Hamlin insisted he’ll again give Vickers the car at some point Sunday at Talladega Superspeedway.

But with a sly smile, Hamlin left the door open to run a full race in his return from a compressed fracture of a vertebra in his lower back. After missing four races, he was cleared Thursday to get back in the car this weekend and said doctors gave him permission to run the entire race.

He said his intention was to “take a knee” after the start by getting out of the car during a caution and allowing Vickers to finish the race. That slightly contradicted crew chief Darian Grubb, who said earlier Friday they’d play race-day by ear and see how the race flows.

When asked about that after his practice stint, Hamlin stammered about his true plans.

“Ummm, yeah. I’d say there’s going to be a caution at some point and I’d like to get out and just ensure myself of one more week of healing,” Hamlin said.

So bet on Hamlin getting out of the car?

“Is there that bet in Vegas?” Hamlin asked.

He doesn’t particularly like Talladega, or restrictor-plate racing, for that matter. But he found himself tossing and turning Thursday night, unable to sleep because he was so anxious to get back in his firesuit, back into his race car and back onto the track.

“If it wasn’t for my crew chief, I would have ran it out of gas,” he said of his only run Friday. “I just wanted to feel speed again. We’re competitors and when you see the people on TV in other sports fighting through injuries to come back to the field or the court, we feel that same thing. We have alligator blood. I don’t know what to say. We’re a different breed. We’re willing to throw caution to the wind just to get back to what we are doing.”

His return drew mixed reactions in the garage.

Race car driving by nature is dangerous and every day on the job has its risks. Now Hamlin is coming back from a serious injury that not everyone would treat the same.

“This is how we make a living,” Clint Bowyer said. “You’ve got to put food on the table and we’re all in the same boat. We’re all given a wonderful opportunity to get paid doing what we love to do, so anytime a racer is OK to get back in the car, he’s going to do it whether he’s sore or whatever the case is. We’d do it even if it didn’t pay anything. It’s just the nature of the beast.”

Jeff Gordon, at 41 years old and the father of two young children, wasn’t sure what his approach would be.

“You have to take yourself out of that and understand what the dangers are, what the risks are and if you re-injure yourself, can that be life-threatening or something that ends your career,” he said. “I think for me, I’m later in my career and have a family and so an injury like what Denny went through, I don’t know. I might not come back from that just because, is it worth it?

“For Denny, I think it’s worth it for him to really take his time and do it right. What he’s doing this weekend, to me that makes sense. It’s Talladega, there’s ways to avoid those incidents,” Gordon said. “I’ll be interested to see if he gets out or stays in there. If I know Denny, he’s going to have a hard time getting out. Sounds like he is ready to go.”

Hamlin was supposed to get out of the car in his return race at Phoenix after knee surgery three years ago. But he stuck it out to prove something to his team because he was injured playing basketball and felt he owed it to his crew to fight through the pain.

“I felt like I had put my team in a very bad spot by getting hurt outside of racing,” he said. “I stayed in to tell them basically that I was sorry and I was going to do whatever I could for them. That hurt worse than what this does in the race car.”

There’s no pain this time around, he said, and the only discomfort is when he actually gets out of the car. To alleviate that, the Joe Gibbs Racing team has taken the option of using a roof hatch and Hamlin is using it to exit the car.

He practiced the driver exchange with Vickers on Friday and twice did it in just over a minute — fast enough to ensure the car would remain on the lead lap if they swapped under caution.

Hamlin now goes forward this week balancing risk versus reward and the challenge ahead. He’s currently 28th in the standings and needs to climb to 20th in the Sprint Cup standings to be eligible to claim one of two wild-card slots in the Chase for the Sprint Cup championship.

He’ll earn the points Sunday if he starts the race.

“We’re going to have to make a big, big run if we’re going to be part of the postseason,” he said. “Our Chase has to start right now. We have to perform each week like it’s a Chase race and do everything we can to get wins. If we don’t win, it doesn’t matter.”

But there is a risk, he admitted.

“I don’t know the exact science, and no one knows the exact percentages. That’s what makes this really, really hard,” he said. “But, as far as I’ve been told, I understand it would take such a significant hit that you probably would be injured from it even if you were 100 percent healthy. I’ve got to let the doctors speak for that a little bit more than me because I don’t know the risks exactly and neither do they. We’re just trying to buy myself another week obviously until Darlington, but the risk is so minimal that it’s almost not even there.”

