FanHouse CraftsmanTruckSeries

Does NASCAR need a 10-race playoff to make a championship race close and exciting?

If you ask the newly-crowned Craftsman Truck Series champion Johnny Benson, he'd probably tell you no.

After all, Benson won the title -- his second career NASCAR championship to follow up his Nationwide Series title in 1995 -- by just a mere seven points over Ron Hornaday Jr.

By comparison, Carl Edwards trails Jimmie Johnson by 141 points in the Sprint Cup Series standings with the season-finale scheduled for Sunday afternoon at the same Homestead-Miami Speedway Benson scored his huge season win at Friday night. What's also notable is that the Sprint Cup Series had a near-total points reset just ten races ago among the Top 12 drivers.

While I won't profess to have followed the 2008 Craftsman Truck Series as close as I could have -- hey, I went to see the character-rich series when they visited O'Reilly Raceway Park in Indianapolis back in July -- I've got to say that Benson's win is one of those "feel good" stories of the year.

Not to slight Hornaday by any margin, but Benson is truly one of the good guys in racing and has always been quite approachable for both fans and media.

I'd imagine you've seen a thing or two about this story in the past couple of days, but in case you haven't, it's worth reading about.

Essentially, the gist of the of the story is that somebody, somewhere is very happy to rain on Kyle Busch's parade in 2008. You remember Busch, right? That guy who has won eight Sprint Cup races in 2008? Or, more timely, the guy who finds himself just puttering through the Chase for the Sprint Cup in 12th-place, wondering how tables can turn so fast.

Busch, who's scheduled to race in Friday night's Craftsman Truck Series race at Texas Motor Speedway, got to the Lone Star State track Thursday only to find that his No. 51 Billy Ballew ride had been charred in a fire along the interstate in Shreveport, La.

The fire left only one race truck -- reports are conflicting so we don't know whether or not it the primary or the backup that was salvaged from the fire -- and a pit box usable, and burned up the rest of the equipment. This bad luck for the team and continuation of bad luck for Kyle Busch simply is incredible to me.

Carl Edwards may have won the race at Atlanta Motor Speedway, but Jimmie Johnson walked away needing only to waltz through the next three races to claim his third-straight Sprint Cup championship. Here's a look back at the weekend:

I didn't get a chance to watch last weekend's NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series event at New Hampshire Motor Speedway, but I certainly heard about the melee that took place after the race on pit road.

If you missed it, the tiff was a result of David Starr making contact with both Germain Racing Toyotas -- Todd Bodine and David Reutimann -- during the race. Tempers flared when Starr pulled to pit road after the event and both Germain pit crews surrounded his truck.

Bodine's crew chief Mike Hillman Sr. was apparently the ring leader of the whole brouhaha, and pulled Starr from his own truck which, naturally, got Starr -- a Texan -- pretty riled up. Starr started swinging (he appeared to connect on at least three shots) and everyone started scuffling. (Watch the video further down this post!)

In other words, it was an ending to a race that the Truck Series -- that's been somewhat struggling in 2008 due to a variety of reasons -- needed to gain some more exposure.

Unfortunately for the teams involved, it meant NASCAR penalties on Wednesday.

ESPN put out a story Thursday afternoon about Craftsman Truck Series driver Ron Hornaday Jr. admission to steroid use a few years ago and it effectively made the rounds across the entire network -- from SportsCenter, the bottom line ticker, and the web site.

In the article, though, it specifically acknowledges a few of things including:

• 1) Hornaday used the steroids to attempt to get healthy after doctor's couldn't diagnose the illness that caused him to lose 38 pounds in less than a year;
• 2) Hornaday used the steroids -- testosterone, specifically -- with a prescription (though the clinic is under federal investigation;
• 3) After using them for a while, Hornaday didn't notice a difference and stopped taking them and was later diagnosed with a hyperactive thyroid.

As of now, though, Hornaday claims to have been off the supplement for quite a while and it's tough not believe the guy because of how open he was to the questions from the ESPN reporter, including showing NASCAR medical forms, prescription records, and the actual substance he used that he has left over.

And frankly, I just don't see it as a big deal.

Hidden beneath the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series, and even under the Nationwide Series, sits NASCAR's third-most prestigious national racing series -- the Craftsman Truck Series.

