Fryer’s Five: Hamlin plays second fiddle

Denny Hamlin won at Martinsville Speedway for the second time.

There ya go, Denny. There’s your top billing.

In the midst of yet another championship year for Jimmie Johnson, everybody else is feeling a bit ignored. It’s Johnson this and Johnson that as the three-time defending Sprint Cup champion marches toward a record fourth title, and his dominance has left little room in the spotlight for anybody else.

So after Hamlin beat Johnson on Sunday at Martinsville for his career-best third victory of the season, Hamlin challenged the media to give his win some attention.

“I’m sure on the Web sites tomorrow there will be … 12 stories, and there will be one about how much this guy lost to Jimmie, how much this guy lost to Jimmie, how much Jimmie gained,” Hamlin said. “Stretched his point lead will be about three or four stories, and then mine will be in that little column, ‘Denny Hamlin wins at Martinsville for the second time.’…”

He sure did, holding on over several late restarts next to Johnson to grab the victory he could have had in the spring. Hamlin was leading late in the March race when Johnson knocked him out of his way to grab his fifth win in six races at Martinsville.

Hamlin was deeply disappointed by that defeat, but turned it into a learning experience and vowed to himself that he would not let Johnson do that to him again. And, if given the chance, he’d return the favor.

But NASCAR had yet to establish the double-file restart rule when Johnson beat Hamlin in March, so the circumstances were different on Sunday. Johnson had restarted in the spring on Hamlin’s back bumper, making it easier to nudge him out of the way.

The double-file restarts had them lined up side-by-side on Sunday, and it gave Hamlin the peace of mind he needed to hold off the champion.

“You actually feel a little bit better with him being on the outside of you than you do right behind you on a restart,” he said. “If I can clear him, then he’s going to have to deal with the guy running third, and it looked like they kind of were mixing it up a little bit, so that helped me stretch it out a little bit.”

Hamlin’s victory moved him up two spots in the Chase for the Sprint Cup championship standings to ninth, but still a whopping 352 points behind Johnson. It doesn’t at all indicate how strong Hamlin has been in this Chase, leading at least one lap in five of the six races so far, but failing to secure the finishes he needed to stay in contention.

One, the wreck while leading late at California, was his fault. But the mechanical failure at Charlotte two races ago was out of his control, and it officially sunk his title chances.

Had Hamlin’s engine made it to the end at Charlotte, maybe it would have been him celebrating in victory lane after the race instead of Johnson. And then maybe he still moves on to Martinsville and Sunday’s result is the same.

Then all of a sudden he’s perhaps back in the title hunt, sharing some of Johnson’s spotlight.

But that’s not the way it worked out, and the facts remain the same: Johnson has not made mistakes and has not suffered any bad luck. He’s won three of the six Chase races and has commanding control of the title hunt.

There’s not a lot anyone can do, Hamlin included, to change the facts.

But, there are non-Johnson stories out there. Here are five of them:

1. Mark Martin isn’t ready to wave the white flag:

The sentimental favorite to win the championship this season has seen his shot at his first Cup title slip away the past two weeks.

Martin’s 90-point deficit stretched to 118 points after Martinsville, where he finished eighth to lose more ground on his Hendrick Motorsports teammate.

Talladega, though, remains the wild card, and Martin has refused to count himself out of contention until after this weekend’s race. Martin has made no secret over the years of his dislike for the Alabama race track, where he has two career victories, five DNFs due to accidents and 11 finishes of 30th or worse.

The good news? He finished last there in April, and odds are pretty good he’ll have a better finish this weekend.

“Somehow or another I just feel lucky about this one,” Martin said recently. “If you can wreck on lap five of the last one there, something tells me I ought to be able to miss it this time. That’s about as bad of luck as you can have.”

Martin is still second in the points, and for as much as he wants to give crew chief Alan Gustafson and the No. 5 team a title, he’s never made this year about winning a championship. A four-time runner-up for the Cup championship, he long ago learned heartache is not the end result of a five-win season.

“I don’t want having an incredible year to cause us to be disappointed by not scoring more points than everybody in the thing,” Martin explained. “We will win it if it’s meant to be. But if it’s not, we won’t. We’re giving it everything we’ve got.”

2. Thank goodness Juan Pablo Montoya has a sense of humor:

The Colombian driver brushed off the offensive “joke” made by ESPN college football commentator Bob Griese over the weekend, and it wasn’t about taking the high road.

Montoya has never let his nationality define him during his racing career, proven several times this season when he was asked about the significance of potentially becoming the first foreign-born champion in NASCAR. He consistently dismissed the relevance, and has chosen not to make being a Colombian – as opposed to, say, being a Californian – an issue.

So he didn’t get worked up about Griese, who when asked Saturday where Montoya was in an ESPN promo for Sunday’s race responded that the driver “was out having a taco.” Griese has apologized twice on-air since making the remark.

