NASCAR Tickets - Busch Contemplates Open-Wheel Switch

Kyle Busch is back on top of the NASCAR Sprint Cup throne, a familiar position for the No. 18 M&M's racecar driver. After suffering a disappointing start to the NASCAR season when he was taken out by Dale Earnhardt, Jr.'s aggravating crash in the Daytona 500 in February, Busch fought back to earn third place honors at the Auto Club 500 in Fontana in late February before jumping headfirst into the Shelby 427 in his hometown of Las Vegas on March 1. Busch won the race at Las Vegas after starting at the back of the 43-car pack, proving his mainstay status in the NASCAR realm. While Busch is sitting pretty in the Top 10 in current rankings, however, the famed No. 18 could be seeing a different kind of racing in the near future.

NASCAR online recently reported on a probable Formula One startup in the U.S., and Kyle Busch is one of the names being tossed around as a possibility to fill the driver's seat. Racing heavyweights Ken Anderson (former Ligier and Onyx engineer) and Peter Windsor (former Ferrari and Williams team manager and pit-lane reporter) have recently announced plans to start an F1 organization in Charlotte, North Carolina, saying they will have seats for two American drivers to partake in the F1 excitement starting in 2010. Busch is one figure being considered out of NASCAR's Sprint Cup Series, and IndyCar racers Danica Patrick, Marco Andretti and Scott Speed are also being considered, though Speed has already tried his hand at Formula One and has expressed no interest in returning to the league.

Busch, on the other hand, has already entertained the idea of switching from stock cars to open-wheel racing, recently stating, "I wouldn't mind trying IndyCars and running the Indianapolis 500 once, or running Formula One. But it's not quite time for me to do that yet. If I can win a championship here in the next two or three years, then I wouldn't mind going over there."

While Kyle Busch is now contemplating a possible future switch to IndyCar or F1, his resume is currently lacking in the open-wheel sector of racing. Busch followed his older brother Kurt Busch onto the stock car racing scene from his youth, starting to race at age 13 in the Legends Series before moving on up to NASCAR's late model series, which he excelled in before joining Roush Racing while still in high school. Busch became the youngest race winner in NASCAR's history at age 20, and, now still in his twenties, Busch has become one of the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series' best drivers, maneuvering his No. 18 stock car around the nation's toughest courses. Busch's game plan for his racing future seems yet uncertain, as he recently made a statement saying, "I think I'd still be young enough where if I could win a championship by 25, go run Formula One for a couple years, be back by 28, I've still got plenty of time left to run in NASCAR. That's just what I see, but a lot of things would have to work out for that to happen."

Clearly, nothing is set in stone now, nor will be for a while, but if you want to see Kyle Busch in his famed No. 18 stock car before he makes a possible switch to F1, get NASCAR tickets, available online, and watch the talented driver zoom around the track before he exits the Sprint Cup Series!

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Article Source: NASCAR Tickets - Busch Contemplates Open-Wheel Switch

Source: http://www.articlespan.com/article/248654/nascar-tickets-busch-contemplates-open-wheel-switch

Jo Gartner Tony Gaze Geki Olivier Gendebien

A great talent awaiting a great car

It is an awful irony that it has taken Robert Kubica's horrific crash in a rally car on Sunday to bring him to the attention of the wider world.

Despite four and a half seasons in Formula 1, the 26-year-old Pole was not exactly a household name. Such is the lot of a grand prix driver who does not find himself in a front-running car.

But Kubica is very different from the other men pounding around in the midfield, to whom the wider TV audience pay only scant attention while focusing on the big names battling it out at the front.

This is a man who is increasingly regarded as one of the very finest racing drivers in the world - someone who, as David Coulthard put it on Monday, can be talked about in the same breath as the likes of Fernando Alonso, Lewis Hamilton and the new world champion Sebastian Vettel.

Kubica has won only one grand prix - a superb drive for BMW Sauber in Canada in 2008 - but there was an ever-growing number of F1 observers awaiting with increasing impatience the time he would get his hands on a competitive car.