The post Denny Hamlin turns 16 laps appeared first on IdealCapper.

It was his second victory in as many races in the series this season.

Sauter earned his eighth career victory in the series, and second at Martinsville.

“Two for two starting out. This is unbelievable,” Sauter said in Victory Lane.

He got there by passing Burton, the pole-sitting rookie making just his seventh start in the series, on the outside following a restart on lap 234, and then holding on as the field behind him battled.

Likely challengers included rookie Darrell Wallace Jr., who was seventh in the field on the restart, and Kevin Harvick, who was 12th.

Both had tires that were 50 laps fresher than the leaders, but with Matt Crafton and Timothy Peters among the drivers also in contention, they dueled while Sauter drove away to win by 1.888 seconds.

Crafton rallied to finish second and Burton was third, followed by Peters and Wallace, another rookie.

“I had to time it just right. That’s the key,” Sauter said of his pass for the lead.

The move was part of a calculated tire strategy that worked to perfection. Sauter and his crew chief, Joe Shear, noticed that the 0.526-mile oval was not developing the rubber buildup as it came off tires, keeping it harsher than normal and making it imperative to protect his tires for a final surge.

Sauter said he spent the first half of the race driving at about 80 percent, trying to maintain a respectable place in the field and stay in position to make a run for the front when the time came.

“At about 40 or 50 to go, I put the hammer down and just started picking them off,” he said.

The performance drew high praise from Shear.

“He’s not really known for saving equipment,” he said of Sauter.

Crafton, who like Sauter was not a factor for much of the race, said his team deserved the credit for his finish.

“We dropped the green and I was good for about five laps, and then it was just done,” he said of his truck, necessitating several stops to pit road for adjustments. “We just made it a practice session.”

It worked.

“We kept making methodical changes and it was there at the end,” Crafton said.

The day was especially eventful for Burton, the rookie who said he wept when he won the pole in track record time on Friday, and had the dominant truck for much of the day, leading a race-high 154 laps.

He also engaged in a brief battle for the lead with Ron Hornaday, a four-time champion in the series, and eventually ran into the back of Hornaday, sending the veteran slamming into the wall.

“I ran in a little too hard and got into him. There’s not much else to say,” Burton said.

He also thought he cost himself a chance by trying to win the race too early, on a restart after Wallace, Harvick and several other contenders had just pitted for tires, dropping well back in the field but sure to surge forward.

“I thought it was 40 to go and it was actually 60 to go,” Burton, the son of former NASCAR driver Ward Burton and nephew of Jeff Burton said.

It was his seventh start in the series, and second at Martinsville. He was 13th last fall.

“We came a long way in a year’s time,” Burton said.

Hornaday rallied to finish 10th.

The post Johnny Sauter wins at Martinsville appeared first on IdealCapper.

“That’s a pretty good one for me to win,” he thought to himself. “Already got my name on the trophy.”

Hornish survived two restarts in the final 15 laps and held off Kyle Busch to win the Nationwide Series race at the Las Vegas Motor Speedway.

Hornish led 114 laps in his second career Nationwide victory, but needed a strong finish to outrun Busch, the hometown driver who won the Nationwide race last week in Phoenix.

Hornish credited the win to his dominant car, all the more impressive since the drivers got almost no practice on the 1.5-mile tri-oval due to Friday’s rain.

“You dream about having cars like this,” Hornish said. “I think I used more energy celebrating than I did actually driving the car today.”

Hornish and Busch both went aggressively after the final restart with seven laps to go, with Busch briefly nudging ahead before Hornish reclaimed the lead with five laps left. Hornish got clear of Busch and finished comfortably in a caution-filled race.

With his third top-10 finish in three races this season, Hornish moved atop the points race and gave owner Roger Penske his first victory at Las Vegas in any NASCAR series — and Penske’s first win since moving from Dodge to Ford in the offseason.

Hornish also snapped a 36-race winless streak in his Ford in his 69th Nationwide race overall.

Hornish hadn’t won since November 2011 at Phoenix. His crew chief, Greg Erwin, won his first Nationwide race.

Busch dominated last week’s race, but his Toyota couldn’t catch up to Hornish despite plenty of cagey racing. Hornish had nearly a three-second lead over Busch before the first of the final two cautions.

“Sam was just that much faster than us,” said Busch, who finished in the top 10 for just the second time in 10 races in Las Vegas. “He was beating us a little bit everywhere, all the way around the race track. Certainly, when he stepped on the gas, that thing would go forward in a hurry. Us two were the class of the field, but he was the class of everybody.”

