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NASCAR Notebook: Toyota wraps up Trucks title
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Published: November 2, 2008
■ Toyota has captured another NASCAR championship, here on Friday night, with Kyle Busch's second-place finish behind Chevy's Ron Hornaday, locking up Toyota's third straight Trucks tour manufacturer's title.
It's Toyota's fourth manufacturer's title since joining NASCAR in 2004. In late September, Toyota clinched the 2008 Nationwide tour crown. And Toyota is locked in a tight battle with Chevrolet for the Sprint Cup manufacturer's title.
But Busch wasn't happy with Friday's second-place finish: "It's just frustrating the NASCAR rule book is the way it is, with the restrictors and all of that.
"It's hard to battle those Chevrolets and Fords, with the drag in our Toyotas and less front downforce and all of that stuff.
"Yeah, I'm complaining.... Running second every week isn't any fun."
■ There are predictions now in the garage that anywhere from 750 to 1,000 Sprint Cup crewmen might lose their jobs at the end of the season, as team owners pare down to the new economics.
Dale Earnhardt Jr. said that his Nationwide/Busch team has lost $2 million a year the last two years, so next season that team will run a limited schedule and many crewmen will be leaving.
"Not only is there a lack of interest in sponsoring a Nationwide team -- and that will probably get worse over the next year -- but a guy who does come in might have a product that conflicts with a sponsorship you already have," Earnhardt said.
"I read that this was a correction more than a recession, that we've been living beyond our means … and we were simply employing more people than we needed. We had 80 to 100 people for two Nationwide teams, and that's just too many.
"A lot of us in this sport have lived in that excess."
■ After his win at Lowe's Motor Speedway earlier this month, Jeff Burton was only 69 points down and in good position to make a run for the Sprint Cup championship. Now he's in fourth place, 218 points down.
"We have six minutes remaining in the fourth quarter, we're down by seven, and it's fourth down," Burton said. "We need to decide to punt or to go for it.
"Right now, we're still going to punt. We'll rely on our defense to win this game. Now if we go into next week's race at Phoenix and are still the same in points, we'll need to change up our strategy a bit and go for it."
Maybe, though, it's time for misdirection and some razzle-dazzle.
"Texas is where I got my first win," Burton said, "but Texas was also a factor in us not winning a championship in 2006. I look at it as a place that has defining moments in my career.
"I want to look at Texas and think ‘That's a place where great things have happened for me.'
"So I want to go to Texas this time and leave there saying ‘Texas put me in a position to win a championship.'"
■ Mark Martin said that he won't be racing at Homestead-Miami for Rick Hendrick in the season finale. Hendrick had been trying to get Martin in a car for that race, to get a jump-start on Martin's 2009 move to Hendrick Motorsports, from DEI. But it seems that Hendrick and owner Richard Childress couldn't come to terms on how to put Casey Mears -- headed from Hendrick's to Childress' next year -- in one of Childress' cars at Homestead.
"I didn't make any decisions. But I did make myself available for that race," Martin said. "But it didn't work out on the other side for Casey (at Childress'). The details just didn't line up on that side of it."
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