NASCAR ROUNDUP \ News and notes

Burton: Safety changes needed: Despite all the safety improvements in recent years, stock car racing remains a very dangerous sport. That was never more evident than last Sunday when four-time champion Jeff Gordon had a brutal crash at Las Vegas Motor Speedway, hitting the unprotected inside wall on the backstretch right at an opening designed to allow safety vehicles to enter the track. Gordon wasn’t injured, but the wreck has raised questions about what additional steps can be taken to make the tracks safer, including adding more of the energy-absorbing SAFER barriers that already line large portions of the outer and inner walls at most of the NASCAR venues. “Without mincing words, last week’s incident and how Jeff hit the wall in a word is inexcusable,” Jeff Burton said Friday at Atlanta Motor Speedway. Burton, one of the leading spokesmen for safety initiatives among the Sprint Cup drivers, said he does give the tracks credit for all the money and effort they have put into making things safer for fans, drivers and pit crew members. “The thing that I’ve been saying for seven years, six years, is that we can never be as safe as we can be,” Burton said. “If we ever get to the point where we quit looking to be better, we’re going to quit being better, and the wall last week is a good example of that. We know that a wall that is shaped like that is wrong. We know that. But yet it was still there.” Burton said everybody involved needs to be aware of things like the opening in the Las Vegas wall that pose a potential danger. “We as drivers need to be willing to look at the walls and say, ‘That’s a potential problem.’ The racetracks need to do it and NASCAR needs to do it,” Burton noted. “So we had three groups that in my opinion [dropped] the ball. That includes me.”

Getting better: After suffering through a miserable season in 2007, Kasey Kahne is off to a strong start with three straight top-10 finishes. Heading into Sunday’s Kobalt Tools 500, Kahne is third in the standings, trailing only Kyle Busch and Daytona 500 winner Ryan Newman. “As far as we were off at times last year, it was kind of tough to know exactly where we’d be this year,” the Gillett Evernham Motorsports driver said. “I think right now we’re from fifth to 10th and maybe better. I think this would be a great weekend to step it up and get into the top five.” Everyone is working with NASCAR’s bigger, bulkier Car of Tomorrow, which is being used for the entire season in 2008 after a 16-race trial last year. GEM and several of the other Dodge teams appear to have figured out the new cars on the intermediate tracks, like the 1.5-mile Atlanta oval. Kahne said his team has learned a lot in the first three races this year, all on tracks where the CoT was raced for the first time. “We tested at those tracks and we’ve tested at this track,” he said. “All these tracks are tracks that everybody has had the same amount of time on. We keep learning more and more about what we’re working with ... It’s been pretty fun, pretty exciting and, when you have a good race car, it makes it more fun to drive.”

Interested observer: A.J. Allmendinger is trying hard to be patient and understanding, even though it goes against his grain as a racer. The former open-wheel star lost his ride in the Red Bull Racing No. 84 Cup car to veteran Mike Skinner — at least temporarily — after failing to qualify for the first three races of the season. Friday, Allmendinger was in Atlanta and spending time with the Red Bull team, but only to watch and learn from Skinner. “I know I have the ability and the confidence that I can do this,” Allmendinger said. So, what happened? “I think the biggest thing is the Friday pressure,” said Allmendinger, who spent all of last year, his rookie season, and the start of this year having to qualifying for the races because his car was not among the top 35 in owner points.

Associated Press