The NASCAR Sprint Cup Series schedule is a quarter of the way finished. We’ve had nine of the36 races, two multiple winners (neither one named Johnson), a boat-load of leaders and leadchanges…and a lot of unfinished business.

Kyle Busch won at Bristol and Richmond, taking the mantle of short-track star from DennyHamlin. Kevin Harvick won at Auto Club and Martinsville, then promptly fell off the planet interms of contention.

Jimmie Johnson won at Talladega by the slimmest of margins, but hasn’t been the guy he wasthe past five years. Not that it matters just yet, but already folks are looking to say thatFive-Time is looking mighty…peaked.

Jeff Gordon won earlier in the season, then set about finding every spot on every track thatdoesn’t have a soft wall on it. Richmond was a tangle that put him in a bad spot on theinside of the corner.

And it seems like everyone is ticked off at each other. Richmond was a treasure-trove ofone-liners, most of which would be victims of the seven-second delay.

Five-Time was described by the fiery Greg Zipadelli as a “bleeping moron” after punting JoeyLogano into the fence, and Tony Stewart wondered why the best drivers out there were drivinglike “bleep.” Martin Truex Jr. “fired” his pit crew after a stop…seriously. “You’re allfired, every bleeping one of you,” was the gist of what I heard on the scanner.

It came true, actually. At Darlington this weekend, there will be four new tirechangers/carriers on the 56 car.

That’s not even a patch on what Kurt Busch let fly.

Apparently, the cooler of the Busch brothers (and by that I mean generally he is lessvitriolic on the radio overall than his race-winning younger sibling, though the sarcasmmeter is pushed through the roof) had enough of an ill-handling car and just started tomonologue.

It wasn’t Johnny Carson, either.

No aspect of his team’s shortcomings was spared, apparently. I didn’t hear all of it, becausehe wasn’t a factor during much of the race, but what I did hear was best said to a guy ifyou’re standing more than a couple of feet from him.

Parentage, intelligence, personal habits…all were touched on by the elder Busch. Good thingRoger Penske was either in Brazil or back at home, because it takes a bit to make The Captainblush and he’d have been redder than a deficit scorecard in Washington.

The whole Newman-Montoya crash-‘em deal was rather tame on the radio. Newman doesn’t screamon the radio much, and after he wound up against the fence with a torn-up race car, he calmlysaid words to the effect that revenge was a motivating factor.

I don’t speak Spanish (I should learn, really), so I don’t know exactly what Montoya wasthinking, but I do know this: neither one of them is a good choice for bracing right after anincident. Newman’s bigger, but Montoya is pretty solid, and it would be 6-5 and pick ‘em ifthey rumbled.

Newman did start it, and Montoya finished it. As it should be…

Ah, the joys of short-track racing! Richmond is a good place to race; wide and fast andmulti-lane, it gives the boys a chance to stand up and holler. They took that to heart,apparently.

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There but for the grace of God and NASCAR went Martin Truex Jr.

The scariest moment of Martinsville’s otherwise excellent Goody’s Fast Relief 500 Truex Jr. and a hung throttle. It also involved Kasey Kahne in a big way, as the Clam Prince used him as a buffer on his way to the wall. There wasn’t much choice,as a hung throttle means you go where you’re pointed until it either breaks loose or you stop—suddenly.

Boy, did he stop suddenly. The impact shoved the front end of his NAPA Toyota hard to the right…well, what was left of it,anyway. Everything in front of the firewall was jammed solid, and that car is even now being recycled into another racer…orrazor blades, whichever is more cost-efficient.

Truex stated plainly that had it not been for soft walls and the HANS device, he would be in the same situation. The angle ofthe crash and, likely, the cause, was the same as those which claimed Adam Petty and Kenny Irwin Jr.

Martinsville is flatter than a presidential approval poll, and so is New Hampshire. Severe angles to the wall contributed tothe fatal accidents of Petty and Irwin, and it was true in this case as well.

