Filed under: Kyle Busch, Mark Martin, Chevrolet, Nationwide Series, Sprint Cup, Hendrick Motorsports, Camping World Truck Series, NASCAR
Just when we thought Mark Martin might be winding up his long and storied career as a NASCAR driver, he's decided to jump back in with both feet in 2011 by running races in all three of NASCAR's national touring series. In his final, lame-duck year with Hendrick Motorsports in the Sprint Cup series, Martin has decided to also run selected Nationwide series and Camping World Truck series events for Turner Motorsports. Martin will drive the No. 32 Dollar General Chevrolet in Nationwide races at Las Vegas Motor Speedway, Auto Club Speedway in Fontana, Ca., Michigan International Speedway and Kentucky Speedway, with Trent Owens serving as his crew chief, the team announced Wednesday. Martin will also drive the No. 32 Chevy Silverado truck in NASCAR Truck series races at Michigan as well as Pocono Raceway. "I'm excited to be running back in the Nationwide and Truck Series again," said Martin. "Everyone at Dollar General and Turner Motorsports has been great and I'm looking forward to hitting the track with them next year. Working with Turner, I get to extend my relationship with Chevrolet and continue to have Hendrick horsepower under the hood, which is really, really good."
Permalink | Email this | Linking Blogs | Comments
Source: http://motorsports.fanhouse.com/2011/01/12/mark-martin-to-race-in-all-three-nascar-series-in-2011/
Crown Royal Ford Marcos Ambrose Kingsford Kroger Toyota Denny Hamlin



McNish, Kristensen lead Audi in ILMC By Steven English Monday, January 24th 2011, 11:05 GMT Allan McNish and Tom Kristensen will lead Audi's assault on the full Intercontinental Le Mans Cup this year. The German manufacturer today announced its driver line-ups for the American Le Mans Series opener at Sebring, the LMS round at Spa and the ILMC events after the Le Mans 24 Hours at Imola, Silverstone, Road Atlanta and in China, with its two lead drivers taking part in every event. McNish and Kristensen will share with Dindo Capello at Sebring and Spa and will then tackle the remain events as a pair. Related posts:Source: http://doxcar.com/lemans-mcnish-kristensen-lead-audi-in-ilmc/
Helmuth Koinigg Heikki Kovalainen Kevin Harvick Brad Keselowski
Sebastian Vettel was choking back tears as he tried to respond to his team's congratulations after he won the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix to clinch an unlikely first world drivers' title. They were tears of disbelief as much as joy.
The German and his Red Bull car have been the fastest combination on the Formula 1 grid all year but a mixture of driver errors, mechanical failures and pure bad luck had meant that Vettel - who replaces Lewis Hamilton as the youngest world champion in history - had never led the title chase heading into the final race of the season.
Starting from pole position but 15 points adrift of Ferrari's Fernando Alonso, who was directly behind him on the grid in third place, the title looked a long way away for the 23-year-old.
But Vettel did everything he needed to do by driving a race of cool maturity as things began to unravel for Alonso and Ferrari almost from the start.
A lost place to Jenson Button off the line was a minor inconvenience for the Spaniard, but the title was lost with a catastrophic strategic call to mirror the decision of another championship protagonist, Vettel's team-mate Mark Webber, to stop early for fresh tyres.
It put Alonso back in the pack of midfield runners, breaking the cardinal rule of all F1 strategy moves - keep track position and if you don't make sure you have clear air in which to run at your maximum pace. Stuck behind Renault's Vitaly Petrov, Alonso had neither, and the Ferrari driver was at the mercy of Vettel's result.
Vettel did what he has proved more than capable of all year - made no mistakes when running in the lead, reeling off the laps to the chequered flag.
It was an incredible final twist to end an astonishing season, one that will go down as one of the greatest in F1 history.
In order to see this content you need to have both Javascript enabled and Flash installed. Visit BBC Webwise for full instructions. If you're reading via RSS, you'll need to visit the blog to access this content.
It was the first time four drivers had ever gone into the final race all with a chance of the title - and a fifth, Button, was only knocked out of the reckoning seven days ago in Brazil.
What has made 2010 so compelling was to have so many superb drivers competing in cars that were relatively evenly matched.
For Alonso, Hamilton and Button, though, the season was always a rear-guard battle fighting a faster car in the Red Bull, and they were able to compete only because of the mistakes made by that team and both their drivers.
