Full Throttle

Greg Biffle grabbed the lead in his DISH Network Ford from Jimmie Johnson during a restart with 12 laps remaining to claim his first win of the season at New Hampshire Motor Speedway.

The rest of the story is depicted left, a real honest-to-goodness NASCAR swaybar. Of course that one has all its bolts attached in their proper place as opposed to not being attached at all as in the case of former Chase points leader Kyle Busch.

Kyle Busch started on the pole and led three laps before dropping back in the field. He had a broken bolt on his sway bar and nearly wrecked on lap 20, glancing off the wall coming out of Turn 4. Busch lost a lap to the leaders while pitting to make the repairs and finally spun on lap 83. He came back on the track eight laps down and finished 34th and dropped to eighth in the standings minus 74 points to co-leaders Johnson and Carl Edwards.

“It wasn’t very good,” said Busch’s crew chief Steve Addington. “When you have a part failure, it’s one of those things that you can’t do anything about. We’re just going to have to go back and re-evaluate.”

It’s also one thing, among many possibilities, that had Kyle scurry from the track without speaking to the media.

Johnson who had similar problems in 2006 at NHMS before taking the crown that year, warned it ain’t over, ’til it’s over:

When I was in that position, we couldn’t do much about it. It is what it is. We just really went on and fought through the rest of the season. Luckily things came our way. So at this point Kyle’s hoping everybody has a bad race.

I just think it’s way too early in the Chase to count anybody out. We just have no clue what’s going to happen with the races to come.

Johnson finished 39th in 2006 and was 139 points behind then leader Kevin Harvick after NHMS.

A smaller hill to climb than Matt Kenseth has now, his Chase dreams possibly end after being caught up in an incident on a restart with 70 laps to go that ended his day early, and 177 points behind Edwards and Johnson.

“The lapped cars were all side-by-side,” said Kenseth, who finished 40th and failed to finish the race for the first time this season. “We’ll just take it one race at a time. We were running pretty good and were looking like we could slide out of here with a top-10.”

UPDATE: Yahoo’s… yahoos, specifically in this case Bob Margolis’ after race “Observations.”

Did Joe Gibbs Racing plan it so that young phenom Joey Logano would have such a stinker of a Cup debut? I mean, this kid wasn’t just a backmarker, he was one of the worst in the field.

Either it was a brilliant move to lower expectations about the 18-year-old, or the Hall of Fame Racing team needs to be shuttered immediately. They gave Logano a car that was complete junk.

I guess Margolis’ infinite wisdom didn’t allow for the fact Gibbs set the kid up in a fully prepared #02 and he didn’t make the field recently because of rain.

It had to be… a “set-up,” can’t get the kid’s head too big now can we?

Nothing remotely related to giving a chance to the kid, when no other guaranteed (starting) options were available, ever entered this pinheads mind apparently. Gibbs set him up for a very predicable fall in what has been a consistent crapwagon all year.

Bob, make sure you send your hypothesis to TRD (and hide under your desk), they may have something to say about it.

Bob wasn’t the only Yahoo, yahoo speaking nonsense Sunday. This is from Jerry Bonkowski written during the in-race chat and just after the checkered flag: “Biffle comes out of virtually nowhere. And remember, I’ve been saying that if one of the five guys that came into this race without a win was to take the checkered flag at Loudon, it could start a major comeback.”

Nowhere Jerry? The guy led nearly 60 laps and he came from nowhere? Not to mention he IS one of The Anointed 12 and not a backmarker by any means.

I have to ask, where do they get these guys?

I’ll have more on Bonkowski later. He has a post up on NASCAR and drugs that proves definitively he knows zero about performance enhancing drugs and even less about what it takes to sit in a 140 degree cockpit for 3-5 hours.