09 NASCAR season

[TheMaster]

I'm gonna start making some predictions for next year. BTW, congratulations Jimmie Johnson on a fourth straight championship! And to Kyle Busch on his Nationwide title and Ron Hornaday on the Camping World Truck Series championship.

Will Jimmie be contending for the Sprint Cup again next year? You bet your life he will. Joey Logano may prove himself a contender next season. He certainly had a good rookie season, winning ROTY honors and winning his first race. Kyle Busch may well rebound and find himself in the Chase once again and Dale Earnhardt Jr. will find improvements enough to get back to Victory Lane for the first time since Michigan last year.

I'm surprised at how many talented drivers went all 2009 without winning, not just Junior, but Greg Biffle, Carl Edwards, Juan Pablo Montoya, Martin Truex, Ryan Newman, Harvick, Burton, etc. There's always next year though.

I'm also pleasantly surprised at the performance of some of the contenders from this year: Tony Stewart, Montoya, Mark Martin. Can't wait for the Daytona 500, but I have to!

Well for the past three seasons my father and I went down to Michigan International Speedway for race weekend in the June. 2007 we saw the Nextel Cup race only and Carl Edwards one that one. Last year and this year we saw both the Truck Series and Sprint Cup. The 08 winners were Erik Darnell and Dale Earnhardt Jr. This year's winners were Colin Braun and Mark Martin. I am looking forward to next year when we go back, and maybe also make it to Berlin Raceway in July for the ARCA Series. And last year and this year I managed to get my name on Junior's 88 car for the Amp Energy 500 at Talladega, and this year he did not crash it, saving my name!

Yes, I became such a diehard racing fan I know, and it came so all of a sudden. That's what I get though, my father was a racer back in the day, in Formula Vee cars.

[TheMaster]

And I managed to keep some pics I took from my trip to Michigan International last year. If someone wants I can upload them, but I will pick only the best shots to put up here.

[FUS1ON]

Post a link if you decide to. You will have to get into my Yahoo NASCAR Fantasy League next season, we had 50 teams (the maximum allowed) this past season.

I usually win it like Jimmie
But I had some runs like Carl,
I blew some pit stops like JooooonYER,
I got mad after races like Kyle,
and finished in 10th like Kasey

[TheMaster]

Or finished in second like KYLE.
Or appeared out of nowhere like JIMMIE.
Or run up so close to the wall there's no room to breathe like JUNYAH.
Whatever you do in there.

Shogun I'll consider joining the league but I run sim races in NR2003 as well. As for the pics I will upload them ASAP.

[TheMaster]

The images are attached to this post. Here's some basic info on all of them.

1) Now this was a sweet deal to get so close to a Craftsman Truck Series race truck (That was the name of the series last year). Nearby the driver of that truck, which they had painted for that event, was signing autographs, which I did not get. Who was the driver? I'm not sure but I think it was Chris Wimmer.

2) The race trucks in pacing formation before the start of the Cool City Customs 200. 1995 series champion Mike Skinner is on the pole.

3) Erik Darnell is celebrating his win in the Truck race as the rest of the trucks park on pit road.

4) The only shot I have from the LifeLock 400 Sprint Cup race that I decided was worth putting up, the pacing field is coming through our turn. Kyle Busch and Jeff Burton started on pole, and race winner Dale Earnhardt Jr. and Carl Edwards formed row two. Qualifying was rained out so the field was set by the rulebook, that meant championship leader Busch taking pole.

Turnout was lower that year than in 2007 for several reasons. In 2007 is was scorching, the temperature, which came damn close to 100 degrees! Several fans were taken out from heat exhaustion. Also that weekend (back to 2008) there was real foul weather in the midwest some probably remember that. My area suffered from such heavy rain that it destroyed some of our more structurally sound roads and bridges, and left severe flooding throughout. The parking lot of our local Wal-Mart was transformed into a lake! Fortunately there were no fatalities in my area, but Tony Stewart pledged his winnings from that weekend to midwest disaster relief. And another reason for the low turnout, I'm pretty sure, was the downward spiraling economy. The race weekend was before that week-long crash on Wall Street, but we were well into the recession by that time.

Anyway I hope you enjoy the shots. And I do have one shot after the Cup race. Junior didn't have enough gas to do a burnout so I took a shot of the scoring pylon showing his mug and car number as the winner. But my camera was shit, only 2X zoom at most so it is a distant shot of the pylon. I decided that's not worth uploading. I have a much more powerful camcorder now and for next year when I go down there, I'll upload some shots from that.

[FUS1ON]

Those are nice. Of the Intermediate sized tracks, Michigan is one of my favorites, it always has great racing .... and the Truck series ALWAYS has great racing, much better than Cup IMO. It would be even better if they kept Cup drivers out of it.

[TheMaster]

They actually consider MIS a superspeedway because it's two miles long. I'd like to see limited Sprint Cup driver involvement in the Nationwider Series. That series is a big stepping stone for future Cup cars and how many Cup drivers do we see entered into a Nationwide race on any given weekend? Heck, for the past four seasons, a Cup regular won the Nationwide title. If they want to run that series I don't have a problem with part-time.

Michigan produces some great action, three, even four-wide racing is common there. Though the times I have been down there big wrecks have been hard to come by. There was a six-car crash in the 2007 Nextel Cup race, and a seven-truck wreck in the 2009 Truck race. Last Cup race I was at down there, there were three cautions. The first two were for debris, and the third was for David Stremme spinning out and slamming the water barrels at pit entrance, he was okay though and even continued the race for a time.