Talladega, Ala. — The Saturday action here on the Talladega Superspeedway more closely resembled a heat race than NEXTEL Cup practice sessions. As a matter of fact, the boys didn’t run but two minutes into the first session before they came sweeping through the tri-oval three-wide.
The runs were at times so intense that it wasn’t uncommon to hear crew chiefs hollering through team radios, reminding the drivers that the race is scheduled to begin to tomorrow.
The practices weren’t without incident, which for the most part were minor in nature. For example Jamie McMurray got into the wall slightly in the first session, requiring a short stop of the action while the driver’s Dodge limped to the garage.
The second session had two equally minor issues, with pole-sitter Joe Nemechek showing a ton of smoke from his car after he lost a brake line on his Chevy. Also, Carl Edwards popped the wall pretty good, giving his crew a little extra work with the Bondo body filler before practice was completed.
Edwards, fresh from an overnight flight from California (where he’s running NASCAR’s Craftsman Truck race at Fontana) hit the wall then kept on rolling as though nothing had happened. Edwards' crew might not have known anything had gone wrong if another driver hadn’t radioed to his crew that the No. 99 had hit pretty hard and that he might get his car checked. Edwards’ crew chief, Bob Osborn, was told about the contact, leading to a request for the 99 to return to the garage. The crew was surprised to see that that the “little scuff” had caused so much damage.
Fastest in the first session was Ricky Rudd, who ran a 48.597 second lap at 197.049 mph. Rudd was the only Ford in the session’s top 10.
Nemechek in his Chevy claimed fastest time in the second session, before his brake problems put him in the garage. Kurt Busch, who ran sixth, drove the fast Ford in this session. Matt Kenseth (seventh) and Elliott Sadler (eighth) closely flanked Busch.
Some teams spent a majority of their time today trying to learn what the new spring rule was doing to their fuel mileage. Talladega, with its smaller fuel cell, requires more stops than usual, but no team wants to run out of fuel on the front straight then have to coast around this track’s 2.66-mile distance for more fuel.
Estimates are that the smaller fuel cell will carry a car between 32 and 38 laps, with most teams proving to themselves that they could run between 34 and 36 laps. That added spring rate seems to have sucked about a lap out of a tank of fuel.
