Nascar Thread part II

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Happy Birthday.

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This makes more sense.


Joe Gibbs Racing has transferred management responsibility of the pit crews for the Nos. 77 and 78 Toyotas to Furniture Row Racing, a JGR spokesperson confirmed on Wednesday. Gibbs provides the pit crews for the two Furniture Row cars driven by rookie Erik Jones and Martin Truex Jr. as part of its technical alliance with the Denver, Colorado-based organization.
However, while management decisions for the Furniture Row pit crews will now be made in-house, the crewmembers will continue to train at JGR.
The arrangement between the two organizations was cast into a new light last month at Indianapolis.
Kyle Busch and Truex crashed while racing for the lead in Turn 1 off a restart on Lap 112 of the Brickyard 400. Following a confrontation between Busch’s crew chief Adam Stevens and several members of Truex’s team, JGR suspended two No. 78 crewmembers – front tire changer Chris Taylor and rear tire changer Lee Cunningham, JGR employees – for three weeks.
Those suspended crewmembers return to action Saturday night (7:30 p.m. ET, NBC, PRN, SiriusXM NASCAR Radio) at Bristol Motor Speedway.

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Very cool indeed.

BRISTOL, Tenn. — Of all the gifts presented thus far to Dale Earnhardt Jr. as he winds down his career as a full-time competitor in the Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series, Thursday’s announcement by Bristol Motor Speedway officials seemed to truly take the Hendrick Motorsports driver by surprise.
The speedway, which will host the Bass Pro Shops NRA Night Race on Saturday (7:30 p.m. ET, NBC, PRN, SiriusXM NASCAR), announced the endowment of the Dale Earnhardt Jr. Scholarship to be presented annually to the Sullivan County (Tenn.) high school student demonstrating outstanding commitment in the field of automotive technology.
“That’s what I’m talking about,” an obviously excited Earnhardt said after track general manager Jerry Caldwell made the announcement. “That’s awesome. … That is exactly the kind of thing that gets me excited, and I appreciate you guys doing that.”
Officials said the scholarship is for $2,088, a nod to Earnhardt’s No. 88 car number.
As a teen, Earnhardt worked at his father’s car dealership. He lists “Retired automotive service mechanic” on his Twitter bio.
“You have meant so much to this place … we love you, the fans love you here and the Earnhardt name has such a legacy at this place,” Caldwell said. “We felt like it was appropriate for us to be able to honor (Dale) but also be able to honor a bright young student that has an interest in the automotive industry.”

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Hendrick Motorsports made a landmark announcement Tuesday night, choosing to let legacy live on by putting Chase Elliott behind the wheel of a newly numbered Chevrolet ( No. 9 ) and William Byron in the No. 24 starting in 2018.
Elliott will now be wheeling the same number his father, Bill, drove to a NASCAR Hall of Fame career, while Byron will carry on the legacy that Jeff Gordon started at Hendrick Motorsports in 1992.
After the news broke, Hendrick drivers chimed in with their thoughts on the announcement — and they were stoked.

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Now this is flat out awesome.


Wearing a Hawaiian-print shirt with old-fashioned cars on it, a smiling Joe Smith accepted the keys to a 2017 Chevrolet Corvette Grand Sport Convertible Collector Edition 3LT Wednesday afternoon at the NASCAR Hall of Fame.
The car’s previous owner? None other than Jeff Gordon.

Gordon signs the inside of the Corvette on Wednesday

Gordon was on hand at the Hall of Fame as well, as he presented the keys to his personal Corvette — and then signed the inside of the car — to Smith, who was the winner of the Jeff Gordon Children’s Foundation raffle that raised $1 million for pediatric cancer this year. Gordon has given away a Corvette for the contest every year for 12 years, but this year marks the first that the foundation has broken $1 million in the contest alone.
That makes the four-time Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series champion proud.
“Over the years, shoot, I think we’re up to 10 or 12 million dollars with just this program alone,” Gordon told NASCAR.com after the event. “So, it’s obviously been very successful – that money plays a big impact on pediatric cancer research. But it’s also a very fun and exciting event where we got to bring today to the NASCAR Hall of Fame a lot of, not just fans, but people that have contributed to the Jeff Gordon Children’s Foundation, maybe through the program trying to win the Corvette, but also wanting to give back to a great cause.”
Founded in 1999 by Gordon, the Jeff Gordon Children’s Foundation has worked to fund childhood cancer research, raising more than $16 million for the cause. The organization also helped open the Jeff Gordon Children’s Hospital in Concord, North Carolina, and the Butaro Cancer Center of Excellence in Rwanda.
Gordon’s inspiration to start the foundation came after watching his then-crew chief Ray Evernham’s son battle leukemia.
“That was the first time that it really impacted me on a personal level and (Evernham) started getting more awareness toward the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society and I kind of joined forces with him,” Gordon said. “I finally formed my own foundation in 1999 and through meeting kids through Make-a-Wish, different hospitals, I realized just how many children are suffering from cancer. And while the success rate for cures has gone up, the long-term effects from that treatment, as well as those (cancers that) are rare that there aren’t cures for, has really driven me to get behind it even more and get more people involved.”
Gordon began his work with pediatric cancer as a young adult. Now married, he has two young children of his own, Ella and Leo. Having children makes him empathize with what the parents of young cancer patients go through.
“I started this work before I was a father and I connected to maybe a family,” Gordon said. “And I thought of myself when I was a kid and when I got the opportunity to get behind the wheel of a race car and live out my passion, how was one of these kids not able to do that because of cancer? And that’s what drove me before I had my own children.
“Now that I have children, I realize as a parent, you’ll do anything for them. And to see them suffer, to see them go through something that is out of their control is a terrible thing to experience. I can’t imagine it. But I can now as a parent, know that it could happen to me – it could still happen to me – and that if it does happen, I want to make sure I’m doing everything I can. That they have a future ahead of them because of research, because of a treatment that could save their lives.”
With only three drugs specifically developed for children with cancer in the last 20 years, the mission to fight childhood cancer is very much ongoing with work to be done. The supporters of the Jeff Gordon Foundation are working to advance that cause every year, Gordon said. Supporters like contest winner Smith and his wife, who presented Gordon with a check for $10,000 at the end of the program to go toward the foundation.
“Every year that we’ve handed over the keys and given this Corvette away, the individuals are special people,” Gordon said. “They’re special because they’re not always just NASCAR fans or fans of mine – they really stand for something greater, they really want to do something to give back to something that they’re passionate about or that we’re passionate about with the foundation.
“So, to know that Joe’s a car enthusiast, that he’s excited to be here, that he’s having a great experience, that he’s passionate about the car but more importantly that he really believes in the cause. …. Here we are giving him a Corvette and he’s giving us a check for $10,000 to only encourage others of the important work that we’re doing.”
“I can’t do it alone,” he said later. “We’ve done great work through some great programs out there. But the work doesn’t stop there, you’ve got to keep going.”

