What’s the surest bet of the 2000 season?
There will be an awful lot of whining, lobbying and bellyaching from Ford and Chevrolet teams about whose 2000 body style has an advantage. Each side will howl that the other has received a huge break in the rules and plead for technical adjustments from NASCAR. Then, if one successfully lobbies for a change, the other side will speak up. It’s a chronic seesaw that occurs every year there’s a change in body style. They all know full well what really counts is the people who work on the cars, balancing the chassis and tweaking aerodynamics in the wind tunnels.
Who are the top contenders in the Daytona 500?
Bet on Joe Gibbs Racing teammates Bobby Labonte and Tony Stewart. Between them they swept the last three races of the season. Those weren’t run on restrictor-plate tracks such as Daytona International Speedway, so the technical momentum doesn’t translate precisely. But overall they’re riding a wave. Plus they’re in Pontiacs, and the body configurations haven’t changed from last year. Ford is having a 2000 Taurus make its debut at Daytona and Chevrolet has a new Monte Carlo.
While the Ford and Chevy teams struggle and experiment to fine-tune their aerodynamics, the Pontiacs are all set. If you must choose, pick Labonte. He’s much more experienced in the crapshoot shuffles of the Daytona draft than his sophomore teammate. But if Stewart finds himself at the right place in the shuffle in the final laps, he’s entirely capable of winning.
As usual, Dale Earnhardt will run at or near the front once the race starts, even if his new Monte Carlo behaves fitfully through practice and qualifying. He’s simply superb at “working the air,” as he calls positioning himself to take advantage of the pushes and pulls of the draft. He was the best at maniplating the draft until Jeff Gordon peaked in last year’s race.
Dale Jarrett will have the advantage in sheer horsepower; team owner Robert Yates is the reigning engine maestro in all of NASCAR. And Jarrett’s crew chief, Todd Parrott, is the No. 1 pit boss in the business now that Ray Evernham is off the tour to prepare Dodge’s factory team for competition in 2001. If he’s around at the end, Jarrett will contend.
Who are the top contenders for the 2000 Winston Cup championship?
There’s the Labonte-Stewart tandem, with their momentum and their just-right Pontiacs. But for the season points title, put Stewart on top. Stewart began to show remarkable consistency for a rookie toward the end of last season and Winston Cups are won by finishing in the top five or top 10 week in and week out. Stewart has the best chance of following rookie of the year honors with a full-season championship since Earnhardt did it in 1979-80. Gibbs Racing’s only worry is that NASCAR officials could blow the momentum apart with a decision after Daytona to change the technical rules to handicap the Pontiacssay, reducing spoiler size. NASCAR loves parity among makes and has a history of changing the rules in midstream if one make becomes too dominant. The Ford and Chevrolet teams already are whining for some handicapping of the Pontiacs. It’s also important Stewart and Labonte continue to get along. There was a glimmer of tension between them in the next-to-last race of last season when Stewart hit Labonte broadside as they raced for the lead at Homestead.
Can Jarrett repeat as points champion?
Jarrett will make a strong bid–nothing has changed with his team except the slight body variations in the new Taurus–if he can put together another string of top-five finishes in midseason. But that sort of consistent fortune rarely repeats itself in slam-bang NASCAR. Getting caught up in just two or three wrecks could change the complexion of this season.
Veteran Ricky Rudd, hired to replace Kenny Irwin on the Yates team, completes the second pair of championship-contending teammates. Rudd was hired by Yates largely for consistent top-10 finishes, which Yates hopes will amount to a backup bid to Jarrett’s for the title. Rudd hasn’t had a teammate in five years. At Hendrick Motorsports, team owner Rick Hendrick said Rudd has a tendency to complain and create friction within the team.
This year’s rookie crop is being called the strongest in NASCAR history. Will Matt Kenseth and Dale Earnhardt Jr. get serious competition from the other six?
The sleeper is going to be Scott Pruett, a CART veteran. There’s a tendency in NASCAR to assume that newcomers from open-wheel Indy cars have a tough time making the transition to full-bodied cars that are twice as heavy. But before running CART, Pruett had loads of experience in full-bodied sports cars. He won Grand Touring championships in 1986 and ’87. And in 1991, in an IROC series race at Daytona, Pruett won by beating NASCAR’s best at their own game–working the draft.
