Submitted by NASCAR Ranting and Raving Blog
OK, other than the whole Carl Edwards vs Matt Kenseth saga leading up to, and into the race, it only really got interesting near the end, but it still was interesting.
Dale Jr got his 8th DNF this season - he only had 7 combined DNFs from 2000 - 20006 - but at least it wasn’t the motor this time. Apparently he was fighting loose wheels all day and when they had a set of wheels on there that were done up right he was “as fast as hell out there”.
Equipment problems, with the air gun perhaps? Was there a recent crew change on his team? Was it sabotage? (that one was for you Dale Jr conspiracy theorists). Who knows, but I bet he’ll be glad when this nightmare of a season is over.
Kyle Busch’s team let him down again. I thought they got all of this pit crew mistake stuff sorted out by mid-season, but I guess I was wrong. I could understand the mistake if Kyle had pulled too close to the wall and the jack man didn’t have enough room to pump the handle, but he was on the other side of the car where there are no obstacles to hinder jack movement. Ugh!
Speaking about poor performance, it is awful hard to accelerate when all you got feeding the carburetor is water, as was the case for Denny Hamlin, Dave Blaney, and maybe The Biff.
NASCAR is currently investigating this, but it does little for Martin Truex Jr, who could very well have won the race if he had not driven up the back side of a badly accelerating Denny Hamlin on what should have been the last yellow flag of the day - except for maybe the yellow flag due to Earnhardt’s loose wheel crash.
OK, let’s talk about water. I worked for Shell all through High School and University, and I know a little bit about how these fuel tanks are made and placed in the ground, and let me tell you there had to be a very large amount of water in those underground tanks for them to get it out of the pump, unless there is a ground water leak somewhere in the system, but if that were the case then more cars would have had water problems.
The pipes for the pumps are not connected at the bottom of these underground tanks because the tanks are never 100% air-tight so there will always be condensation forming inside them. The exit pipes are usually located about 1-2 feet above the bottom of the tank to allow for the moisture that is in there (gas floats on water, so water will always be found at the very bottom of these tanks). So that means there must have been at least 1 or 2 feet of water in the fuel tank at the track. That is huge. That does not happen very often let me tell you. Why? Because you must also do water readings every week or so.
Taking a water reading is easy. You take the long ‘dip stick’ and put a putty-like cream on it (that is usually grey in colour) for the first 12 inches or so and dip it into the tank. The cream reacts with any water that may be in there (it usually turns red) and stays grey other wise. This way when you pull out your dip stick you can measure how much water is in the tank. Where I worked, we usually had about 5 - 10 cm of water in our tanks, which is about 2-4 inches.
“NASCAR Nextel Cup Series Director John Darby said that no water was found in the Sunoco pumps following the race. Darby said all of the Sunoco documentation from the weekend shows no water in the tanks.” - Bob Pockrass at scenedaily.com
So where does that leave us? Nowhere. Was it sabotage? Certainly not likely, but not totally impossible either. Is sabotage, then why those cars and not a Jeff Gordon or Tony Stewart? Unless they had a bad batch of water testing cream - I’ve seen it happen before - but that is still a huge amount of water to be in there for it not to be detected.
I’m very interested in finding this one out, but I’m still waiting for the official NASCAR word on how the ‘jet fuel-like substance’ got into Michael Waltrip’s manifold too.
We just may never find out where the water came from.
Photo Credit: Truex running into a fuel starved Hamlin - Jason Smith/Getty Images for NASCAR
