NASCAR: Live from Martinsville
Turn 4 TV: Disappointed Junior
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McMurray grabs pole, spotlight
By John Oreovicz
MARTINSVILLE, Va. -- There's always been the possibility that a driver not eligible for the Chase for the NASCAR Sprint Cup would steal the thunder from those running for the championship.
For one day at Martinsville Speedway, that came true as Jamie McMurray claimed pole position for Earnhardt-Ganassi Racing.
"It's not a big surprise to me," said McMurray, who also won the pole at Martinsville in 2011. "I'm totally OK with being in the shadow."
On Friday, he almost eclipsed the magic 100 mph mark at NASCAR's shortest track, clocking a lap of 99.905 mph in the No. 1 McDonald's Chevrolet. That edged Team Penske's Joey Logano (99.605 mph) and Joe Gibbs Racing's Matt Kenseth (99.318 mph) as all three manufacturers claimed a place in the top three on the grid.
"We tested here a couple weeks ago and I thought we had one of the best tests I've been part of since I started racing," McMurray said. "This is a great track for me and when things are going well, you get excited about going back to those tracks. Keith [Rodden, crew chief] made some adjustments to the car between the first and the second run and that was the difference-maker."
McMurray, who is 19th in the Sprint Cup standings, chuckled at his reputation as a Chase-buster and lamented the fact that a victory in NASCAR's Sprint All-Star Race didn't earn him a place in this year's Chase.
"We've run three or four Chase races when we weren't in the Chase, so this isn't new to me," he said. "And we already won a race this year -- the second-biggest paying race of the year. Unfortunately, that doesn't qualify you for the Chase. But we've run well enough to win, and for me that's the most important thing. We've been good at every type of racetrack and that's what I'm most proud about our whole organization or group."
Team Penske looks well set for Sunday's 500-lap race, with Logano second and Brad Keselowski sixth. JGR placed Chasers Kenseth third and Denny Hamlin ninth, with teammate Kyle Busch between in eighth.
Tony Stewart (fourth) and Jimmie Johnson (eighth) were the other non-Chase drivers to crack the top 10.
Seven of the eight Eliminator Round Chasers will line up in the top 13. The lone exception is Kevin Harvick, who qualified a season-low 33rd in the No. 4 Stewart-Haas Racing Chevrolet.
"We just missed it today," Harvick said. "We were way too loose. We struggled in practice and just missed it in qualifying.
"We have to get better tomorrow and be ready to go on Sunday."
There aren't many bad days left for Chasers
By John Oreovicz
Martinsville Speedway has been part of the fabric of NASCAR for almost 70 years, since the very beginning of stock car racing's inception.
Whether or not NASCAR's premier championship features a Chase, and if that Chase features 10, 12, 13 or 16 drivers, doesn't matter. Martinsville is still at the heart of it all.
Actually, make that eight drivers, because this year's playoff-inspired Chase for the Sprint Cup has entered the Eliminator Round. Over the next three weeks, the eight drivers who survived the first two cuts of NASCAR's new knockout-style Chase format will fight for the right to be among the four drivers who compete in the Championship Round at Homestead-Miami Speedway in November.
NASCAR's Elite Eight -- Brad Keselowski, Matt Kenseth, Jeff Gordon, Ryan Newman, Carl Edwards, Denny Hamlin, Joey Logano and Kevin Harvick -- are dead level on points for a three-event mini-series consisting of races at Martinsville, Texas Motor Speedway and Phoenix International Raceway.
Only four of them will qualify to race for the big prize at Homestead.
Some drivers, like Penske Racing teammates Keselowski and Logano, got here by winning races in both the Challenger and Contender Rounds of the Chase.
Others, like Edwards, Newman and Kenseth, used consistent point scoring to knock favored drivers like Jimmie Johnson and Dale Earnhardt Jr. out of championship contention.