For all Vettel's stunning qualifying pace and coolness when leading, he is less convincing when not in first place.
He crashed into Webber while trying to pass him for the lead in Turkey, got a puncture at the start in Silverstone after making an ill-advised decision to sit it out around the outside of Webber at the first corner, and inexplicably rammed into Button after losing control behind him in Belgium.
His talent may still have some rough edges, but it is of the highest quality, and he has made a convincing case this season that he can now be considered in the same breath as F1's two benchmarks - Alonso and Hamilton.
Vettel shot to prominence in F1 with his performances for Red Bull feeder team Toro Rosso in 2008, culminating with a brilliant victory in the wet at the Italian Grand Prix.
Back then, his image was all positive. He was young, fast, approachable and had a sense of humour - he was that most unlikely thing, an Anglophile German who liked The Beatles and Fawlty Towers.
Since then, he has displayed a darker side to his character, and the steeliness and ruthlessness all great F1 champions need has been fully in evidence this season as he and Webber have gone toe-to-toe at Red Bull and sparks flew.
It was obvious Vettel was going to be the man to beat this season from the moment he took pole for the first race of the season in Bahrain and led until a spark plug failure handed victory to Alonso.
Vettel lost another victory two weeks later in Australia thanks to a wheel-nut failure and had he won those two races perhaps the pressure would have been off and he would have led comfortably throughout the season.
Thankfully, for the sake of the championship battle, that is not what happened.
Two superb wet-weather wins for Button in the space of three races put him in the lead; Webber took over after dominating in Spain and Monaco; Hamilton took his place at the top after back-to-back wins in Turkey and Canada; Webber took it back; and then it was Alonso's turn after a quite superb late-season run of form.
As Vettel put it on Sunday: "All of us could write a book about races we should have finished in higher positions. We have all had so many ups and downs. It has been a tough season mentally to ignore what people were saying and always get your own thing done."
It has been an intensely competitive year and the pressure on everyone was huge throughout, but Vettel and Red Bull always had the consoling thought that they were the fastest thing on the grid.
Still, though, it had looked as if the drivers' title was going to slip through their fingers. And what appeared as if it was going to be the decisive turning point of the season occurred at the Korean Grand Prix two races ago, when Vettel - under intense pressure from Alonso - suffered an engine failure.
That put Alonso 11 points clear of Webber, and the manic cackle he gave over the radio at the end of the race - a mixture of joy, surprise and disbelief - summed up everything about the Spaniard's unlikely fightback from being 47 points off the championship lead after the British Grand Prix.
In Abu Dhabi, though, Ferrari again found themselves at the mercy of a faster car. Caught between deciding whether to cover Webber's early stop and Vettel disappearing up the road, Alonso's engineers chose what in hindsight was the wrong option. As Red Bull chief technical officer Adrian Newey said after the race, had Alonso stayed out, he would probably have finished fourth. Which would have made him world champion.
Alonso had been adamant before the race that this would have been a great season for him no matter what happened in the championship, and although clearly gutted he stuck to that line after the race.
"If we didn't stop, Webber would probably overtake us; if we stop, we let (Nico) Rosberg and Petrov overtake us," he said. "Very difficult call.
"Next year we try again. But it was [a] very good [season] for me, especially after two years of some difficulties, coming back to winning races, fighting for the championship in the last races.
In order to see this content you need to have both Javascript enabled and Flash installed. Visit BBC Webwise for full instructions. If you're reading via RSS, you'll need to visit the blog to access this content.
"I won five races, I overtook in victories Niki Lauda, Juan Manuel Fangio, some great names, and I'm sure with this team it is very possible to fight for championships in the future, so I am happy."
Forget all the nonsense about team orders at the German Grand Prix, Alonso would have been a fully deserving world champion. In fact, no matter who won it there wasn't going to be a bad one in 2010 and in Vettel there can be no doubt that the sport has a good one.
This is a man who is going to be at the heart of F1 for years to come. There will be many more victories, probably many more titles. And at 23, who knows, even his friend Michael Schumacher's record of seven titles and 91 victories might be vulnerable.
To get there, though, he will have to beat the likes of Alonso and Hamilton, who are not going anywhere in a hurry, as well as Renault's Robert Kubica, a man who this year convinced even his doubters that he will be a major force once he gets his hands on a competitive car.
In 2011, the same top drivers will be with the same teams, and there is every reason to believe it could be just as good as 2010, perhaps even better.
Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/andrewbenson/2010/11/vettel_keeps_cool_to_fulfil_de.html
Vienna Sausage Kroger Chevrolet Zaxby s Chevrolet Brad Keselowski Ruby Tuesday Dodge
Sebastian Vettel was crowned the youngest world champion in history after a memorable final twist at the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix, but was he the best driver of the year?
It's a subjective question, and so difficult after such a momentous season that I have been wrestling with it for some weeks.
Does Vettel's pace in the dominant Red Bull mean he was Formula 1's top driver? How does that rank alongside the performances of Lewis Hamilton and Fernando Alonso in inferior cars?
What about Robert Kubica's ability to mix it with the title contenders in the Renault? Or Kamui Kobayashi's attacking verve in the Sauber?

Vettel is centre-stage among the class of 2010 - but is he number one in our list? Photo: AFP
Here is my list of the top 10 drivers of 2010:
10) After battling for the title with Brawn in 2009, it cannot have been easy for Rubens Barrichello, at 37 going on 38, to drum up the enthusiasm for a season battling to make the top 10 in qualifying with once-great Williams.
But drum it up he did, impressing the team with his technical feedback and producing some excellent drives that resulted in strong points positions when Williams had something of a purple patch mid-season.
The veteran Brazilian was outshone by rookie team-mate Nico Hulkenberg at times as the German found his feet late in the season.
Nevertheless, as he heads into an astonishing 19th F1 season in 2011, Barrichello clearly still has a lot to offer.
9) Kamui Kobayashi emerged as one of F1's most exciting talents with some all-action performances in 2010.
Overtaking is notoriously difficult but the Japanese simply went for it, finding unconventional passing places to liven up such races as Valencia and Japan.
There remain doubts about his ultimate potential, with Sauber drafting in the reliable Nick Heidfeld for the final five races of the season to give Kobayashi a benchmark to measure himself against.
But Kobayashi responded perfectly and gives all the signs of having a great future.
8) It all started so well for Felipe Massa, who out-qualified new team-mate Alonso at the first race of the season. But when Alonso passed the Brazilian around the outside of the first corner, it set the tone for the entire year.
Alonso trounced Massa in 2010, proving faster than him at virtually every race, and there is no doubt the Spaniard's relentless excellence got to the man in the second Ferrari.
There were some good drives from Massa - particularly his third places at Monza and Korea. But he will have to pull something very special out of the bag, not to mention rediscover his mental equilibrium, to reverse this trend in 2011.
7) Nico Rosberg convincingly beat Mercedes team-mate Michael Schumacher this year and, had he achieved that feat 10 years ago, there would have been no doubt he had emerged as a truly great F1 driver.
But the Schumacher of this year was not the same driver as before, as even the seven-time champion himself effectively admitted.
Rosberg drove a strong season, and some good races, and there are an increasing number of people in F1 who believe he is emerging as a top-class contender.
But until he goes up against - and beats - a driver of the highest calibre, it will be hard to tell whether he deserves to be considered as that himself, or whether he is nearly there, but not quite.
6) Not even Jenson Button probably expected to be leading the championship after winning two of the opening four races of 2010 and out-qualifying McLaren team-mate Hamilton 3-1.
Button's two victories in the wet in Australia and China owed a lot to clever strategic calls but that was not all. The sight of Button pulling away from Hamilton in China on a wet track and on tyres of comparable age proved once and for all that this is a driver of the very highest calibre.
After that, Hamilton got on top and stayed there but Button, who was rarely very far away in qualifying and often more or less matched his team-mate on race pace, provided a convincing answer to those who said he had gained his 2009 triumph more by luck than ability.
5) Mark Webber chose the name Aussie Grit for his Twitter account, and 2010 proved why. Expected to fulfil the role of an obedient number two at Red Bull, Webber went toe-to-toe with team-mate Vettel throughout the season and led him in the championship for most of it.
After a shaky first couple of races, Webber came on song when the season came back to Europe with dominant wins in Spain and Monaco that left Vettel bemused at where his team-mate had found such electrifying pace.
By mid-summer, Vettel had got his edge back, but Webber remained large in his mirrors, ready to take advantage of any mistakes. That he was able to do this despite suspicions that Red Bull were not perhaps being quite as even-handed in their treatment of their drivers as they insisted was all the more impressive.
