Car FYI

Photo Credit: Jerry Markland/Getty Images After two rain-plagued weekends on the short tracks of Bristol and Richmond, the 2015 NASCAR Sprint Cup Series convened on a sunny, Sunday afternoon at Talladega Superspeedway. A 2.66-mile tri-oval conducive for speeds of 200 miles per hour and higher, its was not going to be a calm Sunday drive for the 43 drivers and teams committed to running 188 laps for the GEICO 500. The second restrictor plate race of the 2015 NASCAR Sprint Cup Series season, Saturday's time trials was performed under a revised format that avoided the messy result of this year's Daytona 500 group qualifying. Despite a different format, Jeff Gordon again prevailed with the pole in his Hendrick Motorsports by an astonishing 0.281 seconds over his teammate Kasey Kahne. When the GEICO 500 started on Sunday, Gordon enjoyed his qualifying advantage for a mere three laps before the #5 car of Kahne too...

Photo Credit: 304945 Matt Sullivan/Getty Images Earlier this year at the Daytona International Speedway, NASCAR's Speedweeks opened on a controversial note. For the 2015 Daytona 500, the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series adopted a multi-car group qualifying style that had debuted last season for most races. Designed to provide a more dramatic and faster-moving method departing from the single-car qualifying fashion used for decades, the new method for deciding the pole position as well as the positions for the Budweiser Duel 150 races definitely caused buzz. Unfortunately, much of the reaction after the qualifying concluded was not favourable. A Daytona 500 pole qualifying consisting of two groups of cars, it was a bizarre spectacle to watch as some vehicles drove through the infield grass to immediately to placed with a drifting partner and competitors waiting for the last possible moment to set a fast lap. This...