Pole sitter Brian Vickers finished third, with Trevor Bayne fourth — despite an early brush against the wall — and Elliott Sadler fifth. Travis Pastrana came in 10th, four spots ahead of Dale Earnhardt Jr.

Vickers echoed Busch’s praise of Hornish’s superior car.

“I couldn’t move around much,” said Vickers, a top-10 finisher three times in six Vegas races. “The car would get out from under me. Seemed like Sam could not only get through the bumps, but he could run top through bottom.

“We just ended up getting too loose. We killed the car on the last run. It was a valiant effort, trying to go for the win.”

Hornish regained his early lead on the 145th lap, but Scott Lagasse Jr.’s late spin and an even later wreck forced him to be resourceful out of restarts.

Shortly after Lagasse’s spin, rookie Kyle Larson’s car ended up in flames after a big collision with Joey Gase and Ryan Sieg. Larson, who also hit the wall on the 87th lap, emerged from his car unharmed.

Larson, a 20-year-old from the Sacramento area, survived a frightening crash on the final lap of the Nationwide race two weeks ago at Daytona, where his car sailed into the fence and peppered the crowd with debris, including a tire, injuring more than two dozen fans.

Hornish leads the Nationwide points standings by 19 points over Justin Allgaier.

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The 30-year-old Stewart-Haas Racing driver topped the second Sprint Cup practice with a fast lap of 196.220 mph, raising the possibility of her becoming on Sunday the first female to win the pole for the Daytona 500 on Feb. 24.

Patrick’s lap was eight-tenths of a second faster than Joey Logano’s top lap of 195.410 mph in the morning session.

“I suppose being the fastest going into qualifying is as good as you can hope for,” said Patrick, who was third-fastest in the morning session. “Everything that we do is to make sure we do whatever we can to be on the pole. That’s what we all are shooting for.

“But tomorrow is a whole other day. You’ve got to hope the weather stays very consistent.”

The possibility of winning the pole made Patrick’s relationship with fellow Sprint Cup rookie Ricky Stenhouse Jr., which has dominated headlines since she arrived here, secondary for the time being.

“Well, I have always felt in my career that when things go well on the track, the media responds to it,” Patrick said. “Make sure you write about how good the crew is that made this car and the last car that was really fast [at testing], and how strong the Hendrick [Motorsports] engine is.

“That’s really important at Daytona. Here at Daytona and Talladega, it’s very much about the potential of the car and the engine.”

Stenhouse posted the 24th-fastest time in the second practice and 15th in the first.

But Saturday wasn’t about Stenhouse or Patrick. It was about how fast crew chief Tony Gibson and everyone at SHR made her No. 10 Chevrolet, which also was fast here during a January test.

Patrick said this is not the same car.

“This other car was really good in the wind tunnel, so we brought it,” she said. “You always hope the numbers from the wind tunnel translate to the track, and it did.

“That’s kind of the way it’s gone for us at Daytona. Everything we think is going to work a certain way works the way it is expected to, and that’s not always the case.”

Patrick never has started on the pole in a Sprint Cup race. Her best start in 10 races last season was 23rd at Atlanta. She qualified 29th for the Daytona 500 and finished 38th, 64 laps behind winner Matt Kenseth.

Patrick’s best start in the Nationwide Series, in which she competed full time last year, was first last season at Daytona. She finished 38th in that race.

The best start in the 500 for a woman was 18th by Janet Guthrie in 1980. Patrick hopes to change that.

“It would be really nice,” Patrick said of winning the 500 pole. “It’s a very big pole of all of them in the year for attention, especially for [sponsor] GoDaddy, who is on the car. There are other races throughout the year that as a driver you feel more pleased or proud of yourself to get, but this one is a whole team effort.”

Team owner Rick Hendrick, whose organization supplies engines to Stewart-Haas Racing, said he’d “love to see her on the pole.”

“She’s magical,” he said. “You look at the Super Bowl, and she’s all over the Super Bowl. She’s a good little driver and she does a lot for our sport. It would really be special if she could be on the front row. It would be special. It never happened before, so that would be cool.”

Richard Petty, NASCAR’s all-time winner who once said women didn’t belong in the garage, agreed with Hendrick.

“From a [public relations] standpoint, it would be great,” he said. “What it does, it puts us in a different arena because people will pick up on it that don’t usually pick up on the race.”

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