Fryer's Five: Bye bye Bobby
Business decisions are usually the hardest ones to make, especially when they involve decent people.
So there was nothing easy about Yates Racing's decision to pull former Cup champion Bobby Labonte from the No. 96 car for seven of the remaining 12 races this season.
His sabbatical begins this weekend, at Atlanta of all places, where Labonte made his name with six career victories.
Erik Darnell, an up-and-coming driver stuck in neutral because of the lack of open seats, will make his Sprint Cup Series debut in Labonte's car at Labonte's best track.
Beginning this weekend at Atlanta, Erik Darnell will replace Bobby Labonte for seven of the final 12 races of 2009.
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So how did Labonte take the news?
"Not good," Yates general manager Max Jones said Monday. "I wouldn't have either if I was him. He's a class act; he's a professional. I had to explain my side, why I was doing it, and he wasn't happy about it. But he understood, and I respect that."
This isn't about Labonte, who came to Yates in a last-minute deal that gave the fledgling organization some credibility. Despite its alliance with Roush Fenway Racing, the team could not lure top sponsors or top drivers.
Then a late-December alliance with Hall of Fame Racing brought Yates a funded car with a championship-caliber driver. Labonte and Ask.com fit the program perfectly because it gave the team both a veteran and the money it had lacked all of last season.
But the sponsorship wasn't complete, and Jones still had seven races to fill this year. And let's face it, despite a flash here and there, Yates Racing still is what it is, and not Labonte in his prime, or Jimmie Johnson or Jeff Gordon or Tony Stewart could singlehandedly turn the team into a contender.
So at 45 years old, with just one top-10 finish this season and five consecutive winless years behind him, Labonte becomes a tough sell to sponsors. It doesn't matter that he outruns teammate Paul Menard, who has zero top-10 finishes this season and is 32nd in the standings.
What Labonte has in history – 21 wins and 18 years of professionalism – Menard trumps with a lucrative sponsorship package from his old man's hardware chain. Menard, so long as his dad is paying the bills, is in effect untouchable.
Don't blame Darnell for this, though. Like Labonte, he's a victim of the economy.
He landed a job in the Roush stable, and likely believed he was on the Carl Edwards or Kurt Busch fast track from "Gong Show" to truck ride to Cup stardom. But those career tracks dried up when sponsorship dollars became scarce, and Darnell has been patiently waiting for his shot.
"He deserves this opportunity. He's a really talented race car driver,'' Jones said. "It's taken a lot of guys a long time to move up because of the funding, the opportunities just aren't there. Five or six or eight years ago, you could jump from trucks to Cup. But everything came to a screeching halt a few years ago, and Erik has been waiting for his chance."
It comes at Labonte's expense, because Jones has to think about the future of Yates Racing.
And the future, these days, is about what and who you can sell. He can sell promise in Darnell, who is untested at the highest level. He can sell potential for 2010, when Yates plans to have at least two cars but doesn't have a driver lineup or the sponsorship yet to make any official announcements.
It could be that Labonte will be back with the team, but my guess is he'll be soured by this seven-race injustice and look for something new. It could be Darnell will finally get a Cup ride. Or it could be that Jones is able to find the sponsorship that can keep Jamie McMurray under the Roush umbrella.
Jones doesn't know what's going to happen. He just knows that he had to make a hard decision that ultimately has to the best thing for the race team.
"This is not about Bobby. It's about making sure we have funding for these races," Jones explained. "If it was about Bobby, I would have just put Erik in the car for the rest of the year. That was hard to convey to Bobby.
"But we have this opportunity to get Erik some races and that's the business part of this sport. It's challenging. But you can't let it frustrate you.
"If you let it frustrate you, you won't get it done. It's just challenging times, but the sport is not broken."
Try telling that to Labonte right about now.
1. Poor Marcos Ambrose: If Marcos Ambrose didn't have bad luck in Montreal, he'd have no luck at all.
He's been inching his way toward Victory Lane since NASCAR took the Nationwide Series north to the Circuit Gilles Villeneuve. He led 37 laps in the 2007 debut, but was spun late by Robby Gordon in what developed into an international incident for NASCAR.
Gordon was parked for the next day's Sprint Cup race at Pocono, and as retribution for costing Ambrose his first victory, Gordon gave him a car for the Cup race at Watkins Glen.
That incident may very well be the defining moment of Ambrose's stock-car career. With one spin, he was elevated from NASCAR obscurity and given a platform to showcase the graciousness and professionalism he consistently displays.
