tracks in the country.

The other interesting deal in Sunday’s race was the final laps battle between Jimmie Johnson and Kurt Busch. They had a great battle, but started beating on each other between turns 1 and 2. That led to a discussion on pit road and a possible feud that could really spice up the rest of the season.

The five-time champion wouldn’t step into a feud late in the year, would he? Well, he’s certainly picked a battle with somebody who doesn’t worry about showing people he’s upset with them. Just think, Johnson and Busch in a tight battle during the Chase. Oh, that would be fun.

Rating the Heluva Good! Sour Cream Dips at the Glen: 2 Stars **

After the long trek that was the race at Pocono a week ago, the race at the Glen Sunday finished in nearly half the time. But, half the time did not mean twice the excitement; the top six finishers were in the top six nearly all 90 laps. The final road course race of the season gets a 2 Star Rating.

On a positive note, Juan Pablo Montoya’s victory was huge for himself and the entire #42 team, including his crew chief, Brian Pattie. The season has been a struggle for this team, and lately it seemed every call Pattie made turned out in a negative fashion. Sometimes the world seems lined up against someone, and Pattie has been fighting it for the past month or so.

However, this week everything came out perfectly for Pattie and the #42 team. Plus, Chip Ganassi’s magical year continues as he adds not only another win in 2010, but he also became the first car owner in NASCAR to have each of his teams win a race this season. This marks the first time an owner has accomplished such a feat since Roger Penske, of all people, did it with Ryan Newman and Kurt Busch in 2008. No matter where the #42 and #1 end up in the final standings, this has been a special season for the Earnhardt-Ganassi Racing organization.

As for the race itself, the battle between Montoya and Marcos Ambrose early in the race was as good as it gets on a road course. Two of the best road course drivers in NASCAR were going at it as hard as possible. For Ambrose, although he didn’t win, this was still a very successful weekend. A win in the Nationwide race and third in the Cup race is something many drivers would consider a dream weekend. And, if Ambrose does stay in NASCAR and makes a move to the #9 car, he is still going to have an excellent chance to win races in his career.

The theme of the 2010 season has been drivers’ battles on the track that lead to heated moments off of it. This week Boris Said and Tony Stewart, along with Jeff Burton and Kyle Busch, came home with different views of how the race went Sunday. Said and Stewart locked horns coming out of Turn 1, and Stewart spun Said into the fence. Later in the race, Busch and Burton, now in their third spat this season, collided as Busch tried to push the issue out of Turn 6, nudged Burton into Jimmie Johnson and spun the #48 out.

Overall, the racing for much of this season has been better than in past years, and now we have a battle for the final spot in the Chase on our hands. Mark Martin and Clint Bowyer are now separated by only 10 points with four races until the cutoff. It never fails. If NASCAR set the limit at 25 drivers in the Chase, the battle for that 25th spot would be as tight as any throughout the standings.

Next week things straighten out as the series moves to Michigan. Expect plenty of green-flag racing with a possibility of a fuel-mileage finish. There haven’t been many fuel-mileage races this season with all of the late cautions. That just means we’re due for one right about now, and Michigan seems to be the last realistic chance of such a finish before the Chase begins.

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

The second and final road course race of the season brought with it lots of turns, strategy, and big hits. But, this week it’s up to you to put a rating on what you saw/heard/followed on Monday. Thankfully the race went off at noon ET or else the race may have been shortened due to weather because the drops started to fall during post-race interviews. So, take a look at the Rating System and sound off on what you thought of the race.

Tony Stewart and the #14 team continued their roll towards the Chase this weekend. This is shaping up to be a Johnson vs. Stewart battle to the finish. But, there are plenty of other drivers that could put up a good fight.

My question along with the rating is who do you think will still be in contention for the Championship come the final race at Homestead? Will it be a runaway the way Stewart did in 2005, or will it be a several driver battle to the final lap? While both scenarios are entirely possible it has been awhile since there has been a really good fight for the title in the final race. The first Chase Championship in 2004 comes to mind but other than that there have not been any hold your breath finishes to the season. It would be nice to have something like that shape up this season.

Alright, the rating is in your hands this week. Good or bad, the race had several storylines and subplots that will carry on later in the season. Several guys that needed to survive Watkins Glen were able to get out with a top 15 finish, while other Chase contenders were stuck in the back of the pack nearly all race long.

Anyway, next week is the final fuel strategy track for awhile, as Bristol comes up following Michigan. So enjoy another short week as the fight for the Chase heats up with Kyle Busch inching ever closer to getting his spot in the Chase back. When the Shrub has to go all out every week, things are bound to be interesting.