■ 26 February 2009 | 7:41 AM
Previewing Las Vegas
Here's a look at notes, quotes and other items as the series heads to Las Vegas this weekend.
# Top Dogs at Las Vegas
Matt Kenseth avg. finish 9.0 … 2 wins & 4 top fives … finished 20th last year
Jimmie Johnson avg. finish 9.3 ...3 wins & 3 top fives …finished 29th last year
Jeff Burton avg. finish 10.5 …….2 wins & 4 top fives … finished 5th last year
Carl Edwards avg. finish 11.8 … 1 win & 1 top five ……Won last year’s race.
Kyle Busch avg. finish 13.2 ……0 wins & 2 top fives … finished 11th last year
Tony Stewart avg. finish 14.4 …0 wins & 4 top fives … finished 43rd last year
Greg Biffle avg. finish 14.6 ……0 wins & 1 top five … finished 3rd last year
Jeff Gordon avg. finish 14.9 …. 1 win & 5 top fives … finished 35th last year
OTHER NOTES:
Kurt Busch has started in the top 10 in all eight of his previous appearances at Vegas. He’s expected again to have the new R6P8 Cup engine in his car this weekend.
Matt Kenseth, Tony Stewart and Kurt Busch are the only drivers to score top-10s in each of the first two races this season.
Matt Kenseth’s 438 laps led at Vegas are the most in track history.
Denny Hamlin has never finished worse than 10th in three career starts at Vegas.
The pole-sitter has never won gone on to win the race at Las Vegas.
Jimmie Johnson is the track’s all-time winner with three victories. Other former winners at Las Vegas include Matt Kenseth, Jeff Burton, Carl Edwards, Jeff Gordon, Mark Martin and Sterling Marlin.
# Quotes
# Ryan Newman on his tough luck the first two races of the season (comments from his weekly release)
“It has definitely been an interesting couple of weeks for the team. You want to sit back and just say ‘What else?’ But you have to keep on working through it. Luck is a big part of racing. You can have the best car at the track all day, have a huge lead and have some freak issue occur one corner from the end of the race – and that’s it. You went from the first car to the last car. Unfortunately, we’ve been on the bad luck side of things for the last two races. It isn’t the first time I’ve had bad luck. I’m just ready for my luck to change.
“A few years ago, my friend Buddy Baker bought me a little stuffed animal. It was a monkey, and he bought it for me because he said I needed to get it off my back. Well, I think it has reattached. At California, we had the transponder stop working. We lost our track position when one of our end plates broke off the rear wing. Then, about 15 laps from the end, we caught a windshield tear-off smack dab on the grill and it pegged both gauges, so I had to come back in and we lost another lap. We’ve had some really snake-bitten luck. The only thing that I can tell the guys is that our luck will change. The bad part is we don’t know when, but we do know that on the other side of bad luck is a streak of good luck. So, as a team, we have to keep hitting our marks, pushing the pedals and stay focused on what the job is and that’s to make the car go fast.”
# Kevin Harvick, in his weekly release, on what he expects at Vegas this weekend:
“It used to be one of my favorite race tracks that we would go to. It’s kind of a high-banked, mile-and-a-half track. Now, it’s got some bumps in it, and you can move all over the place and make your car do some different things. When you get those newly-paved tracks and you go there the next year, things usually change drastically. I have a feeling that we’ll kind of have something that we don’t really expect in terms of grip levels being lower and maybe tires being a little bit different than what they were last year. We’ll see where the race track goes but, usually in the desert, the tracks go whatever way they’re going to go a lot faster.”
# Jeff Burton, in his weekly release, on last weekend at California and this weekend at Las Vegas:
“Obviously, we didn’t have the weekend we were expecting in California. With the exception of the No. 29, RCR was off, as a whole. You always want to get your year off started on the right foot and based on our performance in Fontana, we have some work to do. The No. 29 hit on something because they were running in the top 10. We’ll have to work off of that, take our best-laid plans to Vegas and hope that what we brought will be something we can run with the leaders with.”
COMMENTS ADVISORY: Users are solely responsible for opinions they post here; comments do not reflect the views of The Virginian-Pilot or its websites. Users must follow agreed-upon rules: Be civil, be clean, be on topic; don't attack private individuals, other users or classes of people. Read the full rules here.
- Comments are automatically checked for inappropriate language, but readers might find some comments offensive or inaccurate. If you believe a comment violates our rules, click the report violation link below it.
Delicious
Digg
Reddit
Facebook
Twitter
Google
Yahoo