Underpowered Stewart Grabs Seventh-Place Finish

FONTANA, Calif. — Rain plagued all activities at Auto Club Speedway over the weekend, with qualifying for the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series, Nationwide Series and Craftsman Truck Series all rained out.
The fields for all three races were set by 2007 owner’s points, and practice was limited. Rain also washed out Saturday’s Nationwide Series race, which would have capped the first-ever appearance by the series and the Truck Series at the same track on the same day. The rain twice delayed Sunday’s Cup event before it was postponed until Monday morning after 87 laps.
The Cup race and the Nationwide Series race were each completed Monday afternoon.
“It’s challenging. I feel it is tough for us mentally,” said Jimmie Johnson regarding the long day Sunday and an early wake-up call on Monday. “But I feel worse for the crew guys. As I start to go through the challenges of it, I can only imagine guys coming in at 6 a.m. or 8 a.m., whatever it was yesterday, standing around till 11 or 12, then back this morning.  
“From our standpoint, I guess you get used to it when you’re in the series long enough. You’re used to these rain delays, things that come with it. It is challenging. It is hard to turn your brain off and on and try to relax between the breaks that we have.”

• Prior to Sunday’s rain out, Casey Mears, Dale Earnhardt, Jr., Sam Hornish, Jr. and Reed Sorenson were involved in a wild four-car accident after Mears’s Chevrolet hit one of the many wet spots on the track from water that was coming up through the asphalt from the all-weekend rain showers.
Mears hit the wall and was impacted by Earnhardt’s Chevrolet, while Hornish and Sorenson tangled behind them with Hornish’s car then impacting Mears’s car, turning it onto its side and igniting a fire, which was quickly extinguished by fire crews.
“I think we were too excited. We got going a little too soon,” Earnhardt said. “The race track was a little dirty and everybody was losing grip and there were a lot of wet spots out there. When you run over all them wet spots and do the best you can; everybody is just trying to ride. But once you slip up, sometimes you don’t save enough. And Casey (Mears) got up there and into some water or dirt or something and ended up out of the groove. And way out of the groove is just terrible. It’s like a dirt track up there.”

• Tony Stewart finished seventh Monday, but said he did it with a de-tuned Toyota engine.
“We need a little work right now, in all honesty,” Stewart said. “They had some problems earlier in the week and so they tamed them down for this week to make sure they would live and they did. I would rather make it live than take a chance on it being fast and not making it to the end here.  That’s part of the learning curve and part of the growing pains when you change like this — trying to find what you have to do and some days you’re not going to have it perfect. We’ll get it there— it’s just going to take a couple weeks.”

• The race at California Speedway is like old home week for California native Casey Mears.
“It’s fun. When we come back here you get a lot of memories with dad (Roger Mears) and Rick (Mears) racing at Ontario and then they used to come down here and race at Ascot Park and Riverside,” he explained. “There is just a lot of history here in Southern California for my family. It’s funny because we usually see people coming out of the woodwork that we haven’t seen for years, from the off-road races and from the early days. My dad actually ran some stock-car races at Riverside. It’s fun to come back and talk to everybody.”

• Kasey Kahne was the top finishing Dodge driver Monday, placing ninth.
“We had a great car. The team did a good job,” said Kahne, who ranks second in points after two races. “We had good pit stops. Everything was nice. That final run we were a top-four car and just got the car loosened up a little too much — maybe a slippery set of tires, maybe a slow pit stop and I just kind of fell back to 13th or 14th, but prior to that we were really good and still got a top 10 out of it, so it was really good for us.”

• Mark Martin made his 700th Sprint Cup start Sunday.
“That’s a lot of races. It’s amazing to reflect back,” Martin said. “It’s made me reflect back on my first race back in North Wilkesboro in 1981. I’ve been real fortunate, worked with a lot of great people, drove a lot of fast race cars. To me, it’s not so important how many times I’ve started but how fast I went when I started them. I managed to go fast a lot with the help of a lot of great race teams and good help.”

• Jeff Burton led the Daytona 500 with three laps to go, but finished 13th.
“I’ll be honest, I felt stupid after the Daytona 500 because we were leading the race with three to go and you finish 13th, why wouldn’t you feel stupid?  In the situation we were in, had I just taken off and got a normal restart we weren’t going to win,” Burton explained.
“I tried to do something and shake things up to confuse people to try to steal a win.  We didn’t have a car fast enough to win, and we put ourselves in a position on that last restart that made it harder for us.”

• Nine Toyotas started the Auto Club 500, equaling the most in any Sprint Cup Series race.