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Dodge teams trying to figure out what's wrong

Submitted by SHNS on Tue, 05/13/2008 - 14:04

It was called the Dodge Challenger 500, but maybe Saturday night's NASCAR race at Darlington Raceway should have been called the "Dodge Challenged 500."Dodge teams were hard-pressed to get anything going -- about the only thing that Dodge had out front all night was the pace car.Dodge teams looked great at Daytona -- Ryan Newman and teammate Kurt Busch finished one-two -- but since then it has been a litany of excuses, and no more wins. Not even a good scent of one.Dodge is last in the Sprint Cup manufacturers' race, last in Nationwide racing, and last in NASCAR's Trucks series.The top Dodge finisher at Darlington was Kurt Busch. His brother, Kyle, is the hottest thing in NASCAR and won again. Kurt? Well, since leaving Ford's Jack Roush two years ago to join Roger Penske, the elder Busch has just about fallen off the radar. This season, Kurt Busch isn't even a top-20 driver -- his Daytona run is his only top-10 finish.Kurt Busch, once used to the boos that now greet his kid brother, would probably love to get any reaction from the crowd this season.Still, he tried to put an upbeat spin on things: "The Charlotte test paid dividends. With this right-side tire being the same at Charlotte and Darlington, we just kept the same frame of mind for four days straight, which really helped us."Kasey Kahne, another Dodge driver, might have had something to work with, but he crashed during practice."We had to go to our backup car for the race, and it wasn't nearly as good as our primary car," Kahne, who finished 22nd, said. "We struggled on power a bit. But we kept it off the wall, which is a positive."Dodge horsepower has been questioned by several teams. It is introducing a new engine this season.Lack of horsepower wasn't the only problem facing Dodge's Juan Pablo Montoya, who finished 23rd."We went a lap down early and struggled with handling," he said. "I thought our Dodge was really good in practice and qualifying.... We just struggled in the race."The Saturday night story for the rest of the Dodge guys was even worse:-- Robby Gordon finished 33rd. He crashed in practice, and his crew had to do some major bodywork before the race."I have to take my hat off to my crew," Gordon said. "They put a new body on the car. And for us to run as good as we ran, and then break an alternator wire, is a huge disappointment."On the other side, we shouldn't have failures. To be honest with you, stuff shouldn't break. These are pretty archaic race cars and pretty simple to work on."-- Sterling Marlin, filling in at Chip Ganassi's for injured Dario Franchitti, ran 34th."The car got real hot," Marlin said. "There was a problem with the cooling system, and we had to pit to cool me off."-- Newman continues to hit potholes. This time he was a very disappointed 37th. And that drops him out of the Sprint Cup tour's top 12."We had problems throughout the race, and it ended up costing us in the points," Newman said. "We're going to have to work harder and hopefully rebound at Charlotte."-- Sam Hornish Jr., who may be regretting jumping from IndyCars to NASCAR, is averaging a 30th-place finish this spring with no top 10s and only two top 20s. Saturday night he was 38th."I'm pretty sure we had a right-side front tire go down," Hornish said. "As soon as I turned in the corner it just went straight."The days when we feel like we're really out to lunch, we go out and run without a hitch ... and the days when we're going to go out there and get a top 15 or a top 10 we have a problem. We'll have to figure out how to get around that sooner or later."(Contact Mike Mulhern at mmulhern@wsjournal.com.)(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)