The signs have been there for some time, little snapshots that made you sit up and take notice that this was someone out of the ordinary.

In 2006, his pace as BMW Sauber's test driver effectively ended the career of 1997 world champion Jacques Villeneuve - when the Canadian fell out with the team, they needed no encouragement to sack him and replace him with Kubica, knowing that he was not only cheaper, but significantly faster.

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Despite zero experience, Kubica was brilliant in the second half of that year, immediately out-pacing his team-mate Nick Heidfeld, a veteran of more than six seasons, and taking a podium finish in only his third grand prix.

Kubica's driving style - turn in early and on the brakes, demanding a lot from the outside front tyre - meant he was affected badly by the switch to a single tyre supplier, and consequent lower grip levels, in 2007.

But he bounced back with a bang in 2008, driving with stunning consistency and pace to lead the championship after that win in Canada mid-season.

What happened next rankles with Kubica to this day.

BMW's plan was to use 2008 as a building year for a full title assault in 2009, and they stuck to it resolutely, easing off development of their race car just as they had got themselves to the top of the pile, in order to concentrate on their next model.

Their logic was that the car was not really quick enough to win the title against the superior machines of McLaren and Ferrari, that they were only leading the championship because Kubica had been more consistent than his rivals - and that the top teams would eventually get their act together.

Robert Kubica crashes his BMW in the 2007 Canadian Grand Prix

Kubica missed only one race after emerging unhurt from this crash in 2007. Photo: Getty

Kubica didn't see it that way - he saw a team giving up a golden opportunity to win the championship. Even with BMW's decision, he ended up finishing third, in contention until the penultimate race.

BMW's intransigence - matched, it has to be said, by Kubica's stubbornness - fatally damaged the driver's relationship with the team, and is almost certainly one reason behind his generally lacklustre 2009 season, when Heidfeld more or less matched him.

Even then, though, there were flashes of genius from Kubica, and last season, following his move to Renault, the doubters became less and less.

The 2010 Renault was not a great car, and had no business mixing it at the front with the Red Bulls, Ferraris and McLarens.

But Kubica performed miracles to qualify it in the top three at Monaco, Spa and Suzuka, the three tracks where a driver's input is most important, where a great driver can transcend the level of his car.

How good is he?

Among his fellow drivers, there has never been any doubt about Kubica's quality. Hamilton regards him as a future world champion - Kubica was the Englishman's main rival in their karting days as teenagers; Alonso has been quoted referring to him as the best driver in the world.

It is also a little known fact that, when Vettel was an inexperienced BMW test driver in 2007, Kubica was an average of about 0.4secs quicker than him.

At Renault, they adore him - technical director James Allison was effusive in a profile of Kubica my colleague Mark Hughes wrote for this website last season.

Allison, who has also worked with Alonso, described Kubica as "one of those very, very top guys where you know that if the car is not running at the front it's because of the car, not him", adding that he was "incredibly fast, won't make mistakes under pressure and will plough on for lap after lap at a really good pace".

Ferrari, too, have noticed his ability. He came very close to replacing Felipe Massa when the Brazilian suffered a fractured skull in a crash in Hungary in 2009, missing out only because he was too big for the car.

The interest remains. And before Sunday, most in F1 expected Kubica to replace Massa eventually, either at the end of this year or next.

Even a Ferrari drive, you suspect, would not change him. Kubica is totally unaffected by fame, has a complete lack of interest in self-promotion and is unimpressed by the razzmatazz of F1.

It now remains to be seen whether he will ever sit in the Ferrari that appears to have his name on it.

F1 drivers are renowned for their near-miraculous ability to recover from terrible injuries - they are to a man very fit and tremendously determined. And as someone close to him said on Monday, Kubica is also "totally stubborn". He will need all his single-mindedness to fight back after this.

But he has done it before. After breaking his left arm in 13 places when a passenger in a road-car crash early in 2003, doctors said he would be out for between six months and a year. Three months later he made his Formula Three debut and won.

