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Eli Manning is the nation’s newest sports hero, having led the New York Giants to victory in Sunday’s Super Bowl. He established that greatness by proving for the second time that he can rise to the occasion on the NFL’s biggest stage, in its biggest game. He is the NFL’s version of Tony Stewart.
It’s always difficult to compare NASCAR drivers and their performances because there are so many variables to consider. Team, crew chief, resources, teammates, sponsorship, etc.
Charlotte Motor Speedway’s annual NASCAR Sprint Media Tour provides the opportunity to visit with practically every Sprint Cup driver and team and gauge their outlooks for the new season. And, as usual, practically all of them are poised to win races and make the championship Chase. And, like always, there were some intriguing developments and some developing stories during this year’s recently completed tour.
Kyle Busch’s announcement Thursday that he will field a Nationwide Series car for himself and his brother, Kurt, this season was a significant development. And not just for the Nationwide Series, which will no doubt benefit from the excitement and exposure the two volatile brothers will bring to the series.
With 18 different drivers winning Sprint Cup races last year, it seems like everyone and his brother wound up in victory lane. Aside from the usual suspects – Jimmie Johnson, Jeff Gordon, Tony Stewart, and Kyle Busch – five drivers won their first Sprint Cup races.
The easy choices have been made. So who’s next? The first three classes of the NASCAR Hall of Fame featured the obvious choices among NASCAR’s legendary figures.
Everyone loves a big upset – one so shocking that practically no one even considered it a remote possibility. Like Trevor Bayne winning last year’s Daytona 500 with Wood Brothers Racing. Or Regan Smith winning the Southern 500 at Darlington with Furniture Row Racing.
NASCAR officials are keeping their collective fingers crossed as preseason testing begins this week at Daytona. They desperately hope that new restrictor-plate rules they’ve developed break up the two-car drafts at Daytona and Talladega and help bring back pack racing to the circuit’s two most exciting tracks.
A busy offseason is almost over, a bevy of driver and team moves have been made and it’s finally time to get back to racing, with Sprint Cup teams hitting the track for preseason testing Thursday at Daytona. With a new season comes a myriad of questions. Here’s 10 that could dominate the headlines in 2012:
Former Cup champion Kurt Busch went from a winning race team that is accustomed to making the Chase to a mid-pack team not even accustomed to running the full Cup schedule. David Reutimann went from a full-time team that he won two Cup races with to a second-tier, underfunded organization that can’t even promise him a full schedule at this point. But their situations could be worse.
