Jeff Gordon and Tony Stewart rip NASCAR's engine cooling limits, and Stewart makes it sing

This is going to hurt (Photo: Getty Images for NASCAR)

 

   By Mike Mulhern
   mikemulhern.net


   TALLADEGA, Ala.
   Jeff Gordon was irate. So was Juan Pablo Montoya.
   And wait till you hear Tony Stewart's take on Sunday's race.
   Matt Kenseth, who at least made it to the finish, one of the few, was kicking himself for giving the race away by simply being too fast at the end.
   In fact Brad Keselowski was about the only driver here who left Talladega Superspeedway with a smile on his face.
   Of course Keselowski was the winner.
    Most of the stars were back in the garage before the end, and Chevy stars took the biggest hits during Sunday's Talladega 500.
   Stewart made it 500 miles before getting crashed out. But then the race went into overtime another 10 miles.
   "The racing was awesome," Stewart deadpanned, clearly frustrated. "It's fun to be able to race and have to watch the gauges at the same time. It makes us as drivers have to do so much more.
    "And being able to make yourself run on the apron and everything else to try to get clean air, it makes it fun.
    "I'm sorry we couldn't crash more cars today. We didn't fill the quota for Talladega and NASCAR."
   And there's more from  Smoke. To get the full inflection, here's the audio of Stewart post-race, with Figure 8 suggestions and more: http://bit.ly/J4VYB7

   Gordon, whose bad luck this season keeps reaching new levels of frustration, got taken out in melee with 115 miles to go. And when he got back to the garage, Gordon launched into a tirade about NASCAR's latest engine cooling rules.
    The engine cooling limits were designed to break up the two-car packs that were so effective last season at Daytona and Talladega. However drivers generally expresses some displeasure with the issue of engines overheating.
    Gordon was most pointed, calling them "a joke" and said NASCAR needed to make some changes before the tour hits the next restrictor plate track, Daytona in July.
   "This temp thing is a joke," Gordon said. "You can't race.
   "They have to address that."
   Stewart added to that by saying NASCAR should forced teams to tape up the nose entirely, so the engine could overheat even more quickly:  "I think we ought to just tape them off solid and run them until they blow up anyway. I think it would make it a lot more exciting for the fans.
   "Honestly, I think if we haven't crashed at least 50 percent of the field by the end of the race, we need to extend the race until we at least crash 50 percent of the cars because it's not fair to these fans for them to not see any more wrecks than that and more torn up cars," Stewart said.
    "We still had over half the cars running at the end and it shouldn't be that way."
   Ouch!
   And that's this sport's defending champion.
 
    Ford teams appear to have a real good handle on the engine cooling situation. But Chevy teams appear to have significant problems.
    Kevin Harvick, caught up in a late crash, complained about the engine cooling rules too: "NASCAR has got us in a terrible box here as far as temperatures. You run around in a pack at 260 degrees.
    "I love this style racing….They just have to figure out a way to do it without (messing with) the engines."
 
  Ford's Carl Edwards, after he wound up crashed out, said he didn't want NASCAR changing anything. Teammate Kenseth, on the other hand, said NASCAR – with tons of engine data from the electronic fuel injection computers – would be able to quickly analyze just who had what types of engine issues.

    Roger Penske, Keselowski's team owner, said he was satisfied the rules. Besides, Penske noted wryly "Bill France told me once 'if you don't like the rules, you don't have to come and run,' and we've lived by that."
   
   However the quality of the action here Sunday wasn't up to typical Talladega. Drivers, until right near the end, were more concerned about keeping their engines cool enough not to blow up. So they were watching their water temperature gauges more intently than they were watching the other cars on the track.
    Gordon made the case:
    "Man, this is just one of the most bizarre years this team has ever gone through. I mean it's almost comical at this point.
    "But that hit was not fun. I didn't like hitting the wall. Gosh, I thought I was clear. I was just kind of cruising by on the inside and it looked to me like somebody came down and got Martin Truex Jr. and then that turned him into me.
    "That is just the way our season has been going."
    Yes, but the engine temps set him off: "We all knew that was going to be a big issue," Gordon said. "But when you can't really even race because the temps….
    "Even in a regular pack temps are an issue. We have to address that.
    "Nobody is really pushing a whole lot out…even though we know what's going to happen at the end.
    "There is certainly plenty of 'pack' racing, and two and three-wide. But when you can't even run fifth or sixth because you are over-heating, or going to overheat….
    "I don't know what we are going to do in Daytona in July."
     Carl Edwards, though, wasn't complaining about NASCAR's engine temp rules. "My temperatures were great all day. We didn't have any trouble."
    So he said he hoped NASCAR didn't change a thing.
     Edwards was caught up in the same wreck as Gordon, when several drivers suddenly ran out of fuel and slowed abruptly.
    "This is Talladega," Edwards said with a sigh. "You come here and you just hope you make it through all that stuff.
    "That was a long wreck. It started; I hit the wall and thought we were done, and then somebody hit me from the rear.
     "People were definitely rushing to get to that wreck.
     "When people run out of fuel like that…."
    And wasn't this new engine electronic fuel injection system supposed to make fuel mileage and other such issues much more precise?
   Montoya was even sharper than Edwards: "It's Talladega, you know. Some people call that exciting. I don't. It sucks.
   "We were staying out of trouble. I hadn't even used the bumper. We were running a smart race.
    "Somebody runs out of gas, somebody hit him and threw him right into us. It sucks."

     One of the big names behind the wall early was Jimmie Johnson, one of at least four Chevy drivers sidelined with engine problems: "Lost oil pressure. Ryan Newman is sitting in here with a similar issue."
    An oil pump issue is suspected.

   NASCAR officials said they would be dyno-testing engines from the cars driven by Chevy's Kasey Kahne, Dodge's AJ Allmendinger, Chevy's Jeff Burton, Toyota's Kyle Busch and Ford's Matt Kenseth. Such dyno testing is rare these days; it's unclear just when the last such dyno test was performed.

   Eric McClure is reported alert and stable, though in pain, still in the University of Alabama-Birmingham hospital being observed and treated after Saturday's savage crash in the Nationwide 312.
   Miranda McClure, Eric's wife, issued a brief statement:
   "Eric and would like to thank everyone for their prayers. They truly made a difference. We are so thankful that he survived yesterday. It is nothing short of a miracle that he was not hurt more than he is. He is still in the hospital for observation. We are hoping to be released sometime today. Please continue to pray for his recovery."
    McClure got caught up in a huge melee in the final miles of the Nationwide race, and his car was sent hard into the inside wall, fortunately the part of the wall protected by the soft-wall Safer barrier. Just a few feet further down the track there is a huge gap in the soft-wall.