tool name
closeGood fortune - and bad - can be a drafting partner
THATSRACIN.COM OPINION
DAVID POOLE
The Charlotte Observer
Saturday, Jun. 28, 2008
LOUDON, N.H. - Call it luck, call it fate. Consider it a quirk or the simple fact is that the quickest way to find something is to look for it.
However you define it, one thing you see after watching NASCAR for a while is that when two drivers cross paths it's sometimes hard for them to get apart again.
"Feuds" fester in racing because the same teams are on the track each week. If the Boston Red Sox and Tampa Bay Rays get into a beanball war, it might be a month before they play again. But in racing, the rotten you-know-what who bumped you last week is out there again in the very next race.
Occasionally it runs deeper, though, than simply carrying a grudge from one week to the next. Sometimes it almost seems to be a karma thing.
Take, for instance, Tony Stewart.
Sure, Stewart was frustrated last week when he got knocked out of a better finish than the 10th he wound up with when Kevin Harvick bumped Jamie McMurray and McMurray then bumped Stewart's No. 20 Toyota off the track.
But the divergence of Stewart's luck path this year can be more directly traced to Darlington, where he and Elliott Sadler were involved in a Lap 2 wreck. Two races later, at Dover, they both also got into a big wreck on Lap 17.
In the five races since Darlington, Stewart and Sadler each has an average finish that, when rounded off, comes to 22nd. More to the point, both have run far better than they've finished in most of those races.
While they haven't literally run into each other on the track since Dover, Stewart and Elliott each has run into sometimes startlingly bad luck.
Stewart was leading at Charlotte with less than four laps to go when he had a flat tire. A pit road speeding penalty late at Pocono led to a 35th-place finish, and then there was the bump-up one week ago.
Going into Darlington, Stewart was 141 points ahead of 13th in the standings, but entering Sunday's Lenox 301 at New Hampshire Motor Speedway he's only 18 points clear of the Chase cutoff.
"We've just not had any luck," said Stewart, who starts 28th Sunday. "It seems like the races that we do get ourselves in good position, then toward the end something bad happens and we get out of that position.
"I think it's that way in every aspect of life. You have to have some luck on your side. There are people who you know who just have absolutely rotten luck and no matter what they do they just can't get a break.
"It seems like in this sport it always comes around. For every bit of success you have, you're going to have a low moment also. It's just weathering the storm and waiting until it gets back on a high note again."
If all things do even out, Sadler is due for a run of good fortune. He likely would have had a top-five finish at Infineon had it not been for the fact he had a tire go down just before the green-white-checkered finish. He faded to 19th.
"We've been running and qualifying really well, we just need some luck to change our way a bit," Sadler said. "We're not hanging our heads. We're still building new cars and feel very confident about the next few races.
"I've got a good feeling about this race team. We just need to put it all together."
Stewart and Sadler each also has a teammate that has done markedly better this year. Stewart hasn't won yet this season, but fellow Joe Gibbs Racing driver Kyle Busch has won five times and leads the points. Sadler is winless and 25th in points, but Gillett Evernham Motorsports teammate Kasey Kahne is ninth in points with two points wins and a victory in the all-star race over the past six weeks. Another Sadler teammate, rookie Patrick Carpentier, starts Sunday's race from the pole.
Sadler has only four career top-10 finishes at New Hampshire. Stewart has won here twice and has four finishes of third or better in his past six starts here.
"I wish it was that easy, that you could just pick which weeks you wanted to be good," he said. "You try to be good every week. We have just been trying to find something that keeps the car balanced and gets us where everybody else is right now."
Stewart's fans have been trying to help, too.
"I've got enough to fill the trunk up and the passenger side of the car with good-luck trinkets," he said. "The good thing is that shows how dedicated your fans are, too, and they want to give you something to try to help you have good luck. The hard part is that if you have another bad week it's trying to decipher which ones were the bad luck."
Luck, of course, won't do it all. Stewart and Sadler both know that ultimately they'll have to work their way out of whatever has been going on lately.
"We're starting to figure out what this car wants," Sadler said, peering forward. "We just have to put together a whole uneventful race."
