iNSIDE SCOOP: What Did I Tell You?

OK, so the Toyota/Save Mart 350 at Sonoma Raceway wasn’t the barn-burner I promised on Friday. It was still a good little race, and it proved the point that oval-track purists need to lighten up a bit on the twisty bits.

There was a lot of strategy, and yeah, a lot depended on it not becoming a fuel-strategy race, but it worked out. Long green to the finish, and Carl Edwards ended up winning it. Carl was not the guy to beat all day, too, and that is refreshing.

Sure, he and Jimmy Fennig played the cards right and made it stand up. Yeah, AJ Allmendinger had the car to beat, but he and several others ended up in the garage, sorry and sore after getting banged around and beat up.

Dale Jr. was a one-man wrecking ball, and that’s interesting to me because he is the anti-Intimidator most of the time. In other words, he won’t rattle your cage unless you tick him off, and even then you’ll still drive away from it. On Sunday, though, he was the second coming of the Intimidator, bouncing hard off a curb and into Matt Kenseth, putting Matty Ice into the tire barrier and ripping off the front of his Toyota.

Most of that is the fact that you run out of room pretty quick at Sonoma, especially Turn 8-9 heading to the 180-degree Turn 11. Boris Said will tell you that you can’t mess that corner up or you’ll be sitting in the snack bar, and he’s right. Plenty of people did on Sunday, and plenty of people wound up in the asphalt ocean, paddling back onto the track with fenders a-flapping and stuff a-rubbin’.

I love the discipline it takes to race on a road course. The racing I’ve done, most has been on road courses. Nothing big, mind you, but it’s a blast. I love ovals as well, don’t get me wrong (and don’t call for my NASCAR man-card!) but there’s something about turning right and left that is way cool.

I’m one of a few guys in the media center—Jon Edwards and Drew Brown are as well—who will get there early to watch the Formula One race if it’s on TV. What has changed with NASCAR is that the cars are more road-race-ready now than they were a few years ago, and that’s good. We’ll be at Watkins Glen in August to see the second road-course race of the season, so come on with us!

I think there’s ample room for a road course in the Chase. What say you?