Though next season it's currently in position to take on simply the name of "NASCAR Truck Series" as the Craftsman, the corporate sponsor sits the series began in 1995, will depart. No new sponsor has been found.

Combine that with other factors influencing NASCAR's Double-A league, and the outlook is less than rosy.

Just last Saturday in Richmond, word spread through the garage area that Dodge would be dropping its factory support money of the entire series -- though it only affects one team, Bobby Hamilton Racing. As a result, the team suspended operations of its No. 4 truck and will focus solely on the No. 18 for the rest of 2008.

Dodge's support has been dwindling in recent years, but pulling out entirely truly signifies that the manufacturer feels it can't compete and that it is simply losing money on the attempt to sell more pick-up trucks via NASCAR truck racing.

If nothing else from NASCAR's Labor Day weekend trip to Auto Club Speedway in southern California is a positive, at least the sanctioning body is taking steps to make the sport safer in the coming weeks.

NASCAR CEO Brian France announced Sunday at the track that NASCAR will be unveiling a new drug testing policy in the coming weeks that will likely take effect when the 2009 season begins at Daytona in February.

NASCAR officials have approached several teams in recent weeks, using them as sounding boards on ideas for the new policy. A form of random testing is expected, members of several team sources have confirmed.

"We're going to expand the scope of the policy," NASCAR's Brian France said. "That's where we are today. We have a very good policy," he said.

"We will be looking at broadening testing, even though we have a lot of latitude today. We're going to broaden it. The circumstances around all of sports have changed in the past three, four or five years. We need to be mindful of that."

That stance is a long way from the one NASCAR originally took earlier this season when former driver Aaron Fike admitted that he used heroin on race days.

Got reservations for 2009 NASCAR Sprint Cup races in Bristol, Atlanta, California, or Talladega? Better get on the phone with your travel agent.

NASCAR unveiled the 2009 schedules for all three series' -- Sprint Cup, Nationwide, and Craftsman Truck Series -- Tuesday afternoon with a few a changes here and there that mostly seem to be very good.

There weren't any new tracks added to the schedule Sprint Cup for 2009 and Auto Club Speedway isn't scheduled for demolition (there's always next year!) but date changes and schedule location swaps were the name of the game. Chronologically the changes were:

• - Bristol: The spring race at Bristol Motor Speedway has long tried to dodge rain and even snow in its March location on the schedule, and it got a little bit of relief by being pushed back one week from 2008 to March 22 in 2009.


• - Atlanta: The next change on the schedule will see Atlanta Motor Speedway move to Labor Day weekend for a Sunday night race at the 1.5-mile track. If nothing else, it means NASCAR will race on Labor Day some 2,100 miles closer to where it should be that weekend. Ahem, Darlington.

Since sweeping the weekend with a win in both the Nationwide Series and Sprint Cup Series races at Chicagoland Speedway in July, racing in NASCAR has been a little rough on the Sprint Cup points leader.

Yep, Kyle Busch has simply cooled off for the past two race weekends. Cooled off, that is, from a high point somewhere on the momentum scale just past red hot.

His two finishes in the last two Sprint Cup events at Indianapolis and Pocono? Try 15th at the Brickyard and a staggering 36th at Pocono. Combined, those finishes have dropped 86 points off his lead over Dale Earnhardt Jr. in the standings to a smaller 176-point advantage.

Both Indianapolis and Pocono are flat tracks -- a venue that the Joe Gibbs Racing driver admittedly hasn't found a great handle on yet in 2008. The 15th-place finish at Indy was about how good the No. 18 was that day, but the 36th-place finish at Pocono was a matter of the team running out of fuel at the end of the race.

He does have a win in the Nationwide Series Kroger 200 at O'Reilly Raceway Park, but on the previous night in the Craftsman Truck Series, he struggled heavily with what he called "the worst truck" he's ever driven.

So, is this the point in the 2008 season where we see Kyle Busch come back to the pack? It very well could be.

First, we need something to cause every race fan to get chills of excitement:



The boys (and girls) are back in (my) town. And man, isn't that music on the video just awesome?

Yep, racing has returned to Indianapolis in the form of stock car racing for the 15th-straight year as the Sprint Cup Series lights up the engines Friday afternoon for the first practice session teams will be given to get prepared for Sunday's Allstate 400 at the Brickyard.