Substance After the Show

To hear the drivers tell it, the NASCAR Nextel Cup season didn’t really begin a week ago in Daytona Beach, Fla., but actually starts today in Fontana.

The Auto Club 500 at the California Speedway is a better gauge of how each car competes against the field, they say. The Daytona 500 is stock car racing’s most prestigious event, and the opening race on NASCAR’s calendar, but it’s a poor measure of the competition.

“As far as the big picture of the whole season, this week is what I was most anxious to get to, and to find out where we stack up,” said defending Cup champion Tony Stewart. “This is more like what we race every week.”

At Daytona and Talladega in Alabama -- which each run two races a year -- the cars must use carburetor restrictor plates that limit speeds for safety reasons. But with the plates, cars run in packs, making it hard to distinguish one car’s advantage over another.

No such restrictions exist at the California Speedway, which ran its first NASCAR race in 1997, or elsewhere on the 36-race Nextel Cup schedule. On those tracks, it’s up to each team to find the most speed on its own.

“You have to have the full package” at the two-mile, D-shaped California Speedway, said Jeff Gordon, who has driven his Hendrick Chevrolet to victory lane in Fontana three times and qualified ninth for today’s race.

“You have to have horsepower. You have to have the car working the corners,” he said.

Veteran Jeff Burton knows this as well as anyone. The driver of the Richard Childress Racing Chevrolet won the pole position for last week’s Daytona 500, then qualified sixth for today’s race. He also has driven the most miles at Fontana of any active driver: 5,476.

“Until we get here, all of us don’t know where we are in relation to the competition,” Burton said. “Daytona is so different than what we do every other week.”

Kurt Busch, who won at Fontana in 2003, put a Penske Dodge on the pole for today’s race with a qualifying speed of 187.086 mph. Greg Biffle, last year’s winner, will start alongside Busch in his Roush Racing Ford.

For Stewart, who drives the No. 20 Joe Gibbs Racing Chevrolet, the car setup wasn’t the only thing he wanted to change after arriving in Fontana. Stewart also wanted to drop the controversy he’d ignited at Daytona over the issue of dangerous driving.

Stewart, opened Daytona’s week of racing by complaining that too many drivers were banging into each other too frequently on the high-banked turns of Daytona.

Then, during the Daytona 500, Stewart bumped into rival Matt Kenseth so hard that NASCAR penalized Stewart for “aggressive driving” and sent him to the rear of the field. Kenseth then later tapped Stewart in apparent retaliation.

On Saturday, Stewart said he had since talked with Kenseth about the incidents but would not elaborate.

“What we talk about is between Matt and I, it’s not between you [the media] and Matt and I,” Stewart said. “You don’t have to be a part of every topic and every conversation.”

Stewart also refused to further discuss the issue of zealous driving.

“We’re at California this week,” he said. “If you want to talk about last week, you might as well turn around and go somewhere else because we’re not talking about last week.”

Speaking of conversations, Ryan Newman said he’d spoken to Daytona 500 winner Jimmie Johnson this week, after Newman was critical of Johnson’s scandal-tinged crew chief, Chad Knaus.

NASCAR suspended Knaus after officials found that Johnson’s Hendrick Chevrolet had qualified at Daytona with an illegal setup that improved its aerodynamics.

Knaus was ordered to sit out the Daytona 500 and three additional races, including the Auto Club 500, and fined $25,000.

Newman, who starts 11th today in his Penske Racing Dodge, publicly suggested that the penalties for cheating should be more severe.

“It got misconstrued as me taking on Jimmie Johnson, and that wasn’t the case,” Newman said Saturday, adding that his comments were directed at Knaus.

“I say what’s on my mind,” said Newman, who finished third at Daytona. “If you ask me a question, I’m going to give you an answer.”