Equally, after surviving virtually unscathed a horrific barrel-roll in the 2007 Canadian Grand Prix, doctors advised him to sit out the US Grand Prix seven days later. He was back for the following event in France, and qualified and finished fourth.

On Monday, the initial prognosis was about as positive as you could expect in the circumstances. Nevertheless, with such serious injuries, it seems likely that Kubica will be out for most of the season and replacing him is going to be impossible for Renault. There are simply not any drivers of comparable quality around.

Renault have two 'third drivers' in Bruno Senna and Romain Grosjean, but both are inexperienced and unproven, just like Kubica's team-mate, the Russian Vitaly Petrov. Will a team with aspirations of winning a couple of races this year feel they can go into a full season with a driver line-up like that?

The other option is to take someone experienced. They could potentially try to buy 2010 Williams driver Nico Hulkenberg out of his reserve driver contract with Force India. And Italian Vitantonio Liuzzi, rejected by Force India this season despite having a contract, is also available.

But the obvious contender is Heidfeld, F1's Mr Consistency, who may not set the world on fire, but can be relied upon to be decently quick and score regular points.

Whoever it is, they have a tough act to follow.

Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/andrewbenson/2011/02/it_is_an_awful_irony.html

Keith Greene Masten Gregory Cliff Griffith Georges Grignard

Team orders and F1's radical plan to improve racing

Formula 1 will be changed for ever by the new rules announced by Formula 1's governing body at its world council meeting on Friday.

The decision to switch to vastly different, far more efficient engines from 2013 and the introduction of movable rear wings for next season will change both the way the sport is viewed by the wider world and the action on the track.

The new engine regulations - the adoption of 1.6-litre, four-cylinder turbo engines with energy recovery and fuel restrictions - mirror the way the car industry is going and are aimed at boosting F1's public image, helping it to survive into the future by opening up new avenues for sponsorship and - most importantly - speeding up the adoption of more sustainable engines in road cars over the next few years, thus dramatically reducing carbon dioxide emissions.

More immediately, the controversial adoption of movable rear wings in 2011 will make overtaking easier. At least that's the hope.

The issue of overtaking is a perennial problem in F1. All stakeholders agree it has been too hard to do in recent years. Races can be processional, or turn on pit stops.

The problem for F1's bosses, who want racing rather than tactics to decide outcomes, is aerodynamics.

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Watch highlights of the season-ending Abu Dhabi Grand Prix

Cars are created with quite incredible capabilities but significant limitations when it comes to racing. Cornering forces often reach 5G. To see an F1 car in the flesh as it negotiates a fast corner like Silverstone's Becketts complex is both to doubt your eyes and to marvel at the way it uses physics to test the limits of the possible.

But aerodynamics work most effectively when a car is running on its own. Give it some turbulent air - such as that created by another car directly in front of it - and its ability to produce downforce - and therefore grip - is dramatically reduced. So drivers find it difficult to get close enough to a car in front to try to pass it, even if they are in a faster car.

A number of attempts to change this have been made in recent years, most recently major new rules in 2009 with significant changes to the way cars produced their downforce and the reintroduction of slick tyres. None of them have worked.

So F1's brains have come up with the movable rear wing.

The idea is that drivers will, when on a straight and trying to pass another car, press a button in their cockpit which will move a part of the rear wing.

This will reduce its effectiveness, thereby cutting drag and increasing straightline speed, allowing the driver to get a run on his rival into the next corner. The driver in the car in front who is defending his position will not be able to use his wing at the same time.

The plan is controversial because it appears to be adding a degree of artifice into the situation - and critics are worried it will make a joke of overtaking by making it too easy, particularly when used in conjunction with the Kers energy recovery and power-boost systems that are returning to F1 in 2011 after a year on the sidelines.

The sport's bosses are aware of the concerns. One insider who has been instrumental in writing the rule says: "The idea is to make it work, but not work too well."

