iNSIDE SCOOP: Round and Round, Right and Left

Ah, road-course season is here! At Sonoma, that means the short course, a healthy dose of “ringers” and a big debate on whether or not road courses belong in NASCAR.

I’m here to tell you, they do. In fact, there needs to be one in the Chase. Yep. I went there, and I’m stayin’.

Think about how unpredictable the road courses are. It’s not mash the gas and turn left, hunt a groove, do better fuel strategy and hope the cautions fall your way. There’s a fair amount of the latter in road courses, but the racing between is fantastic.

We see mash the gas and turn left 34 times throughout the year. We only see left-and-right twice. I like it. Put one in the Chase and you’ll have a true wild-card.

While a fair number of you don’t like road course racing, I’ll offer the following. It is a different discipline, requiring you to adapt and overcome. They have to turn left and right, make sure the car stays where it needs to be, don’t get off the black stuff and onto the sand, so on and so forth.

And you have to run the race backwards, because of the layout and the fact that you lose so much time in pit road. It’s a long, loopy thing that takes a lot of time to navigate at 35 miles per hour, and if you pit at the wrong time, you’re done. Fuel mileage being what it is, you have to have the right strategy and pit to the window every time.

You can’t make up time like you can on ovals, unless you’re just locked on and the cars ahead have trouble. You get caught a lap down, you’ll pay.

A new thing for the Cup Series, group qualifying, will be used for the first time, too.

Cars will be assigned to one of five or six groups based on practice speeds, slowest to fastest. Within those groups, cars will be separated fastest to slowest and released at intervals. Each group will have a window in which cars can complete their qualifying, each likely receiving three laps at full speed. A car's fastest lap will count and the field will be set based upon overall qualifying speeds. The process has been used previously for NASCAR Nationwide Series road course qualifications.

That might be good for the road racers in the cockpit. Ringers, while good at their specialty, don’t often do all that well in these races, because of the cars. Andy Pilgrim, an experienced driver, had 30 minutes of practice in the car last year at Sonoma and wound up 26^th at the finish, which is not bad for not having all that much experience.

Mark Donohue was the last ringer to score a NASCAR premier series road race victory on Jan. 21, 1973 at Riverside International Raceway. Canadian Ron Fellows heads the list of such drivers vying for a spot in Sunday's race. Fellows, who'll drive Joe Falk's Chevy this weekend, has made 23 NASCAR Sprint Cup starts with a pair of second-place finishes at Watkins Glen his best performances. With six NASCAR Nationwide and Camping World Truck victories, Fellows could become the 24th to sweep all three national series and first to do it with road race wins.

Dan Gurney used to win all the time at Riverside, and so did Parnelli Jones. George Follmer, Elliott Forbes Robinson and others showed well, but never won. It’s a specialized world we live in.

So tune in and at least try to appreciate what these drivers are doing: they’re using a car not suited to road courses and racing it as hard as they do at Atlanta or Darlington.