AUTO RACING ROUNDUP News and notes

Newman dreads Talladega: Coming off a victory last Sunday in Dover, there are a lot of racetracks Ryan Newman would rather be facing than Talladega Superspeedway. Like Daytona International Speedway, Talladega is a track where NASCAR requires horsepower-sapping carburetor restrictor plates to keep the Nextel Cup cars under 200 mph. The plates do their job well, but they also tend to turn the races on the two big ovals into 500 miles of high speed rush hour traffic -- huge packs of cars two- and three-wide at speeds above 190 mph. In turn, that close racing often produces at least one massive crash. And, right now, neither Newman nor any of the other nine drivers who are part of the first 10-man, 10-race Chase for the Nextel Cup championship can afford a wreck. "I think that I make it quite clear that restrictor-plate tracks are not favorites of mine," said Newman, who enters the third race of the playoff-style championship eighth in the standings. He is 107 points behind leader Jeff Gordon, a deficit made daunting by an engine failure two weeks ago in New Hampshire. People often take that as meaning that I don't like the restrictor plates, but it goes beyond that," Newman added. "I truly don't like tracks that have an 'out of bounds' line. To me, that's just not racing." The outspoken third-year NASCAR driver was referring to the yellow lines that NASCAR has placed in the turns at Talladega and Daytona, along the bottom edge of the banked tracks, to keep cars from causing a dangerous situation or gaining advantage by shortcutting the corners. Then there is the not-so-small matter of avoiding the almost inevitable multicar crash. "I think everybody's question going in is it going to be crazy or is it going to be relaxed? I think it has more potential to be crazy, but at the same time we never know," Newman said. "The biggest crashes we've had at Talladega have been because of blown tires and cut tires because of debris. Those things aren't related to crazy drivers or the point system or anything else." Whatever his reasons for disliking Talladega's 2.66-mile oval, Newman does have one top five finish -- fourth in this race last year -- and two top 10s in six starts at the Alabama track. He finished 11th there in the spring race this year. He is well aware the key in Sunday's EA Sports 500 will be to avoid crashing and keep working his way toward the top of the standings. "Talladega, although not a race we look forward to, offers the same amount of points that all the other races do," he said. "So, with that in mind, our team looks at it like every other race. We do all that we can to win the race and get the most possible bonus points. We're definitely excited after our win at Dover. It just felt good to go out there and truly have a great day. We're on a high right now, and historically our hot streaks last about 10 races, so we'll see what happens."
Wild card: Kurt Busch is convinced that Sunday's race at Talladega will go a long way toward determining who is going to remain in contention for the Cup championship, even though there will still be seven races left. "Talladega is definitely going to be the wild card in the Chase for the Nextel Cup," said Busch, who trails leader Jeff Gordon by just one point. According to Busch, who won at New Hampshire and finished fifth at Dover, the Talladega race is one long crapshoot. "If you're running in the top five during the race, usually you're single file and out of the three-wide pack," he explained. "That's something you try to position yourself for. If you're stuck in the middle of the pack, there's not much you can do. You don't want to get caught up in that big wreck, so you have to decide if you want to go forward or if you want to hang out in the back and wait for a pit stop to jumble up the field." Even qualifying up front isn't necessarily much help after the first few laps. "You can get shuffled to the back quickly if you get into the wrong draft," Busch said. "We'll just see how it shakes up. We're second by a single point, but I have a feeling that could change pretty drastically considering how these restrictor-plate races tend to go."
Safer track: Martinsville Speedway, which will host a Cup race Oct. 24, is the latest NASCAR track to have completed the installation of energy absorbing SAFER barriers. "We always want our competitors to be as safe as they possibly can be and the SAFER barriers were the next logical step in that direction," said track president Clay Campbell. "I know firsthand from my Late Model Stock experience that hitting the wall is never fun, but at least with the SAFER barriers we have lessened the impact of the hit." The Steel and Foam Energy Reduction barriers were developed at the University of Nebraska and are affixed to the concrete walls. At Martinsville, they cover just over a half-mile of the .526-mile paperclip-shaped oval. With the work done at Martinsville, all but a handful of NASCAR oval tracks have now been fitted for the SAFER barriers, with the rest scheduled to be done by early in 2005.
Associated Press