The way it will work is as follows:

The FIA will define a time gap between the two cars at which point the driver behind will be able to use the system. Initially, it is likely the driver in the trailing car will need to be within a second as he enters the corner before a straight where it is possible to overtake.

The driver will then get an indication - either via a light on his dashboard or audibly - that he can operate his wing. He will then press the button when he is on the straight, giving him more speed than his rival and thus the potential to pass him.

The problem is that no-one is sure whether the system will work or achieve its objectives until it is used in a race - and the first opportunity will be on 13 March, when Bahrain hosts the first grand prix of the 2011 season.

The bottom line is that F1's bosses want to make overtaking easier but not so easy that it requires little skill.

Had the movable rear wings been in place in 2010, I am told Ferrari's Fernando Alonso would have been able to overtake the Renault of Vitaly Petrov in the season-closing Abu Dhabi Grand Prix and thus keep alive his chances of winning the title.

Instead, the Spaniard was unable to pass Petrov's slower car, which had a prodigious straight-line speed, and therefore unable to chase down his rivals as he went in search of a third drivers' crown.

That would have freed Alonso up to try to catch the Mercedes of Nico Rosberg, who was in the fourth place the Ferrari driver needed to prevent Red Bull's Sebastian Vettel snatching the title from under his nose.

Rosberg was quicker than Petrov but probably marginally slower than Alonso. But because the performance differential between the Mercedes and the Ferrari was much less, getting past Rosberg would not have been a given - even under the new rules.

So rather than watching a race in which overtaking was practically impossible, the audience would have known it was possible, but not inevitable, that Alonso would get by - and would have been on tenterhooks as they watched him try.

Such a scenario would have made the title-deciding race much more exciting.

Put like that, as long as F1 finds a way to make it obvious to the audience when a driver is using his movable rear wing, the introduction of such a device has at the very least got to be worth a try.

UPDATE 1530 GMT:

The FIA's decision to remove the rule banning team orders will doubtless offend those who did not like Ferrari's application of them in this year's German Grand Prix and who objected to the Italian team "getting away" with "only" a $100,000 fine for doing so.

But the move - telegraphed when the FIA said it would look into the rule after deciding against giving Ferrari further punishment - is the only practical solution open to F1.

However offensive some find team orders, there is simply no way of effectively policing a rule banning them. There are any number of ways a team could employ them without anyone finding out.

Ferrari might have got caught out because of the unsubtle way in which Felipe Massa was asked to let team-mate Fernando Alonso through in Hockenheim but other leading teams also employed what could be termed team orders in 2010 and no one complained about them - or, in some cases, even noticed.

It is about reality not idealism, logic not emotion.

If you cannot police a rule, what's the point of having it? And surely it's better to have it out in the open than to force teams to go through the ridiculous charades some - not just Ferrari - did last season.

The lifting of the ban does not mean all teams will act in the same way as Ferrari, who now don't need to be quite so secretive about Alonso being their number one driver.
It simply means that when teams choose to use them they don't have to cover it up.

In every other way, nothing will change.

Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/andrewbenson/2010/12/f1s_radical_plan_to_improve_ra.html

Dan Gurney Hubert Hahne Mike Hailwood Mika Häkkinen

NASCAR or Indy? Danica undecided on 2012 plans

DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. -- Danica Patrick's season hasn't even started, and the main thing everybody wants to know is what she'll do next year.Going into Saturday's NASCAR Nationwide Series opener at Daytona International Speedway, Patrick says she doesn't know her plans for 2012 and beyond Related posts:
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Source: http://doxcar.com/nascar-or-indy-danica-undecided-on-2012-plans/

Richard Allen Craven Kerry Dale Earnhardt Ralph Dale Earnhardt Sr Ralph Dale Earnhardt Jr

NASCAR Tracks - The Martinsville Speedway

The Martinsville Speedway is celebrated its 60th anniversary in 2007.