"We admittedly have not been a dominant team all year, so this Chase format gives us an opportunity to be tied for the points lead with four races left," said Edwards, who lost out on the 2011 Sprint Cup crown to Tony Stewart in one of the most thrilling championship battles in recent memory.
"If we make it through these next three races and get to Homestead, we feel we would have a really good shot of winning this championship."
It all starts with Martinsville, where the tight quarters of NASCAR's shortest track (0.526 mile) often lead to bent sheet metal and boiling emotions.
Few tracks test a driver's patience like "The Paper Clip," and with the championship pressure ramped up even higher than usual this year, odds are somebody's hopes of making it to Homestead will get spun out.
"This has been a track that can certainly shuffle the deck," said Johnson, who is the active career leader with eight Martinsville wins. "The chances are low for all eight to come out with straight race cars."
The eight drivers in the Eliminator Round know that they can't count on a cruise-and-collect strategy from here on out. Just like in the Challenger and Contender Rounds, a race win is a guaranteed ticket punched to the next round.
In this case, the Championship Round.
"It's not going to be about surviving and backing your way in," said Virginia native Hamlin. "There is no more hanging back and trying to be conservative.
"From here on out, you've got to be fast."
Changes at SHR could benefit all
By John Oreovicz
In a year when NASCAR switched to a playoff-style format for the Chase for the Sprint Cup, maybe it's appropriate that Stewart-Haas Racing is taking a page from the stick-and-ball sports playbook by shuffling its lineup to finish out the season.
Effective next weekend at Texas Motor Speedway, crew chief Tony Gibson and the No. 10 road crew will swap over to run Kurt Busch's No. 41 Chevrolet. Daniel Knost and the soon-to-be-former 41 crew will transfer to Danica Patrick's No. 10 car.
SHR officials stressed that the move is not being made because there is anything wrong with the way Patrick and the GoDaddy.com team are performing with Gibson. Rather, they believe Gibson's "old-school" approach will be a better fit with a veteran stock car driver like Busch, and that Patrick will benefit from Knost's modern, engineering-driven style.
"We are just basically looking to try to get both teams to be a little more consistent," said Greg Zipadelli, Stewart-Haas Racing director of competition. "They have had speed throughout the year, but haven't necessarily put the whole season together all the races at the level that we expect from them.
"I just kind of feel like it was the time to do it," Zippy added. "We have three races with us not sure what the testing policy is for next year. This is a good opportunity for us to switch things up for Texas and the last three races and just see how things go."
Although Knost is listed as "interim" with Patrick's car, Zipadelli insisted the team is happy with the way the Virginia native has developed this year in his first year as a Cup series crew chief and that he has a long-term future with the team.
Busch won the spring race at Martinsville and qualified for the 16-driver Chase, but was knocked out in the first round of eliminations.
Zipadelli suggested that a no-nonsense veteran like Gibson might be better equipped to handle Busch's occasional emotional outbursts.
"That is a team that we have to get going immediately -- there isn't a lot of time for growth," he observed. "We know Kurt is kind of in the prime of his career. We know that he can go out and win races at every racetrack we go to. We've got to give him that, and we have to give Danica the ability to continue to grow and build a relationship with somebody, because she plans on being here a while.
"We just look at that and it's kind of the best of both worlds right now. We have both people in house."
Patrick has shown improved form in recent races, regularly finishing in the top 20. She achieved her career-best Cup series finishes of seventh place at Kansas and sixth place at Atlanta this year.
But she agreed that Knost's data-driven engineering background is more in line with what she experienced in seven years of racing Indy cars.
"If the team wants to make changes, it's probably in everybody's best interests to make the moves now," Patrick said, citing the restrictions set to be imposed on testing for 2015. "Daniel was my race engineer when I did the first 10 races with Zipadelli and Stewart-Haas in 2012. Really nice guy, very smart, and a lot like the engineers I worked with in IndyCar. In fact, in IndyCar, it was called an engineer instead of a crew chief.