You can make the case that, by hooking Kahne’s left rear quarter, it saved Truex from what could have been a much worse accident than you might anticipate at a track like Martinsville.

Here’s a hearty thank-you to NASCAR for the COT and the HANS…we’d likely see Truex in the crash house for months or worse ifthey hadn’t been in place.

Truex has had, according to reports, problems with the throttle sticking before. He eschewed the ride to the Infield CareCenter at Martinsville in favor of a walk to his pit box, where he had words with crew chief Pat Tryson before heading to see the docs.

Hung throttles were fixed in the aftermath of Petty and Irwin, and we haven’t had much in the way of incidents since then.But as the teams are twisting the innards of today’s engines that much more these days, we’re likely to see some pop up.

Luckily, the COT is made of pretty stern stuff, and so are the soft walls. Even though Truex took a bite out of Turn 3 when he hit it, it was a 25-minute repair job to the wall and then they were back to the beating and banging.

One thing we didn’t see was a whole lot of root-hog during the race. Yeah, they moved people from time to time, but moving isn’t shoving.

You won’t see much of that this weekend at Texas, though. Tapping someone on a crooked part of the track is a big no-no.

Looking forward to the first night race at Texas!

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MARTINSVILLE, Va. – Something nearly happened on Sunday that hadn’thappened since 2008.

Dale Earnhardt Jr. nearly won a NASCAR Sprint Cup Series race. Had it not been for aclosing Kevin Harvick, he would have. And that would have been good for NASCAR as awhole, not just the 88 team.

I know that some of you want to hear about anything other than the 88.Understandable, because as a group, y’all are rather parochial when it comes to yourfavorite drivers. But stick with me a minute here, and I’ll tell you why you shouldcare.

First, a healthy Dale Jr., and by that I mean a Dale Jr. that is in contention on aweekly basis, means that more people pay attention to NASCAR. Rising tide lifts allboats, right? More people paying attention to NASCAR means, arguably, that the TVratings will go up and sponsors will take note.

If they take note, they’ll put more cash into the sport, and that means the sportoverall is healthier.

Second, Junior hasn’t won in 97 races, since Michigan back in 2008. That was on fuelmileage, which has been noted more than once by people who do not like Earnhardt forwhatever reason.

Let me break it down for you: fuel mileage is just as much a factor in a NASCAR raceas horsepower or driving talent. If you win a race, you won a race. Period freakin’dot. If Denny Hamlin had better mileage, he would have nailed down the title atHomestead instead of losing it at Phoenix.

That Junior is back in something approaching 2004 form is a compelling story. It’sat least as compelling as Jimmie Johnson winning title after title, attendance woesand bad TV ratings.

I don’t know if it is that people still don’t forgive him for bolting DEI forHendrick or what, but I do know that the young man is doing better than he has in awhile. Is it really preferable for him to wallow in misery for the rest of hiscareer?

It’s not like he wants to run bad. If anything, he presses a little too much. It’sgotta be hard to carry NASCAR’s fortunes around on your back, in addition to thematched set of luggage he’s still toting from 2001 and the inevitable breakup ofDEI. That has a lot to do with his stepmother and some bad feelings, but that’sanother story.

Who among us can say we’d do any better than he has? Yes, he has great equipment.Yes, he has a powerful team behind him. Yes, Rick Hendrick has good people workingfor him. But none of it matters if you can’t communicate, and it’s been a couple ofyears since he was able to communicate like he’s doing now with Steve Letarte.

I’ll go on the record right here and right now and say that Earnhardt Jr. will win arace before Daytona in July.

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Bristol Motor Speedway and Martinsville Speedway are the two short tracks on the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series schedule. You can throw Richmond and Phoenix in there as well, but both of those act more like big tracks.

Bristol and Martinsville are the places where beating and banging are an art form and the nose of the car is for something besides holding the brake ducts in place.

