Don’t bet on Stewart liking new Vegas

LAS VEGAS – A major renovation at Las Vegas Motor Speedway has turned the monstrous track in the desert into a glistening palace that shames almost every other NASCAR facility.

The facelift sure made Las Vegas pretty, but the verdict is out on what it did for the racing. Track owner Bruton Smith is confident the Nextel Cup event will be a thriller, but the drivers aren’t so sure what they’ll get today.

“To a certain degree, you’ve got to give them credit for trying to make it better,” two-time series champion Tony Stewart said. “I’m not sure they did.”

Stewart has been extremely vocal in his displeasure of the Las Vegas changes, which cost Smith an estimated $30 million.

Stewart dislikes the reconfiguration, which increased corner banking to 20 degrees from 12. The new banking produced speeds that hovered around 200 mph during a January test session, leading Goodyear to develop a very hard tire for use this weekend.

Stewart really doesn’t like that.

“You would think a company like Goodyear could do a lot better job than what they’re doing, especially a company that has been in this business for so long,” Stewart fumed after qualifying. “They don’t care about the competition. They don’t care about the drivers. They don’t care about the teams. All they care about is not having bad publicity and not blowing tires out and getting bad publicity because of that.

“I would give half my salary to get Hoosier Tire to be making the tires instead of the (junk) we’ve got to run on right now.”

Goodyear officials defended the tire.

“He’s one that’s pretty vocal about not liking too much of anything this weekend,” said Greg Stucker of Goodyear. “I don’t think he likes the racetrack. I don’t think he likes the harder setup. There’s no question it is a harder setup, we acknowledge that. But again, we’ve got to make sure that it’s right for everybody. We were concerned about the heat, the blistering, when we came back here and tested and we’ve got to make sure we address all of those problems.”

Busch Series

Jeff Burton won a frantic last-lap battle with Kyle Busch on Saturday to win the Busch Series race at Las Vegas Motor Speedway, preventing Busch from scoring his first victory on his home track.

Contact between the two cars as they approached the checkered flag sent Busch into a spin, and he crossed the finish line backward before shooting up the track and into the wall. He still finished second.

The Las Vegas native took turns dominating the race with his older brother, Kurt, and was out front when Burton took the lead away from him with 13 laps to go.

But a record 12th caution brought out the red flag to clean up debris from an accident, preventing Burton from running away with the win. Racing resumed with seven laps to go, and Kyle Busch slipped past Burton a lap later to retake the win.

Burton nearly lost control of his car as he came out of the fourth turn and used a huge save to keep it off the wall. But he lost ground to Kyle Busch and had to hustle to close the gap.

He finally got to him on the last lap, and used all of it to make his move.

Burton went for it as they exited the last turn, pulling to the top of the track and making the pass on the outside. Kyle Busch wiggled slightly and his car bounced off Burton’s to start his spin across the finish line.

Tony Stewart finished third and continued his weeklong rant against Las Vegas’ reconfigured track and the tires Goodyear brought for the weekend.