Steve Byrnes Posts

One of the questions fans frequently ask me is whether or not NASCAR drivers harbor a grudge against one another from week to week. Well, if they do, Bristol Motor Speedway is the one place they can get away with returning the not-so-friendly favor.

Whether it's payback from a previous race or for something that happened just a few laps before, we usually can expect retaliation on the high banks of Bristol. And that tit-for-tat can be as simple as a complementary spin or as emotive as a post-race fight. One former series champion told me, "Any driver who says they don't have a 'payback' list is a liar." That mental list can be lengthy and likely covers misdeeds from many years back.

Debacle. Fiasco. Embarrassment.

All of these words and more were used to describe last year's Allstate 400 at the Brickyard.

What could cause utterances of this nature to be used to describe one of NASCAR's crown jewel events, held on sacred racing ground at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway?

Sunday's NASCAR Sprint Cup Series race at Infineon Raceway could very well make or break the season of two underrated drivers who are teammates by virtually all definitions of the word.

Marcos Ambrose, who drives for JTG-Daugherty Racing, essentially a satellite of Michael Waltrip Racing (MWR), and David Reutimann, who won his first Cup race for MWR last month at Lowe's Motor Speedway, are two humble and subdued drivers making a lot of noise on the track this year. But the road course in Sonoma, Calif., could mean totally different things to the duo.

Mark Martin's NASCAR Sprint Cup Series victory last weekend at Phoenix very well may have been the most popular and sentimental win in years.

Not only did the fans in the grandstands voice their thundering approval but numerous drivers and car owners ducked into Victory Lane to congratulate Mark on his accomplishment. Greg Biffle articulated it best when he said, in summary, that he couldn't think of anyone else, besides himself, he'd rather see in Victory Lane. The feeling of virtually every driver in the garage is that if they can't pull their car into Victory Lane, they're happy to see Mark do so. He has that much respect because he races everyone clean and is as intense as they come.

While Jeff Gordon's win at Texas Motor Speedway was a big deal to most of us, it wasn't as significant as we've all made it out to be. Sure, he broke a 47-race winless streak and snagged a win on one of the two remaining tracks he hadn't conquered, but the whole incident was terribly overplayed and revealed just how much of a slave Gordon is to his own success.

While Gordon had never before visited Victory Lane at Texas, how quickly we forget the man led a bunch of laps and landed many top-five finishes at the 1.5-mile venue before.