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CONCORD, N.C. — There’s plenty of “new” to be found in the new flange-fit composite body that will be phased into the NASCAR XFINITY Series starting later this season. New technology, new cost-cutting measures and conveniences, plus new officiating fail safes are on tap.
But it’s also worth noticing what hasn’t changed, NASCAR’s senior director of team efficiencies Brett Bodine explained in a Thursday walk-through with a Toyota Camry test mule at the NASCAR Research & Development Center.
The car, Bodine said, retains the same dimensions as its steel-bodied predecessor. Plus, at a casual glance either 50 feet away or from the middle of the grandstands, the car offers no obvious visual cues that its body is composed of 13 interlocking laminate panels.
“It doesn’t look any different,” Bodine said, noting that the basic shapes and surfaces carry over from car to car. After those first-blush appearances, the differences become clearer.
The car received its first close-up for the media Thursday at the NASCAR R&D Center, just two weeks before the first of this season’s three scheduled races for the technology. XFINITY Series teams will have the option of racing the composite bodies at Richmond (Sept. 8), Dover (Sept. 30) and Phoenix (Nov. 11) as the season winds down. The current plan is to introduce the new body style at all tracks except Daytona and Talladega next year, with a full-fledged implementation in 2019.
GMS Racing tested at Richmond Raceway last week, using a rookie test for Spencer Gallagher to allow the team to get accustomed to the new body style. Bodine said the team reported a “virtually seamless” transition, keeping the timetable for a gradual phasing-in on a steady track.
“The decision process was really all on the teams,” Bodine said of the timing. “We presented them with several options through the collaboration throughout the process, the timing of when the panels would be ready out of production in a large enough supply. Certainly, the teams wanted to run it a few races on smaller tracks to get an understanding of how durable the car was going to be. All of those factors went into the teams’ and industry’s decision on this rollout plan.”
Wisconsin-based Five Star RaceCar Bodies produces the composite-material panels, which are all implanted with an RFID transponder, similar to how pets are micro-chipped. That feature helps NASCAR competition officials track inventory.
MORE: Take a 360-degree tour of the flange-fit XFINITY Series car body
Savings in time and cost come with the design. Instead of a steel body welded onto the chassis, parts lock and bolt on, making it far easier to replace damaged panels. Today’s crash in practice that might be an automatic decision to unload a backup car could become tomorrow’s repair or replacement for an individual panel, a process that could lead teams to keep fewer cars in stock. Furthermore, the process to hang a composite body will take far less time — an estimated two days versus the nearly two weeks to form, shape and weld the current steel-body style.
A closer inspection reveals a built-in anti-tampering detail, a raised honeycomb pattern on the surface of panels in the most aero-sensitive areas. If a team tries to sand or otherwise massage the aerodynamics, blemishes to the pattern will reveal the infractions.
While the new body style won’t stop crew chiefs from pushing the boundaries of the rules to gain an advantage, Bodine said the project was developed with fair play in mind.
“That’s their job,” Bodine said, noting crew chiefs’ long history of experimentation. “Their job is to try to be better than the other team. Our responsibility to the industry is to be stewards of the sport, create as level a playing field as possible, and we feel this flange-fit composite body will provide the officials with more tools to ensure that level playing field.”
Bodine said he expected nearly 85 to 90 percent of the field for the XFINITY Series’ trip to Richmond to be using the flange-fit body. There are competitive incentives for doing so; the steel-body cars will be 150 pounds heavier than their composite-bodied counterparts and they will also race without the aero benefit of a radiator pan.
Those decisions and others were reached through collaboration among NASCAR competition officials and team technical directors.
“They asked us to make sure the flange-fit body was the body of choice,” Bodine said, noting that teams wanted to concentrate their resources on a single body style.
Teams in the NASCAR K&N Pro Series have used the Five Star composite bodies since 2015, providing a time for competition officials to learn the ins and outs of the body style before elevating them to a NASCAR national series. That evolution raises the question of whether composite bodies are in the development pipeline for the Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series.
“Right now, our main concern is making it successful in XFINITY,” Bodine said. “We’ve got to get them on the race track, get them running side by side, we’ve got to understand the durability of the car, and then we’ll evaluate the future of a project like this once we’ve got all the information we need.”

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New driver for the 10 SHR car next year, Danica is not returning.

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New driver for the 10 SHR car next year as Danica is now returning.

I hope where ever she ends up has deep pockets to pay for all the wrecked race cars.

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Roger that Mr.