"I'm definitely open-minded and looking forward to the opportunity of seeing how it goes with him."
What they're tweeting ...
By John Oreovicz
Dale Earnhardt Jr. Full Circle
Is it at all weird that the Corvette Parts car is a Ford? pic.twitter.com/D6gU0zPpVu
@MartySmithESPN this is right up there with Santa not being real.
@MartySmithESPN It surely equals the disappointment of finding out Elvira was Cassandra Peterson & not well...Elvira. #SantasReal
***
Man, I do love this place. #NASCAR pic.twitter.com/32TdSKZmlt
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Welcome to Martinsville! @ESPNMotorsports @ESPNNASCAR pic.twitter.com/nLUgVKM9p5
Dale Earnhardt Jr. Full Circle
By John Oreovicz
JGR's Kenseth, Hamlin still chasing
By John Oreovicz
It's been far from a stellar season for Joe Gibbs Racing.
Yet Toyota's flagship team managed to place all three of its cars in the 2014 Chase for the Sprint Cup, and Matt Kenseth and Denny Hamlin are among the eight drivers still in contention in the Eliminator Round of the Chase.
Kenseth's 2003 Cup Series title, achieved in a year when he won a single race while Ryan Newman finished sixth in the standings despite racking up eight wins, is often cited as the event that pushed NASCAR into creating a playoff-style format for its premier championship.
So it's richly ironic that Kenseth and Newman still remain in championship contention this year despite the fact that neither of them has won a race.
And with the "win and you're in" wrinkle that NASCAR added to this year's Chase format, a victory at Martinsville couldn't be more timely for Kenseth. He's never won at the Sprint Cup Series' shortest track.
"If you handed me a menu before the season started, winning a race at Martinsville would be in my top two or three wishes for sure," Kenseth related prior to practice for the Goody's 500. "That would certainly be a career highlight. I haven't been real close to winning here except for last fall -- we had a pretty good shot, we just had too long of a run at the end there and Jeff [Gordon] got by me.
"I definitely ran much better here since I got to JGR than I used to run here. That was a big boost for me."
Kenseth may have benefited from being teamed at JGR with Hamlin, a Virginia native who grew up about three hours from Martinsville.
Hamlin is a four-time Martinsville winner who excels on short tracks.
"I have said all year that if we made it to the final eight, to this Eliminator Round, that we suddenly had a good shot at this championship," Hamlin remarked. "This round has three tracks that our FedEx team has had a lot of success at over the years, obviously starting with Martinsville.
"It's a huge opportunity for us, because as average as our team in general has been this year, we go into a short track where horsepower doesn't matter and aero doesn't matter," he noted. "It's about driver and mechanical setup, and I feel like that's a strong suit with our team."
Hamlin believes that the remaining Chase-eligible drivers will need to push hard in the next three races, rather than adopting a conservative "cruise and collect" strategy.
"The four that move on will be the four that stand out in this round," Hamlin stated. "It's not going to be about surviving or backing your way in. I don't think anybody other than the race winners will be going into Phoenix thinking, 'OK, let's just have a solid week here and move on to Homestead.' There is no more hanging back and trying to be conservative from here on out. You've got to be fast.
"There's a lot of things that can happen between now and Homestead," he added. "One loose wheel, one crash pretty much takes you out of it. It doesn't matter how fast you are if you can't finish these races in a good position. You have to have all the pieces to the puzzle together now that you're part of the final eight."
Podcast: Marty & McGee
By John Oreovicz
Marty Smith and Ryan McGee discuss the upcoming race at Martinsville, Marty's new contract with ESPN and Ryan shares a story about his time in Waco, Texas. Listen 
Johnson looking forward
By John Oreovicz
Jimmie Johnson put his own spin on the classic "unaccustomed as I am to being here" greeting to the media at Martinsville Speedway on Friday morning.
"I always heard you're a second-class citizen if you don't make the Chase, yet here you are talking to me," Johnson joked upon arriving at the dais.
