NASCAR NEWS

2/12/11
Jamie McMurray was forced to a back-up car for this year's race after hitting the wall in Saturday's first practice session. McMurray ran over a piece from a broken brake rotor as he sped into turn one and wound up cutting a tire and hitting the wall. He was uninjured in the crash but the Earnhardt-Ganassi Racing team rolled out its secondary No. 1 Bass pro Shops Chevrolet for Saturday's second practice session.

NASCAR Addresses High Speeds
With practice speeds for tonight's Budweiser Shootout reaching in excess of 203 mph, NASCAR has decided to take some action but it won't be with a smaller restrictor plate.
Air hoses and other cooling efforts will be removed from engine compartments in an effort to break up the two-car drafts that resulted in Friday night's high speed practice session. NASCAR's thinking is by forcing the second car in the draft to break out in order to cool the engine more often will end the long double-car runs.
"There's a couple of fresh air hoses that a lot of the teams added that are OK, it's not something that they did outside of us knowing about it and we're just taking them back off," said Sprint Cup Series Director John Darby. "If the cars can heat up a little quicker to where we can limit the amount of laps that they push each other for all the reasons we'll probably have a little better race out of the deal. At tracks other than Daytona and Talladega you would have a brake duct installed and run air hoses to the brakes. Nobody uses brake cooling here, so in the same real estate, we said, all right, go ahead and put a couple of hoses in here to help to get some extra air to your radiator and oil coolers. We don't believe it's needed for a normal, functioning race car on the race track, so we're going to take it off."
Ford Eyes Mustang in Cup Series
Ford Motor Company has declared its official interest to bring the Mustang to the Sprint Cup Series in 2012.