Radios will play a key role at Talladega

Radios will play a key role at Talladega

By Reid Spencer
Sporting News NASCAR Wire Service

(April 15, 2011)

TALLADEGA, Ala.—Gone are the days when the only voices a driver could hear on his in-car radio were those of his crew chief and spotter.
At Talladega this weekend, most drivers also will be able to communicate with teammates and potential drafting partners in order to deal with the two-car hookups that have become commonplace at restrictor-plate tracks. Many teams have added a second radio just to handle the extra traffic.
As a trial run, Kevin Harvick will be able to tune to multiple channels in his No. 33 Nationwide car in Saturday’s Aaron’s 312, but he’s not sure he’s comfortable with the concept.
“It seems like everybody has just gone that way,” Harvick said of the expanded opportunities for communication. “My Cup car is just still very simple. It’s got my teammates in it, and that’s it. I’m still not comfortable with it, to tell you the truth, but I’m going to try it just because—just to see if it works. If it works on Saturday then we’ll implement it on Sunday (for the Aaron’s 499 Sprint Cup race). We’ll see.”
At this point, there’s only one thing Harvick is certain he wants to hear.
“I just want my spotter to be loud and clear on the radio,” Harvick said. “That’s really all that I care about here. I know my spotter is going to give me the information that I need.”
Though Kurt Busch would rather restrict his radio communication to his own Penske Racing organization, brother Kyle Busch wants all the input he can get.
“If I could, I’d have all 43 (drivers) on my radio, but that radio isn’t legal to go into the racecar,” Kyle Busch said. “You have to have a channel radio, which I think only allows you 15.
“If you were at a 1.5-mile track or a short track or something like that, it would be distracting, because you’d be hearing way too much stuff going on. With Talladega being the way Talladega and Daytona are, you definitely want to hear all that stuff. There’s some guys I can flip over and talk to.”
Busch, who drives for Joe Gibbs Racing, pointed at Richard Childress Racing driver Clint Bowyer, who was leaning against the wall in the media center at Talladega Superspeedway.
“He’s one of them, in case you didn’t know,” Busch said.
Apparently, restrictor-plate racing makes for strange bedfellows, with the lines between teams blurred by the necessity of working together in the draft.

Home cooking? No more for Edwards’ mother
Carl Edwards endured a sour stomach last Sunday at Texas Motor Speedway and still managed to finish third in the Samsung Mobile 500 Sprint Cup race.
Afterward, he blamed his mother’s cooking for the gastric distress.
“My mom made a little dish,” Edwards said. “I think one of the ingredients might have been bad. I think it might have been her first attempt at it.”
Talk about throwing Mom under the motor home.
Edwards’ mother, Nancy Sterling, laughed it off. She did point out that the beans-and-rice dish Edwards had identified as the culprit was made with ingredients fresh out of boxes and cans, and that others had eaten it without incident.
“I thought it was hilarious,” she said over breakfast Friday at a hotel in nearby Oxford, Ala. “A number of people said to me that Carl should apologize on national television, but I thought it was funny—and I don’t have to cook anymore.”

Earnhardt gets plenty of mileage out of snake prank
Even a commercial shoot for a sponsor can benefit from some levity, as Dale Earnhardt Jr. demonstrated recently during a studio session for Suave, his Nationwide Series sponsor for Saturday’s Aaron’s 312 at Talladega Superspeedway.
Earnhardt took a break from filming to play a prank on some of his JR Motorsports colleagues, among them crew chiefs Tony Eury Jr. and Tony Eury Sr. and driver Aric Almirola.
The ploy? A lifelike snake—looking something like a coiled python—in a cooler. Victims of the joke were directed to get bottled water from the cooler. Their reactions to finding the snake were recorded on a video that has garnered more than 45,000 views on YouTube.
“My property manager Sonny (Lunsford) has been doing that to everybody he can at the Charlotte Auto Fair for the last several years—putting a ‘Free Drinks’ sign on that cooler and setting it out near where he parks,” Earnhardt told Sporting News after qualifying third in Friday’s Nationwide time trials.
“We were doing a quick shoot with Suave, and we were trying to figure out something fun to do with our employees at JR Motorsports. That was one of the ideas that I came up with. We had a lot of fun, just pretending we were going to interview ’em and bringing them in there and somehow figuring out how to get them into that cooler.”

Short strokes
NASCAR canceled Sprint Cup activity at Talladega just before 3 p.m. CT, after rain interrupted final practice. At that point, only eight cars had appeared on the track during the session. … Friday afternoon’s ARCA race was postponed until Saturday morning. The speedway plans to start track drying at 5:30 a.m. CT, with a projected start time for the race at 8. … Nationwide regular Elliott Sadler won the pole for Saturday’s Aaron’s 312, followed by Bowyer and Earnhardt.