Sprint Cup drivers hope to avoid crashes at Talladega Superspeedway
Talladega Superspeedway is the site for Sunday's NASCAR Sprint Cup Amp Energy 500. // David Griffin, NASCAR Scene
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At least three distinct strategies exist for negotiating treacherous Talladega Superspeedway. But which one is the best?
While some drivers say the optimal way to avoid a multicar crash is to get ahead of it, others deem hanging near the back until almost the very end to be a better approach.
Yet some drivers don’t buy into either philosophy. As far as they’re concerned, the most sensible method is to confront Talladega just like any other track. That is, they want to simply do the best they can and miss the big wreck - wherever they are in relation to it.
“We've seen the big one happen at the front and at the back of the pack,” Michael Waltrip Racing’s David Reutimann says. “You just run your race and hope that you can avoid the trouble."
According to four-time NASCAR Cup champion Jeff Gordon, it’s more a matter of when trouble will strike than if it does at the 2.66-mile high-speed oval.
“The big one is going to happen – it’s just whether you get caught up in the crash or not, or whether it comes early or late in the race,” says Gordon, who carries six Talladega wins into Sunday’s Amp Energy 500. “It’s going to be an exciting race for the drivers and the fans.”
Talladega, of course, is one of only two tracks on the Cup tour (Daytona is the other) where teams are required to use horsepower-reducing restrictor plates on their cars. While the plates keep drivers from traveling well in excess of 200 mph, they also keep cars bunched in one or more tight packs throughout the 188-lap distance at Talladega.
And history shows that running so closely together for so long tends to breed multicar crashes – some of them in spectacular fashion.
So where do you want to be when the big crash comes? It all depends on who you ask. Talladega is about the only track on the Cup circuit where it isn’t uncommon for some top drivers to hang back for most of the day in hopes of missing the big wreck and move into contention for the win in the closing laps.
“It will be interesting to see what kind of strategy you play during the race because there is always two ways of looking at it,” Earnhardt Ganassi Racing’s Juan Pablo Montoya says. “‘Do you need points and you want to try and lead as many laps [as possible]? Or do [you] play conservative and play it at the end?’ It is always a challenge, especially with the side-by-side restarts. It is going to be ‘Whew,’ pretty wild.”
The stakes are higher at Talladega in the fall than in the annual spring race because the latter event is part of NASCAR’s 10-race Chase For The Sprint Cup.
Even though Jimmie Johnson boasts a 118-point lead heading into the weekend, the Hendrick Motorsports driver knows it could all go away if he is caught up in the almost-inevitable Talladega melee and his closest points pursuers are not.
While certainly unlikely, it is mathematically possible that second-place Mark Martin (118 behind Johnson) and third-place Gordon (150 points back) could overtake their Hendrick teammate on Sunday.
Any chance of that happening depends on whether Johnson is in the wreck and his teammates manage to avoid it – and go on to lead laps and challenge for the win.
“I’m going to go there and race and I am going to race like I am not concerned about getting in an accident,” says Martin, who has long admitted to not being a big fan of Talladega. "And sometimes accidents are all around you and you don’t get tangled up, and I am going to race like I am expecting it to happen around me and not catch me. I’ve thought about it and that is how I feel.
“If we wreck, then I am not going to worry about it. If we wreck, we don’t have a chance to win the championship and if we win, we might - we just might. So we are going to go there and just see what it turns out.”
So does Martin plan to go all out or go into conservation mode in hopes of steering clear of any carnage?
"There's obviously strategy that unfolds during the race, but even before the race there's two clear-cut strategies,” crew chief Alan Gustafson says. “You can race as hard as you can and try to stay up front, or you can try to lag back from the main pack and avoid any potential accidents. You have to decide which way to approach it and then decide how you want to execute that. Our strategy is not for anyone to know right now.”
Gordon, meanwhile, is a bit more forthcoming about his plan, while noting that it is subject to change as the race begins to unfold.
“We will most likely take the aggressive approach and try to lead, but try to make smart decisions as well,” he says. “A lot of that will depend on where we start and what is going on around us once the race starts. If need be, we can change our game plan during the race. But there is one approach I prefer, and that’s racing from the drop of the green flag.”
