Championship Season
Racers Fall Below Season Expectations
With thirteen races now finished, it is clear which drivers were the pleasant surprises of the 2009 Sprint Cup season. Making NASCAR news is a small group of top-ranking drivers. The Stewart-Haas Racing drivers Tony Stewart and Ryan Newman have surpassed any speculations established in the preseason. Michael Waltrip Racing driver David Reutimann is having a career season, as he recently scored a victory at Lowe’s Motor Speedway. There is little separating him from the top twelve.
Part-time Sprint Cup driver Brad Keselowski is another first-time winner in 2009. He also won at Talladega driving for James Finch’s independent racing team, Phoenix Racing.
Other pleasant surprises include former open-wheel icons Juan Pablo Montoya and Sam Hornish Jr, both showing perceptible improvement since the 2008 season.
Now, there have also been disappointments in NASCAR, both with drivers and teams that have had less than stellar scores.
It appears that Dale Earnhardt Jr holds the top spot for disappointments of 2009. Back in 2008, when Earnhardt Jr became a member of Hendrick Motorsports, he was touted as the best of the four-car team. As the season got underway, other teams began to close the gap until Earnhardt was slipping behind his competitors. He has yet to recapture the magic he and Tony Eury Jr found in the early months of the 2008 season. Consequently, Rick Hendrick has replaced crew chief Eury Jr with Lance McGrew. McGrew is now the interim crew chief for Earnhardt Jr.
Even when his performance is good, Earnhardt Jr is trying to hold up to serious expectations;when he struggles, it is almost impossible to meet them. NASCAR’s most popular driver must improve quickly in order to rid himself of all of the negative press.
Kevin Harvick qualified for the Chase for the Championship in every season from 2006 to 2008 and won six races in that span. Now, he is struggling to salvage what’s left of a season that has proved just about as bad as his 2002 sophomore slump. At this point, Harvick, who hasn’t had a win since the 2007 Daytona 500, has enormous odds against a fourth appearance in the Chase for the Championship.
Harvick is not the only racer from his racing team that is drowning weaker track performance. Those other drivers that make up the Richard Childress Racing team have all underperformed during the last year, particularly Clint Bowyer. After an impressive start to the 2009 season, Bowyer has finished outside of the top ten in each of the previous seven races leading up to the Pocono 500. Jeff Burton has kept up his consistency, but it is a fact that the team’s performance as a whole is lower . Casey Mears encountered a very slow start to the season, but he has scored two top ten finishes in the last four races.
Rivaling Earnhardt Jr and Harvick as the largest disappointments include Roush Fenway Racing driver David Ragan. This marks another series of pockmarks reported by NASCAR news sources. It was suggested that Ragan was the most improved driver of 2008, but he has since become a disappointing statistic. After finishing thirteenth in the championship standings in 2008, many NASCAR news groups and analysts project that Ragan would be one of the twelve drivers fighting for the Sprint Cup championship. Unfortunately, for Ragan, he only scored one top ten finish in the first thirteen races. Something is definitely off with this team.
For Carl Edwards, a teammate of Ragan, the 2008 season was marked by a Sprint series-high nine races. After thirteen races, Edwards has yet to perform his race-winning celebratory back flip. Still, with Edwards ranked in the top twelve in the championship standings, his record has been a bit of let down, as it has been for other members of the No. 99 group.
Show Clips: “That Championship Season”
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