But his challenge faded in the end, crashing in Korea and failing to make any real impact in the final two races of the campaign.
4) Did Renault's Robert Kubica perform better than any other driver on the grid when you consider the equipment he had at his disposal?
You can certainly make that case. No-one else can claim to have made so few mistakes while extracting what appeared to be the maximum from his machinery.
The Renault was not fast enough for Kubica to regularly mix it with the title contenders but on three occasions he transcended the car's limitations in a way only the truly great can - at Monaco, Spa and Suzuka, F1's three great drivers' circuits.
To qualify second in Monaco, third in Spa and fourth in Suzuka was a momentous achievement - and he backed that up by taking podium places in both Monaco and Belgium before being robbed of another when his wheel came loose in Japan.
There is still a slight question mark over a man who, in 2009, was not able to comprehensively overshadow Heidfeld at BMW. And let's not forget that Kubica was not burdened with the kind of pressure that the likes of Alonso, Vettel, Button and Hamilton were.
But put Kubica in a competitive car and all his rivals would fear him.
In order to see this content you need to have both Javascript enabled and Flash installed. Visit BBC Webwise for full instructions. If you're reading via RSS, you'll need to visit the blog to access this content.
3) Sebastian Vettel is a great talent and a deserving world champion but, considering the stunning pace of the Red Bull car, he should have won many more races and clinched the title much sooner.
The car's fragility did not help - failures in Bahrain, Australia, Spain and Korea cost him a lot of points - but the German also made a number of high-profile errors. He crashed into rivals in Turkey and Belgium, suffered a puncture following a red-mist moment at Silverstone and was penalised for misjudging the safety car in Hungary.
Ten pole positions and five wins speak for themselves to an extent but, as the (slightly) faster driver in comfortably the fastest car, they are to be expected.
Some of those pole laps were stunning, though, with Vettel possessing an Ayrton Senna-esque ability to pull that little bit extra out on his very final lap, no matter what the circumstances, while each one of his wins was a masterpiece of domination.
However, there have to be fewer mistakes, more wins dragged out of adversity and more convincing performances when he is back in the pack for him to be ranked above the next names on the list.
2) Had this article been written after the Belgian Grand Prix, Lewis Hamilton would have occupied the number one spot.
Up to that point, Hamilton had made not a single mistake worth the name and he was leading the championship in what had from the mid-point of the season been the third fastest car.
Hamilton had maintained his exuberant, attacking style and stunning natural pace and had mated it to a consistency that was making him a formidable competitor.
His fantastic victory at Spa - not forgetting the qualifying lap that earned him second on the grid on slicks in a shower of rain - confirmed him as the outstanding driver of the season to that point, notwithstanding the canny Button's two wet wins.
Suddenly, though, it all went wrong. Hamilton crashed out of the next two races in Monza and Singapore and when he crashed again in Friday practice at the next race in Japan his season appeared to be coming apart at the seams.
But then came one of the laps of the season - third on the grid at Suzuka in a car in which he had done just six flying laps before qualifying. It was a reminder of Hamilton's amazing talent. By then, though, as far as the championship was concerned, the damage had been done.
1) Fernando Alonso's first year with Ferrari started with a few shaky races and finished with a strategic mistake that cost him the title. In between the Spaniard did just enough to earn the right to call himself the best driver of 2010.
Early-season errors were born of trying too hard in a car that was not quite on the pace. Combine that with Ferrari losing their way for a while and Alonso was 47 points off the lead at the midpoint of the season.
But in a car that established itself as the second fastest behind the Red Bull, he recovered that margin by driving with a consistent, relentless brilliance that his rivals were not able to match. His victories at Monza and Singapore were stunning. Only Hamilton at Spa and perhaps Webber at Monaco can claim a performance of comparable quality.
That ultimately Alonso did not win a third title was only because of his team's error in Abu Dhabi. For the 2005 and 2006 champion, as he said himself, it was still a great year.
Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/andrewbenson/2010/11/who_were_the_top_10_f1_drivers.html
Kurt Busch Miller Lite Dodge Jeff Gordon DuPont National Guard Military Intelligence
Filed under: NASCAR Tracks, Sprint Cup, NASCAR

Permalink | Email this | Linking Blogs | Comments
Source: http://motorsports.fanhouse.com/2011/01/18/nascar-considers-points-overhaul/
Carel Godin de Beaufort Christian Goethals Paul Goldsmith José Froilán González