Happy Hour: Stewart-Haas as NASCAR’s Jekyll and Hyde
Throughout the week you can send us your best questions, jokes, rants and just plain miscellaneous thoughts to [email protected] or @NickBromberg. We’ll post them here and have a good time.
If you’re a sports fan and this isn’t one of your two or three favorite weekends of the year, you’re doing something wrong. 48 basketball games over four days. Racing at California. NBA and NHL in the homestretch. Baseball getting ready. Spring starts Friday… Glorious.
But before we go any further, we just want to say that we don’t expect you to care about our Tourney Pick’Em Bracket and therefore we don’t care about yours. Yes, we realize it’s very, very likely you picked Iowa State and Baylor to win Thursday and possibly to go to the Final Four. You weren’t picking a perfect bracket anyway, so just consider this an early cracking of your delusions.
Let’s get to it.
Hey Nick. I liked your article on the SHR program and how Harvick is performing at the top while the others, particularly Tony Stewart, seem to be struggling. As far as the 41 goes, I think you can chalk that up to the situation with Kurt this year, a substitute driver and that host of issues. I wouldn’t be too concerned there unless Kurt falls off the map as far as speed/time goes when he returns and gets a couple weeks under his belt. Danica, well, is Danica, ‘nuff said. Happy is running lights out, no issues there. Which brings us to Tony. OK, I get that ‘setups’ don’t always work for each driver, and putting the #4 setup under Tony may not work. However, putting the #4 setup in the car, having Harv test it and getting it fast, could you not work from that base line with Tony in the car and adjust? Presently, there is no speed in the #14, so work from the same point as the #4 and ‘tweak’, or learn to adjust to drive more Harvick style with this current car if that’s what it’s going take. It’s embarrassing to see him running laps down every week. He’s a multiple past champion and too damn good a driver to be where he is right now. I just can’t understand why working from the #4 setup WITH speed in the car you can’t tweak, and if he loses that speed, then I guess you’re back to square one and he better make some adjustments. After that, then crew chiefs/teams may need to be re-worked. – M
Stewart-Haas has already tried putting Harvick’s setups in Stewart’s cars and Stewart can’t drive them as successfully as Harvick can.
It’s similar to cries of Gordon driving Johnson’s setups when the No. 48 was in the midst of his five-year title streak and the two teams were in the same shop. Different setups work for different drivers (obviously), and you can bet that SHR figured out pretty quickly that they should try the setups Harvick and crew chief Rodney Childers have perfected in Stewart’s cars.
It’s still striking to think that Stewart has the fewest points of anyone who’s participated in all four races this season. The guess is not, though who would have guessed Stewart would have fewer points than Landon Cassill right now in the first place?
P.S. Busch’s fifth-place finish also underscores how ridiculous the notion of it being tough for Busch to get in the top 30 in points. He’s already just outside it. Hell, with a good finish on Sunday, he could be in it.
@NickBromberg Can we judge the ’15 rules package on the racing yet? Will NASCAR and the nation survive #MartinsvilleHotDogGate? #hadtoask
— Brian Cullather (@Briancullather) March 19, 2015
We can go with what we know, and that’s while top-end speed may be throttled a bit with the horsepower reduction, corner speeds are up. If you’re someone that prescribes to the theory that slower = better, well, that’s not good for side-by-side racing in the corners.
It’s imperative, however, to realize that this is a temporary fix given the rules that will be in place in 2016. And hopefully there will be some significant corner-speed reduction. We’re not fans of 1.5-mile tracks becoming places where you don’t touch the brake hardly at all (and can get away with barely lifting on qualifying laps). Let’s make drivers work the brake some more and the throttle, even if it’s on qualifying laps. The more drivers have to manipulate the pedals, the better the racing could be in terms of cars yo-yoing through the field.
As far as the hot dogs go, well, they were served at the Daytona media center during Speedweeks. Not to go all conspiracy-theory here, but wouldn’t the media be a good test subject for the new hot dogs? And we can’t say we heard any complaints, though we also didn’t have a hot dog. No hot dogs for us meant thirds or fourths for others.
And if you want to continue the theme of the 2015 rules package … behold and see if you can spot the best line we’ll ever get in a reader email this year:
With all the technology these days nascar should be able to figure out how to make all the cars equal so on lap 20 the lead car ain;t lapping cars. Daytona was good but their mile and a half settups suck.. 25 years ago they didn’t have much of a package settup to go by and plus back then that was hardcore racing. They need to fix something before this season is over or their going to lose a lot of fans. You can tell already that their not selling out like they use to by just looking at the stands during a race and seeing how empty they are. Nascar use to have good racing until they decided to tweet things and look where that got them. We got only a handfull of dominint cars right now with the #4 leading the pack. All I’m saying is it’s not fun to watch anymore because you really don’t have side by side racing anymore. You have a laeder that’s 5 seconds in front of second place. That’s not racing. Thanks for getting back to me but wish your reply was a little better. – Bobby
The cars are as “equal” as they’ve ever been. Look at the scoresheets in practice and you’ll see that lap times are separated by tenths of a second in places. In Friday’s first practice at Phoenix, the top 40 cars were separated by 1.04 seconds.
But parity brings out its own issues. With cars so close together (and also aerodynamically dependent) passing is tough. You can’t pass someone on the highway if you’re going the same speed, right?
It’s Twitter’s fault.
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Nick Bromberg is the editor of From The Marbles on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at [email protected] or follow him on Twitter!