Bristol, where we raced a couple weeks ago, measures .533 miles around, Martinsville a slightly shorter .526 miles. One (BMS) is high-banked; the other is flatter than a stock market growth chart.

Yet the two have many of the same characteristics.

Both are rhythm tracks, both require a lot of input from the driver and both serve as high-pressure reminders that it’s not all about mashing the gas and driving in deep. When you talk rhythm, Bristol is a thundering rock ballad while Martinsville is more…Michael Buble.

Bristol is easier on brakes than Martinsville and a tad easier on the engine, because the banking serves as a gravity brake, for lack of a better term. At Martinsville, it’s dragstrips and turnarounds, where drivers go as hard as they can on the straights, hard as they dare on the brakes and back to the throttle…500 times.

So what does a race at Bristol do to you? Ask Dave Rogers, Kyle Busch’s crew chief on the No. 18 M&M’S Toyota Camry.

“If you bring a rookie to Bristol, one of the first things he’s going to tell you after a 50-lap run is that he couldn’t even tell you if he was in Turn 3 or Turn 1,” Rogers said. “The track is so symmetrical and so fast and so tight that they literally get lost out there.”

Busch, as he has proven the last five times NASCAR has raced at BMS, doesn’t.

While Bristol is like a blender set on puree, Martinsville is like the old slot-car tracks from back in the day. It’s not challenging as far as layout goes, but it is technical.

Really technical.

It starts with the brakes, runs through the rev limiter and winds up in the hands of bead blowers inside the front wheels.

Hard on the brakes into the corner, float through the center and hammer down off the corner is the mantra; sounds simple, but it’s tougher than nickel steak to do 1,000 times in a row.

If you don’t have brakes at Martinsville, don’t take the car off the trailer. The G-force when the drivers are stepping on the middle pedal is around 3.6; stepping on the gas again is over 2.0, according to one of the leading brake manufacturers.

The brake wear at Martinsville for 500 laps is equivalent to the sort you would see in your passenger car after…80,000 miles.

And you can’t come off the corner any old way at Martinsville. You have to protect the inside line; ergo, it’s one-lane racing for the most part. At Bristol, with its progressive banking, has at least two and sometimes three, depending on the time and place.

That’s where the rhythm comes in. At Bristol, it’s more like launching down the straight, getting off the gas and a slight drag of the brake to set the car, then back to the gas and up off the corner. It’s like Dover in that regard.

Martinsville is more like, “go very fast, stop, turn the car, go very fast again.” That’s tough on engines, because the RPM range is so big. At Bristol, it never gets as low as it does at Martinsville, so the range is smaller.

The heat generated by the brakes makes the bead blowers very important. As long as the bead of the tire (the part that tucks into the edge of the rim) stays cool, the tires act like tires and not balloons at the county fair. If they can’t keep up, the front tires tend to blow out and that is never good, even at a short track.

With Martinsville on the horizon, there’s plenty of attention being paid to the differences between Bristol and Martinsville.

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After most of a season off recuperating from blood clots that threatened his career, Brian Vickers was eager to get back in the saddle at Daytona last month.

Getting back in his No. 83 Red Bull Toyota Camry—complete with a new paint scheme—was all he’d been thinking about once the 2010 season ended. Well, that and all that he’d been through, including heart surgery, enforced layoffs and a massive change in perspective.

“Going through this is definitely going to change my perspective,” he said. “I think what I went through changed me more personally. It changed who I am and I grew a lot as a person. I still have a lot of growing to do and I am sure there are plenty of people that would point that out. I definitely took a big step up the ladder through this experience.

“I have no doubt that going through this experience and how its changed me personally is going to show up on the race track. My opinion is that it’s going to show up in a better way. I think it’s going to be a benefit to how we perform on and off the race track. There may be times when it’s not, but I believe that the perspective and the growth that I’ve had personally is going to be a positive out there on the race track.”

That said, he was looking forward to making noise in NASCAR’s biggest race.

