Top teams could be trying new ideas in NASCAR Sprint Cup races

Jimmie Johnson made an interesting point during his comments following last weekend’s Brickyard 400 at Indianapolis Motor Speedway. He highlighted that no team or organization has been able to get on a hot streak and sustain it for any length of time this season.

I thought about that for a while, and you know what, he is absolutely right.

Remember that when the season started, Johnson and his Hendrick Motorsports team were hot. Then they lost that edge, but got back on it a little bit in June. Now it’s not there again. You had Kurt Busch and his Penske Racing team get hot in the spring. The Joe Gibbs Racing teams got hot, but now it’s not there for them, either.

Really, the only organization that has been consistent and solid all season has been Richard Childress Racing. On the flip side, they aren’t dominating races. So it has been a really strange season. It just seems that no one can go out and be the one to beat week in and week out.

Even though we still have six races to go before the Chase for the Sprint Cup, a stretch that includes two short tracks and a road-course event, the sands in the hourglass are running out for some of these teams. Naturally, there are things like engine failures and wrecks that you can never predict. We can’t factor those in, obviously, because we don’t have a clue.

So all you really have to go by is consistency and performance. When you look at the top 12 right now, it’s probably not far off from where it will be come the final pre-Chase race at Richmond International Raceway in September. I know Mark Martin is happy with the way he is running right now, but it’s the results on Sunday that we look at. That isn’t looking good right now for his No. 5 team.

Can Jamie McMurray still make it in? Well, if he keeps running like he has the past two races, then, sure, he can get there. As the time grows short on these teams, we may see one or two changes in the top 12, but I think that will be it. Now, sure, if you look at the finishing order at the Brickyard 400 last Sunday, other than Kevin Harvick, our top five or six in points had a pretty dismal Indy race.

It really makes you wonder if some of these teams are simply trying things and experimenting with combinations leading up to the start of the Chase. Maybe because they are comfortably in the Chase, some teams are just trying things right now to build notes and their database for those final 10 races.

They still have to get to those, though. This weekend, we head to Pocono Raceway. The blind obvious, when you look in the record books, is to put your money on Denny Hamlin. He has won the past two races there. If you look at the way he ran at Indy and how he has been running in general right now, though, I would be a little reluctant to say he is the favorite.

Pocono is a strange race. It’s a 200-lap race. Back in June, we only had two cautions in the first 150 laps. One was a competition caution, and the other was for debris. That’s right, for the first three-quarters of that race, we only had two cautions. Then in the last 40 to 45 laps in June, we had an epidemic of cautions. For whatever reason, we had more cautions than we could almost count. For this Sunday, it could be a lot of the same.

Looking for more racing news? Check out SPEED.com and the NASCAR on SPEED TV schedule.

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On the personal side of things, it’s a pretty big weekend at Pocono for the McReynolds family. Our son Brandon has teamed up with GlobeTrack Wireless (GTW), an emerging leader in the application of global positioning technology, vehicle usage and management software tools, to compete in the July 31 Weis Markets 125 at Pocono Raceway for the ARCA Racing Series presented by Re/Max and Menards.

Brandon is again teaming with Eddie Sharp Racing for the event, which is being held in conjunction with the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series and is part of a double-header race day with NASCAR Camping World Truck Series that will be shown live on SPEED with my ol’ buddy DW up in the booth calling both races.