The Martinsville Speedway track was sold to International Speedway Corporation in 2004 and has been defined as the "biggest deal in NASCAR" to date. Recently, International Speedway Corporation has been purchasing race tracks in an effort to gain a majority in the number of races on the circuit. The Martinsville Speedway ticket office is open daily 9 a.m. The ticket office will be open this Saturday, March 24, from 9 a.m. The Martinsville speedway in Virginia has been home to NASCAR races for the entire time it was constructed except the very first year. Martinsville Speedway was formed in 1947 and hosted various races for the entire year and in 1948 NASCAR was formed and begun racing at the Martinsville Speedway.

Martinsville Speedway is located just miles out of the city of Martinsville, Virginia. This facility is proud to be recognized as the only original NASCAR-sanctioned track still hosting Nextel Cup competitions. Martinsville Speedway is one of the oldest venues on the NASCAR schedule; the paper clip shaped track is famous for close, intense action as Nextel Cup stock cars beat and bang on each other for 500 laps.

Martinsville Speedway tickets are worth the expense for any event because of the electrifying atmosphere. Martinsville Speedway opened in 1947 with 750 seats and has grown continuously over the years. But other than being paved in 1955, the track configuration has not changed since Red Byron won the inaugural event. Martinsville Speedway is one of the oldest venues on the NASCAR schedule; the paper clip shaped track is famous for close, intense action as Nextel Cup stock cars beat and bang on each other for 500 laps.

The Martinsville speedway in Virginia has been home to NASCAR races for the entire time it was constructed except the very first year. Martinsville Speedway was formed in 1947 and hosted various races for the entire year and in 1948 NASCAR was formed and begun racing at the Martinsville Speedway. The Martinsville Speedway ticket office is open daily 9 a.m. The ticket office will be open this Saturday, March 24, from 9 a.m.

Martinsville Speedway ran the first NASCAR race there on July 4, 1948. When Martinsville Speedway opened in 1947 it only had 750 seats. Today the track holds over 70,000 race fans and is continually improving the facilities.

The paper clip shaped track is famous for close, intense action as Nextel Cup stock cars beat and bang on each other for 500 laps. Martinsville Speedway is located just miles out of the city of Martinsville, Virginia. This facility is proud to be recognized as the only original NASCAR-sanctioned track still hosting Nextel Cup competitions.

For NASCAR Merchandise, Up to the minute News, and everything NASCAR including Race Car jackets or Nascar Racing Jackets we have them at the best prices everyday!

Article Source: NASCAR Tracks - The Martinsville Speedway

Source: http://www.articlespan.com/article/189624/nascar-tracks-the-martinsville-speedway

Mike Wallace Hermie Sadler III Brian Scott Carl Long

Michael Waltrip Takes Emotional Truck Race Win on Earnhardt Anniversary

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DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. -- An emotional, out-of-breath Michael Waltrip could barely choke out words of thanks after he made a dramatic last-lap pass to win the NASCAR Camping World Truck series 250-mile race Friday night at Daytona International Speedway.

Waltrip, who usually announces the truck races, swept past Elliott Sadler in a classic Daytona slingshot pass as the trucks sped into the tri-oval toward the checkered flag in a green-white-checkered, two-lap finish after a couple of big wrecks late in the race.

It came on the 10th anniversary of Waltrip's greatest and worst day -- his win in the 2001 Daytona 500 seconds after his car owner Dale Earnhardt's fatal crash in turn four on the last lap.

"I'm just so thankful, Waltrip said Friday night, nearly breathless, with tears and sweat gleaming on his face in the glare of the television lights in victory lane. "I want to thank the fans, man. They keep us going. And they've just been so good to us. It's just very emotional and I didn't know I could push Elliott all the way around there. And I was able to do it.

 

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Source: http://motorsports.fanhouse.com/2011/02/18/michael-waltrip-takes-emotional-truck-race-win-on-earnhardt-anni/

Parker Kligerman Trevor Bayne Out! Pet Care Toyota Jason Leffler