Meeting the press is part of Johnson's race weekend routine. But the six-time Sprint Cup champion is also used to being in the thick of the championship battle at this point of the season.
Not this year. Although he qualified for the 2014 Chase, Johnson was eliminated from championship contention after failing to win a race in the Contender Round or remain in the top eight in the points standings among the 12 eligible drivers following last week's race at Talladega Superspeedway.
Title No. 7 will have to wait another year.
"The mindset is simple," Johnson related prior to practice for the Goody's 500. "We want to close out the year well and finish as high as we can in points. We want to win races. That's what we're here for.
"At the same time, this does open up an opportunity for us to work on 2015 from a personnel standpoint and even from a 2015 test plan," he continued. "Obviously testing is gone next year, so anything we can do to work on the 2015 package will suit us well. We're not slowing down any. These last four weeks are going to be about as busy as any as we're getting geared up for 2015."
Any doubts that Johnson is somehow less hungry for success after winning six Cup series championships since 2006 were dispelled by his performance last week at Talladega. The No. 48 was as close to dominant as a car can be during a restrictor-plate race, but by choosing not to help championship rival Brad Keselowski near the end of the race, Johnson lost momentum and dropped to a 21st-place finish.
Keselowski won anyway, overcoming a similar poor finish at Kansas Speedway to Johnson's to advance to the eight-man Eliminator Round.
"If I made a mistake, that was it -- I should have pushed the 2 [Keselowski]," he said. "I didn't know there would be another green-white-checker and that I'd have another shot at it.
"I think it's mainly on me and the risks I was willing to take -- the position I was in and the situation I was in," Johnson added, discussing his strong overall performance at Talladega. "It's so hard to look in your mirror for 95 percent of the lap and block people. It's just not in my wiring, and I don't think it's really in many. I was more aggressive in the car in blocking, defending and holding on to control of a lane more than I can remember. Unfortunately in the end, it didn't work out."
Even though he can finish no higher than fifth in the standings, Johnson refuses to call his uneven 2014 campaign a failure. He also rubbished reports that he and longtime No. 48 crew chief Chad Knaus are headed for a split.
"It's hard to call a three-win season a low," Johnson said. "But the standards we've set for ourselves are our own doing. We're used to winning a minimum of three races and always competing for championships and certainly top-5s. We just haven't had all of that. We've had some hot spots but the consistency of running up front is something we've lacked. We have four races to close out this season on a positive note.
"It wasn't fun leaving Kansas or Charlotte," he added. "It was relatively dark and not a lot of sunlight floating around. You'll have that. But I truly believe that those moments make you stronger and make you dig deeper. I don't want to be in this position. But it's great medicine to sit and watch this championship unfold. It's going to motivate me, Chad and all of us on the 48 team.
"We'll come back next year and be ready to roll."
This and that ...
By John Oreovicz
. @jamiemcmurray is the fastest on @VirginiaLottery Pole Day. He will start first in the #Goodys500 pic.twitter.com/EZTUatxOCZ
. @JimmieJohnson and Ky. Busch sit tight in their garage stalls as other cars make their way to the track for qual. pic.twitter.com/S1Wou0rrfq
I'm in my usual spot top of T3 sending good vibes to @austindillon3 and all @RCRracing guys pls do t same 5 min to Q pic.twitter.com/aoYKFJyEEW
This and that ...
By John Oreovicz
. @jamiemcmurray is the fastest on @VirginiaLottery Pole Day. He will start first in the #Goodys500 pic.twitter.com/EZTUatxOCZ
. @JimmieJohnson and Ky. Busch sit tight in their garage stalls as other cars make their way to the track for qual. pic.twitter.com/S1Wou0rrfq
I'm in my usual spot top of T3 sending good vibes to @austindillon3 and all @RCRracing guys pls do t same 5 min to Q pic.twitter.com/aoYKFJyEEW