Montoya said he only heard about it in passing.

“Somebody mentioned it to me,” he said. “I don’t really care to tell you the truth. Yeah, I don’t. I could say I spent the last three hours eating tacos, but I was actually driving a car.”

Johnson, who had just taken his seat next to Montoya on the podium, then jumped in.

“Can you save some tacos for me?” he asked Montoya. “I love tacos.”

Everyone was laughing in the end, but I still wonder if the remark had been made about a star in one of the four major sports, would anyone have found it funny?

3. Kyle Busch showed signs of life at Martinsville:

His fourth-place finish was the highest for Busch since he missed the Chase six weeks ago, and that’s not at all how anyone expected Busch to respond to his adversity.

When he failed to make the 10-driver field, the belief was that Busch would roll off a string of dominating runs to make his presence known during the Chase. Instead, he’s flown so far under the radar that his crummy finishes at Dover, Kansas and Fontana went mostly unnoticed.

Granted, he battled a bout of pneumonia during that time and David Gilliland actually finished the race for him at Fontana, where Busch was credited with a 24th-place finish.

So it was good to see him snap back on Sunday, when he charged through the field from the 41st-starting spot to grab his best finish since his win at Bristol in August. He has four more weeks to salvage this season, but larger issues remain with his Joe Gibbs Racing team.

Namely, will Busch be back with crew chief Steve Addington next season?

What seemed to be a non-issue just six weeks ago has suddenly gathered steam as JGR officials continue to ponder how to get Busch to the next level.

Team president J.D. Gibbs believes much of Busch’s issues right now are confidence-related – when he’s winning, he’s unstoppable, but when Busch is in a slump it seriously messes with his mind.

But that doesn’t mean his crew is immune from changes.

“As far as the Addington crew piece, from our standpoint, we just want to make sure we have the right tools, the right people in the right place at JGR,” Gibbs said. “We think we do. We think we have a great group of crew chiefs to engineers to guys on the shop floor, across the whole board.”

What’s happened to Busch this season is not Addington’s fault. And remember, Addington is the guy who helped Busch rocket out of the gate following his firing from Hendrick Motorsports.

Together, they’ve won 12 races over the past two seasons, including four this season, and had it not been for several fluke incidents Busch would have made the Chase.

If JGR plans to replace Addington, and the logical choice would be with Nationwide Series crew chief Dave Rogers, one would think the team would do it sooner than later. Why not get a head start on 2010 if the plan is to make a change?

Then again, maybe getting ready for next season has nothing to do with Addington at all.

4. There’s some hard racing going on behind Johnson:

Namely between Montoya and Jeff Gordon, who traded a little, uh, paint on Sunday.

The two bumped each other a bit at Martinsville, and Montoya’s aggression led Gordon to wonder if he’d done something to make Montoya mad.

“I didn’t understand why he was just driving into me for no reason,” Gordon said. “But hey, that is Martinsville. That’s kind of the way he drives. And I just tried not to make him mad anymore and race him as clean as I could. I hope it’s not something that transfers over because I don’t know really what I did, if I did do something.”

Truth is, Montoya has been frustrated with Gordon for some time, and it boiled over two races ago at Charlotte. Although Montoya’s race was ruined on a restart when he drove into the back of Clint Bowyer, and Martin drove into the back of Montoya to cause damage to both ends of the No. 42, Montoya immediately placed blame for the incident on Gordon.

Over his radio he complained to his crew that the traffic stack-up would not have happened if not for the way Gordon, the leader at the time, restarted the race. Montoya also griped that Gordon had mastered his technique on restarts in a way that messed with the cars behind him.

So, yeah, Montoya had a short fuse Sunday. But once off the race track, he said “we’re OK,” after speaking with Gordon.

“It’s just every time we’ve been around him racing against him, he runs the hell out of me,” Montoya said. “He moved me out of the way before, and he was starting to do the same here. You know, I was running the outside of him and every time, he was just getting wider and wider.

“It’s OK. I never really had a big problem with him, but he’s always so hard to race against. But he probably says the same thing against me.”

5. There have been few updates on the status of the merger between Richard Petty Motorsports and Yates Racing:

But one would believe the deal is still on track based on word that Elliott Sadler will drive a Yates Ford this weekend at Talladega.

It appears that might open the door for AJ Allmendinger to get into a Ford before the end of the season, as well.

George Gillett, majority owner of RPM, has said the team will be in Fords next season regardless of whether the deal goes through or not. But the fact that Yates is providing RPM a car at least signals that the deal is still alive.

There’s probably still a ton of issues looming – remember, Gillett wasn’t sure where the engines will come from, which shop the new team will use, who will drive for RPM next season, and how many cars the new team will field – but getting a Ford on the track now is the first step to making sure they are ready for 2010.

The rest will apparently be sorted out as we go.