Defending Brickyard champ McMurray hopes to erase some of awful 2011 season

By Jim Pedley

Sporting News NASCAR Wire Service

Jamie McMurray was delicately asked about scenarios which could still get him into this year’s Chase for the Sprint Cup Championship. McMurray wasn’t having any of that kind of talk.

“Yeah, I’m not thinking that anyway,” McMurray said.

But while McMurray has all but written off a berth in the playoffs, which are now just seven races away, he does not sound ready to spend the rest of 2011 riding around wasting expensive racing fuel. He most certainly will not be doing that this weekend.

Sunday’s race — the Brickyard 400 — is at the most famous race track in the world. And McMurray will be walking the garages, pits and Gasoline Alley as the defending champion and thinking a repeat victory could take a bit of the bite out of a very frustrating season.

“Indy is a special race for all of the teams,” McMurray said. “Everyone wants to win at the Brickyard. This is one of the races that all drivers and teams specially prepare for. The teams build new cars, the engine shops get their best engines prepared, there is just a lot of emphasis on this race.”

Chase contender or not. And McMurray is probably not.

The 35-year-old Missourian will arrive at historic Indianapolis Motor Speedway in the depths of train wreck of a season which is being made even grislier coming on the heels of his best NASCAR season.

The winner of not just the Brickyard in 2010, but also the Daytona 500 and fall race at Charlotte, McMurray today is 29th in points — 170 out of the 10th and final Chase slot.

Not even a victory at Indy — or some other event held before the Chase starts at Chicagoland Speedway in mid-September — would likely be enough to get him a wild card berth as he’s 100 points out of 20th place.

“There’s three or four guys that have won races that are all, I don’t know, from 14th to 15th to 22nd in points, somewhere in there,” McMurray said. “Even winning one race, I don’t think you’d get the wild card because of the points you’d have to make up. Maybe if you win a couple, you would have a shot at that.

“But honestly, I mean, our goal right now for the rest of the year is just to get our team back where it was at this time last year and hopefully to be more consistent in the races.”

McMurray said the problem this year has been consistently bad luck.

“It’s the same thing,” he said. “We’re on our third engine failure of the year, we broke one transmission. It feels like if we do have a race that things start going our way, then you have a flat tire. We’ve had six or eight flat tires this year. Ran out of gas at Loudon. It just seems like if it could go wrong, it has.”

McMurray believes things could go right this weekend for him. Not only does he have the victory at Indy, he also has three other top-10 finishes there.

“To me,” McMurray said, “Indy is one of those tracks that if you like the track, it tends that the same guys always run well there.”