Brickyard 400 Notes & Quotes

Jeff Gordon celebrates in victory lane at Indianapolis with his 5th Brickyard 400 win.  [Father Dale Grubba photo]

• After the race NASCAR announced that the rear firewall block-off plates on the third-place Joe Gibbs Toyota of Denny Hamlin would be taken back to their R & D center for further inspection.

• Tenth-place finisher Austin Dillon described problems with his Mycogen Seeds Chevrolet which some observers feel are the same issues that discourage good competition at the Brickyard. “It’s tough to pass out there. Even if you have a good car, you get within five car lengths of somebody and your day’s over and it goes from good car to just terrible.”

• Matt Kenseth is the highest-ranked driver without a win in pursuit of a spot in the Chase field. The Cambridge,Wisconsin driver is fourth in points and finished fourth in a race which saw the Joe Gibbs Toyota’s run 2-3-4 behind Gordon. “We were all top-10 cars and we were able to capitalize on that with a good finish. I wish it had been 1-2-3 and it would have been a good day for us.”

• Kyle Larson was the highest finishing rookie (7th) in his Target Chevrolet, and was happy to accomplish that in his first Brickyard start. “We were a top-10 car the whole race. We were too tight on short runs. Everybody was struggling with grip out there. but we tried not to make any mistakes as the Chase is getting closer. Restarts were definitely intense just like they are everywhere. I’m not sure what happened to Kasey on that last one.”

• Danica Patrick (rear gear-114 laps) and Trevor Bayne (accident-96 laps), were the only two competitors to drop out of the race.

• By winning the 400, Jeff Gordon became the second five-time winner of a major race at Indianapolis (1994, ’98, 2001, and 2004). This was also his 17th top-ten finish out of 21 Brickyard starts. Michael Schumacher was the first to accomplish five wins when he won the U.S. Grand Prix in 2000,’03, ’04, ’05,’06. Gordon’s win came on “Jeff Gordon Day” in Indianapolis as proclaimed recently by Mayor Greg Ballard.

• This was the final Brickyard 400 telecast by ESPN as the TV contract switches to the NBC Sports group which joins Fox for next season. The NBC deal is for 10 years and includes the final 20 Sprint Cup races and the final 19 Nationwide races. NBC last did NASCAR television in 2006. They now hold telecast rights for NASCAR, F1 and IndyCar.

• TV captured well the emotion of NASCAR racing Sunday on the lap 144 restart when Jeff Gordon boldly passed Kasey Kahne through turn 1 for the race lead which turned out to be the race-winning move. Gordon described that pass as “the restart of my life when it mattered the most.” Crew chief Alan Gustafson pumped his fist emotionally while rising off his pit box seat. The win was Gustafson’s first here at IMS and Gordon’s 90th career victory.

• Brickyard fans were advised near the end of the event that a severe thunderstorm was expected in the track area shortly after the race.

• Father Dale Grubba, the priest from Princeton, Wisconsin, said mass for Kurt Busch race morning, prior to the running of Sunday’s Brickyard 400. Father Grubba had flown with Busch from Indianapolis to Charlotte in May when the driver “Did the Double,” competing in both the Indianapolis 500 and NASCAR’s Coca-Cola 600 on the same day.

• With Sunday’s Brickyard attendance at perhaps an all-time low, some observers believe that the 400 will become the opening race of the Chase, possibly as soon as next year, with Chicagoland’s Chase event switching to July and the Indianapolis event moving to September.

Other shuffling of the 2015 schedule is also said to be in the cards, especially events following the Daytona 500 early in the season.

• The Sunday press release which announced that Carl Edwards is leaving Roush Fenway Racing is discussed elsewhere on this site. The organization’s line-up for 2015 shows Greg Biffle Ricky Stenhouse Jr. and Trevor Bayne anchoring the Ford team as Carl Edwards moves to an as-yet unannounced program.

“I think we all recognize that Carl is a private person. I’ve spent a lot of time with him and have just the utmost respect for him, both personally and as a competitor. I think he keeps a lot of reasons to himself,” noted Steve Newmark, president of Roush Fenway Racing. “The only insight he shared with me and that we talked a lot about is that the reality of sport today is that athletes don’t generally stay with one team for their entire career. When he retires at some point in the future he didn’t want to wonder what it would be like to be in a different situation.”

And the team may understand the move that Edwards apparently decided on a month ago, but what about Ford?

“Ford is a tremendous partner of ours and we consult with them on everything that we do, whether it’s competition or business. The reality of it is that Ford very much allows us discretion in how we operate with our drivers and any discussions with drivers and contract negotiations, all that goes on solely between the team and the driver.

“Unless something unusual happens, you would not have the #99 running full-time next year.” Trevor Bayne’s sponsor will be AdvoCare and will run the #6. Stenhouse will be in the Fastenal #17. “We have many sponsorship opportunities (for Biffle) and I’m not prepared to discuss those,” Roush said.

Roush also announced that Chris Buescher and Ryan Reed will be in the team’s Nationwide program next year. Newmark wouldn’t say whether either of them would run any Sprint Cup events in 2015, but did say that, “Chris and Ryan are rookies and just getting their feet wet in the top series. In a perfect world we would have been four teams, but we’re comfortable that we will continue at least with three teams at this point for the Cup level.” At least? At this point? Stay tuned.

Paul Gohde

Paul Gohde heard the sound of race cars early in his life.

Growing up in suburban Milwaukee, just north of Wisconsin State Fair Park in the 1950’s, Paul had no idea what “that noise” was all about that he heard several times a year. Finally, through prodding by friends of his parents, he was taken to several Thursday night modified stock car races on the old quarter-mile dirt track that was in the infield of the one-mile oval -and he was hooked.

The first Milwaukee Mile event that he attended was the 1959 Rex Mays Classic won by Johnny Thomson in the pink Racing Associates lay-down Offy built by the legendary Lujie Lesovsky. After the 100-miler Gohde got the winner’s autograph in the pits, something he couldn’t do when he saw Hank Aaron hit a home run at County Stadium, and, again, he was hooked.

Paul began attending the Indianapolis 500 in 1961, and saw A. J. Foyt’s first Indy win. He began covering races in 1965 for Racing Wheels newspaper in Vancouver, WA as a reporter/photographer and his first credentialed race was Jim Clark’s historic Indy win.Paul has also done reporting, columns and photography for Midwest Racing News since the mid-sixties, with the 1967 Hoosier 100 being his first big race to report for them.

He is a retired middle-grade teacher, an avid collector of vintage racing memorabilia, and a tour guide at Miller Park. Paul loves to explore abandoned race tracks both here and in Europe, with the Brooklands track in Weybridge England being his favorite. Married to Paula, they have three adult children and two cats.

Paul loves the diversity of all types of racing, “a factor that got me hooked in the first place.”

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