The normally tranquil Napa Valley was the site of a group of NASCAR guys making a lot of noise Sunday.
Races won by pit strategy and fuel mileage estimations are usually not the most exciting affairs. Not so Sunday at Sonoma. The individual pit strategy was a high-speed chess match that had different cars seeming to pit at different times and actually provided some of the more exciting racing of the year.
Kasey Kahne who has admitted that road racing wasn’t his forte scored his first victory on a road course and his first since June of last year at Pocono. Since that last win at Pocono last year Kahne hasn’t exactly set the NASCAR world on fire, until Sunday that is.
Kahne’s win Sunday was totally unexpected by many, including Kahne himself. So what was Kahne’s secret to success Sunday? Maybe he needs to look no farther that his new team owner the King himself Richard Petty.
Petty has six road course wins to his credit. That ties him for second on the all time road course winners list
It was no secret that during Kahne’s tenure with the former Evernham Motorsports, there was friction between Kahne and management. But during the off-season the Gillette-Evernham operation became Richard Petty Motorsports and while the equipment is there, no doubt the kind of mentoring that only Richard Petty can provide to his drivers is worth more then anything.
Sunday at Sonoma was perhaps proof of that. In addition to Kahne, Richard Petty Motorsports had two other teams in the top-10 AJ Allmendinger in seventh and Elliott Sadler in 10th. The only lowlight for RPM was Reed Sorenson who lost a trac bar on the No. 43 Dodge early in the race and finished 40th, 14 laps down.
Or was it? The interesting thing will be to see how well RPM performs from this point. After Dodge decided to withdraw their financial support from the teams a few weeks ago people from RPM confessed that they will have a tough time. Sunday showed that while they may be down, they are certainly not out. No matter what happens, the sight of Richard Petty celebrating in Victory Lane -the first for him since April 1999 at Martinsville- was something that made any NASCAR fan smile, no matter who they root for.
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