The rookie battle is already underway, but with Joey Logano and Scott Speed posting modest results in the first two races and with last year’s freshmen bloodied and beaten by the sport, reinforcements are coming.
This week at Las Vegas Motor Speedway, Max Papis joins the NASCAR ranks after a successful career in Championship Auto Racing Teams (CART) that produced three victories and 22 top-fives in 112 starts. He hopes that his fate is not the same as last year’s open-wheel defectors—Dario Franchitti, Patrick Carpentier and Jacques Villeneuve—who all failed to complete their first seasons.
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Papis’ team has a different approach than those three drivers, however. Instead of stretching their resources to the breaking point, the No. 13 Germain Brothers Toyota will attempt to run only half the schedule in order to put a greater emphasis on running well in the races for which they feel they have the best chance of qualifying for.
The team tried to get a little experience at the end of 2008 but missed races at Texas and Homestead by a wide margin. In stark contrast, they easily timed their way into the field this week for Sunday’s Shelby 427 at Las Vegas Motor Speedway.
“I’m so happy; it’s an awesome day,” Papis said after qualifying his car 26th. “We made the show (for the) first time on an oval, and it just proved the perseverance pays off.”
To say the least, last year’s rookie class was disappointing. And in 11 of 36 races, first-year drivers who were not competing for the Rookie of the Year honors beat the official contenders. Brad Keselowski was one of those spoilers.
Keselowski was fastest of the true “go-or-go-home” drivers for the Shelby 427—and he is another tardy freshman. Even though he is not officially contending for rookie honors again this year, Keselowski will run too many races in 2009 to be eligible for the prize in future seasons, and his part-time program just might provide him with some of the best cars in his class.
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In seven races this season, including this week at Las Vegas, he is competing in a fifth Hendrick Motorsports Chevrolet. He also will run nine more races in the James Finch-owned Chevrolet. He was originally scheduled to run 10 races for Finch but failed to qualify for the season-opening Daytona 500.
With Hendrick power under the hood, Keselowski lines up 13th for Sunday’s event, which not only places him well in front of all the other first-year drivers, it also showed more speed than some of the favorites to win the Shelby 427, such as Carl Edwards and Jeff Gordon.
“It’s the same Cup car I had at Texas and Homestead (last season),” Keselowski said. “We ran very well at Texas with this car.”
That race was Keselowski’s Cup debut and he finished an impressive 19th, which again was the best among all first-year drivers.
This same car “ran good in practice at Homestead until I put it in the fence and kind of hurt it,” Keselowski continued. Even though he was disappointed with his performance in the Ford 400, he finished 23rd.
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