The Tropicana 400 goes off for just the third time Sunday at the Chicagoland Speedway in Joliet, and that means the track is still young enough to be open to interpretation.
Here, for one example, is Jimmie Johnson, who drives the Lowe’s Chevrolet.
“What you find with the new racetracks,” he says, “is that they’ve done such a good job of building a smooth racetrack, and the quality of the asphalt is so good that the bottom lane is the fastest way around the track. If you move up at all into the second or third lane, you’re just making your distance longer and there’s no benefit to that.”
But then, as a counterpoint, there is Jeremy Mayfield, who drives the Dodge Dealers/UAW Dodge.
“It has a lot of grip and it’s still kind of new,” he says of the track. “It’s just a good place. . . . There’s good racing there. You can run three-wide if you have to. It’s just a great place to race, and I like it because it’s new and has a lot of grip to it.”
Down on the farm
Casey Mears, a Winston Cup rookie, is 34th in the points race. But Friday afternoon, in qualifying for just his third Busch race of the season, Mears grabbed the pole for Saturday’s Tropicana Twister 300. He finished just 0.023 seconds ahead of defending champ Johnny Sauter, the Wisconsin native who earned his first Busch victory here last year, and behind them came Bobby Hamilton Jr. and Dave Blaney.
“It’s a big confidence booster,” Mears said of his performance. “I mean, every time you do well, get a pole or a win, it’s a huge confidence booster. It just shows that what we’ve been doing this year is helping. . . . Busch is darn hard and it’s darn hard to get a pole and win a race, for sure. But Winston Cup’s that next level, and to be able to run with those guys week in and week out and to come here and apply a lot of things that I’ve learned from there has been a big help.”
And how much did that pole help his confidence?
Later on Friday he qualified fourth for Sunday’s race. His previous best starting position was 10th at Talladega.
Stars out all over
Sammy Sosa didn’t make this All-Star team, either, but he can’t complain about that. He was, after all, ineligible for selection. Frank Thomas didn’t make it, either, and for the same very good reason he can say nothing about his omission.
But Reggie’s on it. Yeah, Reggie Jackson, the former Yankee-Oriole-Angel-Athletic who was the unofficial leading vote-getter on NASCAR’s 2003 All-Star baseball team. He was eligible as co-owner of the Herzog Jackson Motorsports team that runs in the Busch Series, and he’s not the only familiar name on that team.
Rick Hendrick, who has won four Cup championships as an owner, is on that team as well; he hit .500 as a senior at Park View (Va.) High School and was drafted by the Pirates. Richard Petty and Kyle Petty are also members, as are Dale Jarrett, Elliott Sadler and Derrike Cope. Cope, in fact, drew interest from both the Cubs and the Orioles after hitting .358 as a catcher at Whitman (Wash.) College, but his career was cut short when he suffered a severe knee injury in 1978.
Blast from the past
The Tropicana may be just the third Cup race at Chicagoland, but it’s the fourth to be held in the area. The other went off in 1956, believe it or not, at Soldier Field. That year the quarter-mile oval that was added to the stadium in 1935 was expanded to a half-mile, and Fireball Roberts collected a cool $850 with his victory on it. Rounding out the top five that day were Jim Paschal, Ralph Moody, Speedy Thompson and Frank Mundy.
Quickly noted
Sunday’s race is just the 18th on the Cup’s 36-race schedule for 2003, but only four drivers have been running at the finish of the previous 17: Matt Kenseth, Kevin Harvick, Terry Labonte and Michael Waltrip. . . . Waltrip has finished 27 straight races, the longest active streak on the series. Labonte, with 23, is second. . . . Jim Pohlman, Bill Elliott’s lead mechanic, grew up in Oak Lawn and attended St. Laurence High School, where he was a four-year letterman in football. His grandfather, Bob Pohlman Sr., raced at Soldier Field in the late ’40s and ’50s.
And finally
The record for different race winners in a Cup season is 19, set in 2001. This year, with 19 races remaining, there already have been 14 different winners. The only repeat winners this season are Kurt Busch with three victories and Ryan Newman with two.
