San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
NASCAR course offers little hope for long shots
In the past 12 years, only Kyle Busch and Martin Truex Jr. have won the Toyota/Save Mart 350 twice. Trying to pick a winner is something of a fool’s game.
It takes excellent roadcourse skills and a great NASCAR Cup car to win at Sonoma Raceway. It also takes the right fuel strategy — and a lot of luck. That said, in this race Cinderella usually stays stuck in the kitchen. The big guns are still the same.
“It’s a very technical track, where the driver can make a difference,” Denny Hamlin said. “The cream will always rise to the top. I don’t think you’ll see any surprises when you look at the finishing order on Sunday.”
Hamlin’s best finish at the track came three years ago. On one of the most thrilling final laps in race history, Hamlin passed Tony Stewart on Turn 7, only to see Stewart sneak past him on Turn 11, the final turn. Stewart pushed Hamlin to the outside, where he clipped the wall before finishing second.
Stewart’s win, by 0.6 of a second, was the last of his career. He retired after the season.
“It was nice of me to get Tony his last win,” Hamlin quipped at Thursday’s NASCAR luncheon in San Francisco.
In contrast to that tight finish, Truex claimed his second Sonoma win last year when he beat Kevin Harvick by 10.5 seconds, the largest margin of victory in the race’s history.
The track becomes even more technical this year with the return of the Carousel to the NASCAR layout for the first time in 22 years. It’s a sweeping, tiresquealing, 200-degree downhill corner that drops onto the raceway’s longest straightaway. Then comes the hairpin Turn 7.
The Carousel “creates a gap between the guys that can figure it out and the guys that don’t figure it out,” said Hamlin, who applauded the change. “There is more passing opportunity. Anywhere that you have heavy braking, it’s a passing zone. With the Carousel there’s at least one additional braking zone, so there’s more opportunity there to pass (at Turn 7).
“Certainly when you start to run the same road course over and over, there’s nothing new to learn. So when you add the extra corners, it will create an element that we have to adjust for.”
None of the drivers in Sunday’s field has raced this layout in a Cup car. Thanks to data sharing, they’ll all pay close attention to how each other handles the added turns during practice, Saturday’s qualifying and the race itself.
The addition of a half-mile, making the 12-turn course length 2.52 miles, will alter how crew chiefs gauge their fuel strategy. The race consists of 90 laps instead of the previous 110, so the old pit-stop estimates will have to be revised.
“Over the last few years it’s gotten stagnant, where everyone runs the same strategy,” Hamlin said. “Now it could open it up to a different strategy again.”
The stage breaks will fall at laps 20, 40 and the finish. Teams will have to decide whether to go for stage points or think about the race’s bigger picture, depending on whether they think they have a winning car. There are usually about a halfdozen caution flags, further complicating the calculations.
In addition to his runner-up finish in 2016, Hamlin has placed fourth and 10th at Sonoma in the past two years. However, he’s not riding into Wine Country with a head of steam; a sixth at Pocono is his only top-10 finish in the past seven races.
On the other hand, the magic of Joe Gibbs Racing this year can’t be denied. Kyle Busch is second in the Cup standings behind defending series champion Joey Logano of Team Penske, while Truex is sixth and Hamlin is seventh.