Former sprint car driver Dave Blaney will make a decent showing under the tutelage of veteran teammate Ward Burton. But the other rookes–Ed Berrier, Mike Bliss, Stacy Compton and Jeff Fuller–simply are going to be overshadowed by the Kenseth-Earnhardt show. Without Kenseth and Earnhardt, this rookie crop wouldn’t rate as extraordinary. Still, this the strongest group of freshmen since 1979, when Dale Earnhardt was rookie of the year and Terry Labonte was runner-up.
As NASCAR’s most heralded rookie, will Dale Earnhardt Jr. live up to the billing?
And more. He’s a lot better driver at 25 than his father was at that age. Junior is smoother, more calculating. He seems more of a young Darrell Waltrip than a young Dale Earnhardt. “The Intimidator” was like a bull in a body shop, slamming and banging almost aimlessly. Junior is simply more graceful than his father was at this stage. His timing and instincts for setting up to make a pass are superb. Like Waltrip, Junior doesn’t have to run ugly to run hard. He makes it pretty, turning a car into a mechanical athlete.
Who will be rookie of the year?
Earnhardt Jr. is a slight underdog to Kenseth, his archrival for the last two years in the Busch Series.
Kenseth, thought driving for a team with moderate resources and funding, consistently was competitive with Junior, who had the enormous resources of the Dale Earnhardt Inc. empire behind him. Now, arriving in Winston Cup with powerful Jack Roush Racing, Kenseth is going to make a far greater leap in terms of crew, technology and resources than Earnhardt. Kenseth turned in a magnificent performance the first time he drove a Winston Cup car, at Dover in 1998 substituting for Bill Elliott. At one point, Kenseth passed Jeff Gordon and Mark Martin in one spectacular swoop that took less than half a lap. He ran as high as second before finishing fifth. Kenseth actually drove the car better than Elliott, an old master of smoothness, had been driving it in the previous weeks. And the “Monster Mile” at Dover didn’t get its nickname for ease of navigation. After that performance, Kenseth got some fabulous offers to go to Winston Cup in 1999, but he chose to stick with team owner Jack Roush’s game plan of bringing him to the big league methodically.
Is Jeff Gordon’s team falling apart?
Only in the dreams of the legions of Gordon boobirds. Departed crew chief Ray Evernham, Gordon’s coach through the first six Winston Cup seasons, said after he left the Hendrick Motorsports team last year that he felt Gordon had outgrown and need for a mentor.
As for the loss of five “over the wall” pit crewmen who jumped to Dale Jarrett’s team in the off-season, there’s a quick fix. Hendrick has a pit crew coach, Andy Papathanasieu, a former Stanford offensive lineman with a master’s degree in organizational behavior. “Andy Papa” trains and synchronizes crewmen to work like an offensive line firing off the ball. He analyzes tapes of pit stops, much as coaches break down game film. He’ll simply turn five new guys into a clockwork team. A possible foul-up in the pits Sunday is all that keeps Gordon from being the overwhelming favorite to win his second consecutive Daytona 500 and his third in the past four runnings.
Gordon’s new crew chief, Robbie Loomis, was hired away form Petty Enterprises during the off-season and Richard Petty’s driver. John Andretti, is still sick over the loss. Loomis has enormous savvy, dating to when he ran the pits for Petty himself during the King’s twilight years. But victories were rare for Loomis during his time at Petty Enterprises, so he rarely had to make instantaneous judgment calls in the pits that would win or lose a race. He should be fine under fire, but he needs that first crisis in NASCAR’s showcase event under his belt.
Gordon. After an ‘off year,”–he finished sixth in points but still won a series-leading seven races–will contend for his fourth Winston Cup if Loomis doesn’t have trouble with the new Monte Carlos. Now the anti-Gordon hordes won’t be able to claim he’s winning mainly because of the coaching of Evernham. Instead, we’re going to see just how good Jeff Gordon really is–which is the best there has been in NASCAR. In the 1999 Daytona 500, Gordon turned in the best single driving performance in the history of the race.
What’s the story on Mark Martin?
Martin, who had major back surgery during the off-season, says he can’t remember when he felt this good in a race car. Chronic back problems for several years deteriorated into excruciating pain for him last season.
Just being comfortable for a change should translate into slightly higher finishes all season–and that may be enough for the first championship for a driver who has finished third or better in the standings seven times. Nobody deserves it more.
