Kasey Kahne wins fan vote, then captures all-star race
By Bob Pockrass - Associate Editor
Thursday, May 22, 2008
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An hour after Kasey Kahne won the NASCAR Sprint All-Star Race, security guards combed the stands to shoo away the fans still lingering, those still celebrating a race where the athlete thanked the fans and said they helped him win.
For once, it wasn’t cliché. It actually rang true.
Among those still basking in the glow of victory was the Pirkle family from Cumming, Ga., which has rooted for Kahne ever since he entered the Cup series as a baby-faced 24-year-old in 2004. A microcosm of the Kahne fan base, lifelong die-hard Bill Elliott fans Tammy and Scott Pirkle cheered for Kahne, as did their 16-year-old daughter, Ashleigh.
They were among the people who spent time voting for Kahne to get into the all-star race. Ashleigh thinks she voted 22 times the night before the non-points event. Tammy believes she voted at least 100 times in the week leading up to one of NASCAR’s most electric nights.
Their strategy worked as they and certainly tens of thousands of others voted Kahne, winless in his last 52 points events, into a race designed to highlight the best of the best. They shared in the emotion of Kahne’s million-dollar victory and seemed satisfied that they wouldn’t see a penny of the earnings. Just the fact that they helped manipulate the outcome of one of NASCAR’s premier events – and their driver left victorious thanks to a clever pit call – was good enough.
“Definitely we feel like we made a difference,” Tammy Pirkle said. “We just had to get him in there. We knew we just had to do it.”
Kahne owes thanks to the Pirkles and the rest of the fans who voted him into an event that requires drivers to have either won in the previous 15 months or placed in the top two in the heat race that kicked off the night’s activities. Kahne, who finished fifth in the qualifying race, became the first winner of the fan vote – a last-chance gimmick used the last five years – to capture the main event.
Kahne admitted a day earlier that while he had won six races in 2006 he didn’t deserve to be in the all-star race because he didn’t win in 2007. He reiterated after celebrating in victory lane that qualifying for the race through the fan vote is not his goal.
“I want to race my way in,” said Kahne, who earned a 10-year exemption into the main event thanks to winning the race. “I don’t even want to be in the open [qualifying race]. I want to be in because we won races [in the] last year. But we weren’t in that situation. It’s really cool they give the fans an opportunity to vote. I mean, they did it. They put us in.
“For some reason, we ended up being the best car tonight. That’s just part of the rules.”
With NASCAR’s new car rolled out for select races last season and then all races this year, his Gillett Evernham Motorsports team fell behind. Team owner Ray Evernham eventually sold 80 percent of the team to the Gillett family and it looked as if the team could take more steps back in 2008 before improving.
That hasn’t been the case. Kahne, who finished 19th in points in 2007, is 14th this year, but just a day before the all-star victory he noted that “we really haven’t run that great in the last month, two months. … The consistency is why we’re in the points. As far as winning races, we’re a long, long way from there.”
The two-day period of highs and lows was just another part of a mercurial Cup career for Kahne, who was 13th in points as a rookie in 2004, dropped to 23rd in 2005, won the six races on his way to finishing eighth in 2006 and then struggled last year.
“I get down,” said Kahne, reflecting on the previous day when his team struggled in practice at a track where he won both points events in 2006. “We weren’t running as good as we were. This is momentum. These are things that can turn your season around and get you going in the right direction.”
All year, the Gillett Evernham teams have said they were making progress even though results were inconclusive.
“I kept saying we weren’t that bad, we weren’t that bad,” Evernham said. “We just needed a little bit of momentum and a little something to hold on to and prove that we could do it. I think this was a really big night for Gillett Evernham Motorsports. For these guys, too. People have got to believe. I think the biggest thing we did is we’re starting to believe that we can again.”
That’s pretty amazing when Kahne wasn’t sure what to believe a few hours before winning. With five laps remaining in the qualifying race, he wasn’t sure if his day would be over and had no idea he would end up cashing the big prize. But he knew that if there was any chance for his day to continue, he would need to keep his car clean.
“I wasn’t trying to catch the leaders,” Kahne said about the waning laps of the qualifying race, where he was a non-factor as AJ Allmendinger and Sam Hornish Jr. advanced. “There was no chance of that. So it was about finishing the race where we were. You hear from different people throughout the week that you’re doing all right in the votes or you’re doing good in the votes. So I was just trying to think that hopefully we would get into it.”
After gaining entry, Kahne wasn’t sure he had a car to contend. “I guess it wasn’t as far off as I thought,” said Kahne, who started 15th in the heat race. “I was disappointed. I felt like we had a bad practice yesterday. I didn’t feel like we were that good as far as what I was looking for in the car.
“But we don’t race during the day either. We don’t race in the sun. The longer the race went, the further the sun went down, the more the track was shaded, the faster our [car] got. It was like that until the last lap of the race. It was still getting faster and faster.”
Kahne might have had a fast car, but pit strategy won the race, which was broken into four 25-lap segments that included a 10-minute break. Between the final two segments, drivers had to make at least a stop-and-go pit stop with the option to take tires. Kahne elected not to take any tires, improving from seventh to second. He restarted beside Jimmie Johnson with Denny Hamlin third and Greg Biffle fourth. Biffle was the first driver who pitted for two new tires.
Kahne took the lead with 17 laps remaining and held off Biffle to win by 1.3 seconds. Biffle challenged him several times but to no avail, leaving him frustrated as he had won the third segment by more than four seconds. That was pretty typical – Kyle Busch won the first segment by more than two seconds, but saw his night end with engine trouble. Carl Edwards won the second segment by more than three seconds but faded to 10th.
Before the final segment, Kahne wasn’t considered a factor. Starting last in the 24-car field, he was 13th after the first segment, eighth after the second and seventh after the third. Then he got track position and it looked like a typical 1.5-mile race with NASCAR’s new race car, which has made it tough to pass on intermediate tracks. There were only five passes for the lead in 100 laps of green-flag action, likely a product of the new car as well as no cautions except for those between segments.
“When you get out front with this car it’s like magic,” said Matt Kenseth, who finished third. “If you’ve got just the right balance, if you’re a little tight and you get out in that clean air, it’s a big deal. … Track position is just so much more important with this car.
“... I never really thought of Kasey that much because we never had to race with him until the last pit stop.”
Kahne’s crew chief, Kenny Francis, though, had thoughts about winning long before he made the final pit call.
“I knew we still had a good car and we still would have a shot to work on it and make it better if we could get in the main race,” Francis said. “We were fortunate the fans thought enough of us to vote us in.”
The Pirkle family was glad to do its part. They traveled 250 miles to see Kahne win.
Ashleigh Pirkle, proudly wearing her red Kahne gear, laughed as she described how she cried in disappointment when it looked as if Kahne wouldn’t make it out of the qualifying race and then cried “like a baby” in excitement when he won.
“I saw Kasey won the voting and I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, we voted him in,’” she said. “We knew he was going to do it for us.”
- Mentioned Drivers:
- Kasey Kahne
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