Sharpie 500: You Mean There’s A Night Race At Bristol?

Every year I tell you how great the Saturday night race at Bristol is. And every year I don’t get to watch it.

It’s hard work being a sports-writer-type guy, people. You get pulled in a lot of different directions. And despite the fact that I love watching racing at Bristol more than at any other track on the Nextel Cup circuit, and despite the fact that night racing is clearly superior to events held in the daytime, for something like the fourth consecutive year, I’ll have to find out what happened at Bristol via someone’s sports pager at 2 a.m.

You see, this is the weekend my longest-standing fantasy football league holds its draft. Every year on the last weekend of August (not intentionally; it just works out that way), we congregate in a different city for a weekend of boy stuff: drinking beer, smoking cigars, going swimming, talking about sports and sitting around a draft table for five hours trying to decide between Charles Rogers and Mike Williams. It’s really the one weekend a year when I can honestly say that one of my other geekeries fully eclipses my NASCAR geekery.

This year, we’re headed to Austin, Texas, my former home for five years, where folks actually care about racing (well, a little bit more than in Massachusetts, anyway). Why, driving from the Austin airport, I’m well nigh guaranteed to see a dozen “Dale Earnhardt Jr.” bumper stickers, and “#6″ air fresheners and little cartoon Calvins pissing on the #24. Yet when the green flag waves at Bristol this Saturday night, it’ll do so without me once again. I’ll probably be playing poker, half-in-the-bag, wondering fondly how my selections (see below) are doing in the Sharpie 500. However, should I mention such interest, I’m guaranteed to get empty beer cans thrown at me (the fantasy footballers with whom I congregate sigh and shake their heads at stock-car racing).

So alas, alas, one of these years I’ll watch the actual night race at Bristol. Not in ‘06, but someday. Somebody write me a letter and tell me how it was.

Last Week: In last week’s column, I bragged that I’d officially had the smallest winning week in my history as a picker. Doh. Then the guys hit the track at Michigan, and I actually posted an even smaller winning week. I picked the race winner, Matt Kenseth, who came in at 825. Unfortunately, I lost my head-to-head pick (stupid Greg Biffle), which nullified all but a sliver of my winnings. For the record, it was a win, but it was a win that profited us exactly .04 of a unit. I guess it beats a sharp stick in the eye (as did the .06 units we made two weeks ago). But let’s go for a little something bigger this weekend at the mythical Bristol night race, shall we? By the way, for the season, I’m still at a profit of 14.6 units.

Note: The odds for the following selections will be updated late on Friday or early on Saturday, at which time I’ll also make the head-to-head selection for the week (i.e., when the online books post their odds).

Take Kurt Busch ( 511), 1/6th unit. It’s not an exciting wager, because Busch is the hands-down Bristol favorite every time the Smokeless Set comes here. But in an otherwise lackluster first season driving the #2 for Penske, Busch was still able to come here in the spring and post a dramatic come-from-behind victory, his fifth win in the last nine Bristol events. You might be thinking that it’s unlikely that the beaky Busch could make a sweep of this track, but you only have to go back to 2003 to find a season when he did exactly that. Also in this wager’s favor is the fact that Busch is all but eliminated from the Chase for the Championship, so he can afford to go balls-out and try to win this thing at his best track.

Take Matt Kenseth ( 775), 1/6th unit. Last week’s winner at Michigan is a model of consistency at Bristol. He won this event last season, and finished third here in the spring. All told, Kenseth has eight top-10 finishes here in the last nine Bristol events. He also won earlier this year at Dover, which is a good indication that his Bristol setup could be close to right-on; experts refer to Dover as a “Big Bristol,” because they both have tight, high-banked turns that require great torque.

Take Kevin Harvick ( 828), 1/6th unit. The tendency here is to think about taking Jeff Gordon ( 757), because Gordon was pretty thoroughly robbed here this spring: he was leading Kenseth, but Milwaukee Matt snuck up behind him, pounded his bumper, and took off for the front, whereupon Gordon jumped out of his car (wearing a precious pink driver’s suit) and shoved Kenseth for the nation to see. But I’m going to take Harvick instead; he’s a really big threat to win his first points title this year, and he probably had the second-best car (after Busch) here in the spring. Like Kenseth, Harvick is a model of Bristol consistency (say that five times fast): he’s got seven top-10 finishes here in the last nine events, including a win last spring, two seconds, two thirds and a fourth. If he can stay away from mechanical problems (and the RCR cars did show a slight chink in their armor when Jeff Burton ( 1971) and Clint Bowyer ( 1169 as part of field) blew up at Michigan last weekend), he’ll be around the lead late. Anyway, I say Harvick makes a real run at this thing, like the short-track specialist he is.

Christopher Harris is a featured writer for the Professional Handicappers League.
Read all of his articles at procappers.com/ procappers.com