Still, he'd have preferred the win. And two years later, he's still searching for it.
He lost a chance at the win last year when a speeding penalty took him out of contention after leading 27 laps, and he was determined not to make the same mistake again. Indeed, he was fine on pit road all race. His mistake this time came in the final turn.
Ambrose led 60 laps Sunday, holding down the top spot on restart after agonizing restart in what developed into the longest race in Nationwide Series history. As the race headed into a green-white-checkered finish, Ambrose finally slipped as the Napa Auto Parts 200 closed in on the four-hour mark.
Ambrose hit the rumble strips in Turn 14, causing his car to slide sideways and give Carl Edwards room to slip by and beat him down the final straightaway.
"I made a mistake on the last corner, the last lap and lost the race because of it," Ambrose said. "It's disappointing, but you have to take the lumps as they come. We led a lot of laps and I'm starting to get annoyed with this track, to be honest with you. That's three years in a row that I have seemed to [have] given it away."
It's easy to say Ambrose's time will come, and eventually he'll break whatever curse seems to follow him into Canada every year. But that's no consolation today for Ambrose, and also no guarantee.
The best of the very best will tell you that losing can play tricks with the mind, and they'll wonder if they will ever win again. Although Ambrose has a win this year, on the road course at Watkins Glen in the Nationwide race, he can't help but believe he should have two victories.
He won't be able to avoid lamenting what slipped away, again, and agonize over what he should have done differently on that final lap.
The bright spot is that Ambrose has proven in the Cup Series to be a burgeoning star. His NASCAR future is firmly in front of him, and there's no reason he should look back for too long on another Montreal disappointment.
2. Kudos to Carl Edwards: It hasn't been a great season for Edwards, who has not lived up to the expectations set for the preseason favorite to dethrone Jimme Johnson in the Cup Series.
He's still seeking his first win of the year in the Cup Series, and it took him 15 races to reach Victory Lane in the Nationwide Series. Hoping for a second Nationwide title, his winless streak allowed Kyle Busch to build a healthy points lead that was starting to look insurmountable.
But Edwards has turned it up a notch over the last six weeks and has considerably closed the gap on Busch.
He was steady through the closing laps Sunday at Montreal, where he put himself in position to capitalize following Ambrose's slip. It gave Edwards his third Nationwide win of the season, and he now trails Busch by only 192 points in the standings.
Since winning in Indianapolis in July, Edwards has five more top-four finishes. A wreck at Michigan is his only blemish, and that 40th-place finish is the only thing standing in the way of a much tighter title race.
He's not out of it, though, and despite his drought in the Cup Series, he's not out of that race, either. The momentum he's building in the Nationwide car could potentially carry over into the Cup car, and Edwards could still get hot enough during the 10-race Chase to contend for the championship.
Although Edwards didn't win at Talladega in April, when he went airborne into the fence on the final lap, just being out front at the end was a significant step in his progress and patience. Montreal has now added a road course win to his resume, which is shaping up nicely as Edwards is excelling at tracks that had troubled him in the past.
People will allege that Edwards inherited Sunday's win when Ambrose coughed it away, but he had to be in position to capitalize. It's up to him to do it again with two titles now on the line.
3. Hey, at least they tried to race in the rain: So it was painful to watch the end of the marathon in Montreal, but give NASCAR credit for pulling out the rain tires this weekend and giving them a shot.
Earlier this month everyone complained when the Cup race at Watkins Glen was held over a day because of rain, and fans questioned why NASCAR didn't use rain tires then. The answer was because the technology is not complete, and the stakes are too high to experiment.
For the second straight year at Montreal, NASCAR utilized rain tires.
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The Nationwide Series is the right place for that, proven last year at Montreal when drivers raced in the rain for the first time in NASCAR history. So there was no hesitation to make Saturday's qualifying session the first ever to be run in the rain. Then with 16 laps to go Sunday and rain falling on the track, NASCAR called the cars to pit road and gave teams five minutes to switch to a wet-weather setup. The decision was made even though it was past the halfway point that made the race official.
It was immediately evident most of the field was not comfortable driving in those conditions. There were 11 cautions all race, and three came in the final 11 laps.
Brad Keselowski, who finished fifth, said racing in the rain transitioned everyone from "race car drivers to daredevils.
"It's self-serving," he continued. "When you're running well and you pass [a] car, it's fun. But when you get wrecked, you think it's the dumbest thing ever. You can't see, and you're in a hairpin corner starting double-file, that's what's going to happen. It's unfortunate. I feel bad for everybody who got wrecked. But that's what this racing is."