He did, but it wasn’t the kind of noise he was after.

The 17-car pileup in the early going claimed Vickers, crash damage rearranging the right side of his Camry and ending his hopes of a Lazarus-like comeback at Daytona.

“It was a very special moment for me,” BV said after the race was over. “To not finish with a car in one piece, not so much…I want to be mad. I want to be angry. I want to be disappointed. But I have to honest with you, I’m having a hard time being that.

“It sucked being in a crash, but it felt fantastic getting back in a race car. It felt so good. I can’t tell you how happy I was to be back.”

It didn’t get any better at Phoenix, as an early contretemps with Matt Kenseth relegated him to 30th place at the end.

As such, Vickers was a little more fiery than normal while watching his Camry get pounded back into shape for the second week in a row.

“The 17 (Matt Kenseth) ran us into the wall, door-slammed us into the corner coming out of turn two, just 67 laps into a very, very long race,” Vickers said. “I felt like it was unnecessary and I’m sure it will come back to him.”

With that veiled threat hanging in the air, Vickers packed up and went to Vegas, where he finally got rid of the comeback blues.

Las Vegas was the start of something better. In logging his first top-10 since Darlington last May, Vickers could see the light at the end of a tunnel, and he was reasonably sure there wasn’t a train behind it.

“Today was finally the good start to our season we have needed,” he said. “We have to keep it up and chip away at the points inch by inch each week. We made the most of everything today and got every drop we could out of the car -- the guys did a great job in the pits and with adjustments.

“Everyone gave 100 percent and that’s all you can ask for.”

With a week off between Vegas and this week’s race at Bristol, Vickers hopped a jet with friends and went out of the country. Off-weekends are rare in NASCAR’s top division, and one takes what one can get.

But it still leaves him with hope for Bristol, the coming race at Auto Club Speedway and Martinsville, where he has run very well in the past.

Vickers has a new teammate in Kasey Kahne, and the two are getting along well. An example of that came at Phoenix, where Vickers and crew chief Ryan Pemberton adopted Kahne’s Kenny Francis-prepped setup for qualifying and the race.

“We’ve always got along good,” Kahne said of Vickers. “We’ve never really done a whole lot together as far as racing, but we’ve got along good. Brian’s a really good driver, so I feel like we can work together well. I think we can learn a lot from each other and work together as teammates to help each other and to help our company.”

For his part, Vickers welcomes Kahne as a teammate, if only for a season.

“We got along as opponents so I can’t imagine we’re not going to get along as teammates,” Vickers said. “His experience level is going to bring a lot to the table. That’s something Red Bull hasn’t had. I’m not going to get into whether or not he’s a better, more successful, less successful driver -- that really doesn’t matter.

“The point is that Scott (Speed) brought his own talents, but he didn’t have experience. You can’t just make that, you can’t just create that. It just takes time and that’s something Kasey does have. Kasey has experience and depth in the sport. I can lean on him, he can lean on me. When he starts talking about something he’s tried at a particular track or a car setup or something that’s bothering him in the car -- he has the experience to back it up.”

Since that dreadfully character-building season of 2007, Team Red Bull has come a long way, Vickers said.

“When I was hired at Red Bull as the first driver, gosh, I was like maybe the fifth or sixth employee,” Vickers said. “Literally I walked in the shop and it was just me and a handful of other guys. It’s incredible to watch the team go through everything it’s gone through and grow as much as it has.

“Where we’re at right now, I really believe is as good as we’ve ever been as an organization. From a direction, a culture, a structure, a passion, a drive -- I think the enthusiasm within the team on both cars within the race shop in the highest it’s ever been. Having two experienced guys that can lean on each other is the best it’s ever been. Honestly, I’m really excited about 2011 and the growth I’ve seen through the years.”

When it gets right down to it, though, Vickers is still the same guy he was before all this happened.

“When Sunday rolls around I still want to win,” he said.

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