Nationwide series still looking for its identity

By Mike Mulhern
MEDIA GENERAL NEWS SERVICE
Published: July 22, 2008

Here’s a quick test. Who’s leading NASCAR’s Nationwide tour at the midpoint of the season? And remember, that’s the country’s second-most-popular motorsports series now.

Is it Carl Edwards? Kyle Busch? Clint Bowyer? Tony Stewart?

Here are some hints.

Busch has won five Nationwide races. So has Stewart. And Denny Hamlin has three wins.

Busch, Stewart and Hamlin are teammates running for Joe Gibbs, and nine of the Gibbs’ wins have come in Dave Rogers’ Toyota, with four different drivers at the wheel.

So which driver leads the Nationwide tour?

That’s Clint Bowyer. With one win in 21 starts.

Confusing?

On the owner’s side, Gibbs is running away with things, with 12 wins in 21 races. And Rogers is the series’ winningest crew chief, with nine victories.

So who gets the big trophy at the end of the season, if things stay as they are?

Well, this just shows how confusing the NASCAR system is. There’s one set of standings for drivers, a separate set for team owners.

NASCAR’s Saturday series has had an identity crisis for several years now - it’s Cup Lite, dominated by Cup team owners and Cup drivers.

And this is just more fodder for those complaining, and wanting NASCAR to define more clearly just what this series really is. But there probably won’t be a shake-up any time soon.

NASCAR racing, after all, really is more about the drivers than all that other stuff.

Carl Edwards’ win Saturday night, in the Missouri-Illinois Dodge Dealers 250 at Gateway International Raceway, was memorable not for Edwards logging his second win of the year but for the man he beat - Joey Logano, who continues to tease the NASCAR faithful with the promise of what he might be able to do when he finally gets in a Cup car.

Mark Martin has been shouting Logano’s praises for more than six years. But Logano, because of NASCAR rules, really wasn’t able to make a statement in this division until after he turned 18 in May.

Since then, Logano has been very impressive. In his last three Nationwide starts, he has won at Kentucky Speedway and has run second at Milwaukee and Gateway. He made his debut with a sixth at Dover in May. In his five Nationwide starts, Logano has qualified in the top 10 each time and has won poles at Nashville and Kentucky.

Logano is expected to get a couple of Cup rides later this season, and there is considerable talk that he might take over Tony Stewart’s Cup ride next year when Stewart leaves Gibbs. There are also indications that NASCAR executives might like Logano to stay in the Nationwide series in 2009, to give it some of his star-power.

At the moment, Logano is getting close scrutiny from Cup drivers and NASCAR executives, and from Joe and J. D. Gibbs, to see if he really is ready for the big leagues. Logano, in Rogers’ car, led 42 of the 200 laps Saturday and never ran lower than fifth.

“We had a pretty good night,“ Logano said. “We made a lot of adjustments during the race, and we could run well at both ends of the track. We could turn the center well, but had no forward bite ... or we were too tight in the center and had good forward bite. We couldn’t really get it right where we wanted to.

“But it seemed like Carl Edwards got it right where he wanted to.“

One critical area for Logano to study will be pit stops. “We gained a lot of spots in the pits ... but I lost a lot of spots in the pits with me driving,“ he said. “But that’s part of the learning curve as a rookie.“

In fact, Logano might have lost the race in the pits. He was leading when the last caution came out with 50 miles to go, but he stalled the engine on his pit stop and restarted fourth.

“I screwed up coming out of the pits, and I tried passing on the restart, and the car got free and lost a spot,“ Logano said. “By the time we got back by all of those cars, I was about 15 car-lengths back, while Carl gradually started pulling away. Before I knew it, he had a straightaway lead on me.

“I never gave up, but he had such a big lead that even if I was a half-second quicker at the end, I was never going to get there. My only hope was a caution and then something happening - because even with a caution I don’t think we were fast enough to get by him….

“We were a second-place car, and there’s nothing wrong with that.“

Mike Mulhern can be reached at .