The decision to continue the race on rain tires cost Busch, who was collected in an accident during the green-white-checkered finish. It led to a 10th-place finish that cost him ground in the title race with winner Edwards, and Busch's crew chief wondered why NASCAR put the drivers in that position.
"Maybe when it got to looking like a circus or a demolition derby it was time to call it," Jason Ratcliff said. "It's a great idea to come out here and run in the rain. Everybody puts forth a lot of effort, but it wasn't working. It wasn't racing. You couldn't even make a lap without a caution coming out. Basically, you're getting to a point where you're degrading the series. It got to where it was bumper cars."
You can't have it both ways, folks. You can gripe about rainouts and NASCAR's unwillingness to try something new, or you can gripe about what the product ultimately looked like after they tried the rain tires. And you can't overlook that many of those guys out there don't have road course or rain-tire experience, and Steve Wallace is a far cry from Jeff Gordon, Tony Stewart or Juan Pablo Montoya.
Did racing in the rain stink up the show? Depends on how you look at it. But at least NASCAR tried.
4. Now, looking ahead to Atlanta: The Labor Day race is back in the South – where it belongs – and heads to Atlanta for a high-stakes event that could determine the 12-driver Chase field. There are nine spots up for grabs with two races to go, and realistically, only three more – Stewart, Gordon and Jimmie Johnson are already locked into the Chase – will be locked down Sunday.
So it's a big weekend for drivers in the seventh through 14th positions. And it will be a critical race for Brian Vickers and Kyle Busch, the two drivers trying to race their way into the field.
I received an email from a reader who essentially called me an idiot for suggesting Busch may have problems at Atlanta, where he has one win and two top-10s in 10 previous starts. But Busch is worried about this upcoming race, and with good reason.
Busch was 18th at Atlanta during the spring race this year, and struggled to convey why the car had dropped off so far from last season, when he won in his first visit with Joe Gibbs Racing and finished fifth in the fall.
"We have a little bit of work to do. We weren't as good as we needed to be there this spring," he said after last week's win at Bristol put him just 34 points behind Matt Kenseth for the 12th and final Chase berth.
"I think my biggest concern is going to be Atlanta, just trying to get through Atlanta with a solid top-10 finish."
But because Busch is also in the Nationwide race that weekend, which is a condensed two-day show, he'll have little time to sit with crew chief Steve Addington and diagnose the race car. Instead, he'll be running back and forth between cars and hoping Addington can get the setup right.
"That's not going to be much fun for Steve and I trying to communicate," he said. "We'll just have to get together Saturday night after Nationwide or Sunday morning. Talk about what we got, see what we can do to make it better."
Compounding the problem is that Atlanta is one of Vickers' best tracks.
At 14th in the standings and 39 points out of 12th, he's just as much alive for the Chase as Busch. He has five top-10 finishes in 12 Atlanta starts and is looking forward to staking a claim on the Chase there.
He stepped up with a strong 12th-place finish at Bristol, where he was most worried about his Chase position, and now can capitalize on any troubles Busch may have on Sunday.
"Atlanta has always been a really good track," he said, somewhat downplaying his results there. "We've run well there. I think our chances are great. I think we're capable of it, as much or more capable of it than anybody that has an opportunity to make the Chase as of right now."
5. So who is in the most trouble with two races to go? My guess is Kasey Kahne, who is dropping fast in the standings.
He's fallen from seventh to 11th in the past four races, and doesn't have the best track record for stepping up when the Chase is on the line. He failed to qualify in 2004 when he went to Richmond with a chance to race his way in, an opportunity that then-teammate Jeremy Mayfield seized as Kahne was shut out.
For a guy with so much hype, he's only made the Chase once, in 2006 when he finished eighth in what was then a 10-driver field.
Conversely, Matt Kenseth has stepped up every time the Chase is on the line and is one of only two drivers, along with Johnson, to make the field in every season since its 2004 debut.
Kenseth has come from deep in the standings to lock up a berth, and although he's clinging to the 12th-place spot right now, he can't be counted out.
Sure, Kenseth has struggled this season since winning the first two races of the year, but no more than Kahne, who has been up and down and not always thrilled with management at Richard Petty Motorsports.
More telling is that when the stakes are at their highest, Kenseth delivered at Bristol with a 10th-place finish that helped stave off Busch and Vickers. Kahne, meanwhile, was a miserable 28th and three laps off the pace.
It's time to step up, and I'm not so certain that Kahne is in a position to deliver.
