Defending champ cools down
Singed eyelashes were the least of Jimmie Johnson’s problems after a fiery crash knocked him out of the race at Indianapolis Motor Speedway.
The race roared on without the defending Nextel Cup champion, and if his luck doesn’t change real soon, so will the Chase for the championship.
It was the second consecutive DNF for Johnson, who has dropped from fourth to ninth in the season standings the past three races.
With six races to go before the Chase field is set, Johnson knows he has a perilous hold on his spot inside the top 12.
“We’ve squandered away a lot of points here in the last month or two with these poor finishes,” Johnson said.
When asked on a 1-to-10 scale how worried he was about not making the Chase, Johnson said he was “about a seven.”
It wouldn’t be unprecedented for the champion to be ineligible to defend his title. It happened to Tony Stewart last year, when a summer swoon knocked him out of the Chase.
Johnson and teammate Jeff Gordon opened the season as the top two drivers, and it wasn’t too long ago that he seemed a shoo-in to win a second straight title.
He won four of the first 10 races this season, stashing away 10 bonus points a pop to use in his seeding when the Chase begins.
But Gordon, who also has four victories but hasn’t been to Victory Lane in six races, has maintained his spot on top of the standings. Johnson, winless for 10 races, is free-falling.
Biffle put on probation
Greg Biffle was fined $5,000 and put on probation until Dec. 31 for skipping a press-box interview following his second-place finish in the Kroger 200 Busch Series race at O’Reilly Raceway Park last week in Indianapolis.
Biffle said that he talked to reporters on pit road after the race Saturday night but avoided the press box because of the huge crowd.
“I want to be clear that I was very excited about the second-place finish and was in no hurry to leave,” he said in a statement released by his team. “It just seemed unreasonable at the time to try to get to the press box as the grandstands were emptying in the opposite direction.”
NASCAR requires the top three finishers and the highest-finishing rookie of the year candidate to attend postrace interviews.
Montoya to drop Busch
Juan Pablo Montoya will race in his final Busch Series event next week at Watkins Glen, then the team will stop competing.
Chip Ganassi Racing officials said the No. 42 Busch program was formed only to help Montoya adjust to NASCAR after six seasons in Formula One.
He drove the car to a win in March on the road course in Mexico City, and will try for another one in Watkins Glen, N.Y., on Aug. 11.
Course reconfigured
The Indianapolis Motor Speedway has begun a reconfiguration of its road course to accommodate a MotoGP Series motorcycle race next year.
The 2.6-mile layout will be altered slightly from the configuration used the past eight years in the Formula One U.S. Grand Prix, which will not return in 2008.
Catch fencing and viewing mounds will be removed from inside the first turn of the speedway’s oval track to build a new, four-turn section for the MotoGP bikes. Also, a creek running inside the first turn will be filled to accommodate the new section of the course.