Pre-Phoenix Miscellenia

With the Phoenix 500k beckoning, some miscellenia -

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Matt Borland will not be with Ryan Newman's #12 team the rest of this season. While his departure is reported to be for "personal reasons," it doesn't take much effort to suspect that it's more than that, since the Borland-Newman effort in 2006 has been spotty to say the least.

Borland has been Newman's crew chief throughout his Winston Cup career, and when Roger Penske elevated rookie Newman to the WC level in late 2001 the signs of greatness became clear with a runner-up finish at Kansas. A win at New Hampshire in 2002 followed, and Newman was ready for the next level.

That came when Dodge brought Penske Racing into the fold, in the process sabotaging the One Team approach they'd had from their Truck debut in 1996. Newman and Borland erupted to eight wins in 2003, but the seeds of their downfall were planted by the jealousy of their teammate, Rusty Wallace, who stopped cooperating with the Newman-Borland effort and furiously lobbied NASCAR for a reduction in downforce on the cars and softening of tires - Newman periodically won races by not pitting for fresh tires and thus stretching his fuel, an option made possible by the larger downforce and harder tire package the sport had in place in 2003.

When NASCAR reduced downforce and went with softer tires in 2004, it was advertised as making the racing better. That it did not achieve this result was clear from the start, but for Ryan Newman the results were worse than that, as he slipped to just two wins in 2004 and only one in 2005. He became one of the most prolific pole-winners the sport had ever seen but it never mattered as his races week after week became exercises in frustration. Entering the final races of 2006 Newman is winless, and one cannot feel much confidence in him breaking this skid.

If Borland does not come back to the Penske team, a new chapter in Newman's career will have opened, but one will have to wonder, regardless of who is crew chief is, whether Newman really has the capability of recovering from the downfall from his one season of dominance.

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One should also ask questions about Mark Martin. At the National 500 he plowed into J.J. Yeley as Yeley ducked off of Turn Four to pit. Blame was laid on Yeley, who'd earned the ire of many drivers over the season in general and at Richmond in particular based on scanner quotes. But at Texas during practice Tony Raines began to pit and Martin plowed into him.

What has happened to Mark Martin to get involved in two such incidents within a month of each other?

In a related development, Roush's game of musical crew chiefs continues with the #26 and #99 efforts swapping over chief wrenches - Bob Osborne goes to Edwards and Wally Brown to McMurray. Musical crew chiefs is a game that rarely goes well and tends to be a sign of desperation. The comparative fall of the Roush effort from 2005 can of course be traced to the hiring of Jamie McMurray, the talented but underachieving racer from Joplin, MO to replace Kurt Busch in the 2004-title-winning Ford. It became clear by May that McMurray was not fitting well with the Roush effort, and getting all five cars to run on the same page was disrupted enough that, even though the organization is among the biggest in racing, it's become less of a sure thing to see a Roush Ford win.

So the question becomes - does McMurray need a new crew chief, or does he have to adjust his driving style to what works for the Roush oragnization?

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There's been more talk from Greg Pollex about Buschwacking and how an eventual conversion to "IROC" body styles - Mustangs, Camaros, etc. - may help alleviate the practice. I'm amazed it has not been pointed out that those body styles in NASCAR trim won't handle that differently from what is run at the Winston Cup level; one should look at tracks like Stafford Speddway in CT where Late Model drivers jump into SK Modifieds and vice versa - Todd Owen is the best individual example - and get a performance edge because they ran the previous feature that night and gained that extra realtime track knowledge.

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Kyle Petty had been sleepwalking for some time as a racer. Critics have often put the mouth to him that he was never serious nor talented enough to race Winston Cup, and that isn't fair. What is fair is to say he had not pushed the pedal hard enough the last few years, especially when Robbie Loomis took control of the racing arm of Petty Enterprises and Bobby Labonte, a driver whose style and personality get along with Kyle's close enough to make mutal feedback work, joined the #43.

When the playoff period of the Winston Cup season began, they made a crew chief change, slotting Paul Andrews with the #43 and bringing Bill Wilburn to the #45. To say that it's worked well is an understatement, especially for Labonte and Andrews, whose competitive spark has been rather astounding. More importantly, what Wilburn has brought to Kyle's effort has been not just changing chassis geometries and other hardware aspects - he's brought a take-charge approach as a crew chief. And the improvement in Kyle Petty's driving has become tangible, to where entering Phoenix Kyle can put some distance back into the top-35 lock-in area of owner points. From where Kyle had fallen this season, this is improvement upon which to keep building for 2007.

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The story goes that NASCAR dyno-tested Truck engines after Texas and Toyota outpulled everyone else in power. The question thus becomes - given how thoroughly Toyota has crushed everyone else in Trucks, will there be a change like the cylinder-width reduction that hurt Dodge's effort after 2002?

And so it is with Phoenix around the corner.