Tony Stewart Racing - A Fans View

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Came across a couple more changes this morning that are of importance. These aren’t rule changes but interesting things that are happening.

Rusty gets the boot. No, not from ABC/ESPN, just from his lead race analyst role. He’s going to take over as the lead analyst in their prerace show.

So who’s taking his place? No big surprise here, Dale Jarrett is leaving his seat in the UPS Toyota of Michael Waltrip Racing after the first five races in this years Sprint Cup Series (the former Nextel Cup Series) (The former Winston Cup Series). Once he’s done there he’ll slide into the seat formerly used by Rusty.

I’ve always liked Dale, probably because he was Joe Gibbs Racing’s first driver, and won two races for them, including the Daytona 500.

NASCAR NEXTEL CUP CHALLENGE Sprint All Star Race. Autoweek reports that the new name of the all star race is –The Sprint All-Star Race. Dean Kessel from Sprint said, “Not the Sprint Challenge, like it used to be. It’s a race, so we’ll call it a race. The preliminary event [for drivers not in the All-Star Race] will be the Sprint Showdown, not the Open. And the All-Star Race will be in four 25-lap legs instead of four 20-lap legs.”

Funny I don’t remember it ever being called the Sprint Challenge. It was the NEXTEL Challenge last year. I guess the word NEXTEL doesn’t exist and has been erased in the memory of all those involved with Sprint.

I do like the 25 lap segments, rather than 20. Now if we could just figure out how to change the field around, rather than the typical reverse the top 4/6/8 whatever cars for the last segment. How about odds and evens? After segment 2 the odd finishers are reversed, after segment 3 the even finishers are reversed? Or maybe we just reverse the field at the start, fastest cars to the rear, and let them race?

On a side note, Steve Waid says over at Scene Daily Blog that the name of the race is going to be the “NASCAR Sprint Cup All-Star Race XXIV“. I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s right. I especially like the XXIV part, in deference to the Super Bowl.</sarcasm>

Joe Gibbs Racing, NASCAR, Sprint Cup, Tony Stewart