WATKINS GLEN, N.Y. -- There just might be more drivers capable of winning here Sunday than for any NASCAR road race I can remember. The era of oval-track stars giving up on turning right is fading fast.
The event is officially called the Heluva Good! Sour Cream Dips at The Glen, about as awkward a mouthful as the profitable practice of title sponsorship has made yet. But, all things considered, this could indeed be a helluva good race.
Eight drivers in the starting lineup have won NASCAR road races, either here or at Sonoma, Calif., or both:
Kyle Busch,
Juan Pablo Montoya,
Kasey Kahne,
Tony Stewart,
Kevin Harvick,
Robby Gordon,
Mark Martin and
Jeff Gordon.
The first four starters --
Jimmie Johnson,
Kurt Busch,
Denny Hamlin and
Marcos Ambrose -- haven't won a Cup road race yet, but appear entirely capable.
"In the old days it was going to be Mark Martin,
Rusty Wallace and
Ricky Rudd, and you could count on that," said
Boris Said, now an ESPN analyst and the longtime tutor and guru of road racing techniques to the long-resistant Cup drivers. "Now, there are 15 or 20 guys who can win here, easily."
The practice of substituting "road racing ringers" for Cup drivers is dwindling. There are only three true ringers in Sunday's field:
Andy Lally for
David Gilliland,
Patrick Carpentier for
Michael Waltrip and
Ron Fellows for
Sterling Marlin. Three more non-Cup regulars are entered due to road-racing skills, but in cars fielded especially for them: Said,
P.J. Jones and
Tony Ave.
The difference in the Cup regular on a road course from 10 years ago is "night and day," Said said. "I remember 10 years ago when I substituted for
Jimmy Spencer ... my first time ever in a Cup car. I had to come from the back after the driver change. It seemed easy to pass these guys.
"And now -- to get into the Chase they can't afford to give up those points. So they've all worked at it. I've always said these guys are the best drivers in racing. But road racing is really just a different discipline. And a lot of these guys, like Kevin Harvick and Kasey Kahne, guys I've worked with, were terrible when they started and then after the test they're faster than I am.
"So it's like showing a duck water," Said continued. "Once you give them a few things that are different, and how to do it, they work at it."
Said Ambrose, who grew up road racing in Tasmania, Australia, and Europe before turning to NASCAR: The Cup drivers "don't do it a lot but they've had good training, they've had good experience now in the two tracks that we go to and they're forced to contend with.
"Kasey Kahne winning at Infineon [in June] surprised many," Ambrose continued, "but it didn't surprise me because you can just tell that he can drive the wheels off a race car whether it's on a road course or an oval."
Overall, "The depth is huge," Ambrose said. "The road course ringers that come in haven't had the impact like they used to five or six or seven years ago ..."
Said Martin, NASCAR's preeminent road racer of the early 1990s who has since been deluged with competition: NASCAR drivers have improved "significantly" on the serpentine circuits.
When he was winning here -- three in a row, 1993 to 1995 -- "it was much easier to put a whipping on two-thirds of the field then than it is today," Martin said. "That's because the whole field has pretty much the same access to all the knowledge that we do [he learned his expertise from his car owner of the time, road racing specialist Jack Roush] and the drivers have all really stepped up to the plate."
So have the team engineers and mechanics, with much stronger road racing specialty packages -- especially brakes, which Kahne credits a great deal for his win at Sonoma.
"The biggest key to success to this racetrack for success, other than staying on the road, is brakes," Said said. "They really pay a big dividend."
Jeff Gordon, NASCAR's all-time winningest road racer with nine wins -- four here and five at Sonoma -- dominated in the late 90s and kept winning into this century.
But, "We don't have the advantage over the competition that we had at one time," Gordon said. "Especially with this car [the COT] -- this car makes the competition so much tighter and so much closer that it's hard to get an advantage."
Watkins Glen is a much higher-speed circuit than Infineon, with more places to pass, and "I think especially the double-file restarts here are going to be pretty interesting," Montoya said. "I think they're going to be pretty wild. But you know, it's all about surviving."
With this many contenders, and double-file restarts, Heluva Good! might turn out to be an appropriate race name indeed.