MONTREAL – This weekend’s NAPA Auto Parts 200 marks the NASCAR Nationwide Series’ fourth annual visit to Montreal.
The versatility of a high-performance stock car is, to many, one of its greatest beauties.
It runs frighteningly fast on the high-banked ovals of tracks like Daytona, 2.5 miles in length, and 2.66-mile Talladega; it feels right at home on the mile-shorter superspeedways like Charlotte, Atlanta and Chicago; it bangs fenders on the tight short tracks of Bristol, Martinsville and Richmond; and it indelicately dances the road courses of Watkins Glen, N.Y., Sonoma, Calif., and Circuit Gilles Villeneuve on Ile Notre-Dame.
From almost the first lap run here in 2007, fans have been treated to an outstanding show on a Montreal track that seems to tolerate stock cars more than embrace them. The Villeneuve layout was designed more than three decades ago with nimble Formula One cars in mind, not 3,400-pound beasts that often resemble rolling biceps.
Fans will almost forgive NASCAR for the start of the 2007 race, eagerly anticipated by the spectators in the tight left-right Senna Corner as a used car lot. If F1 cars, which don’t like dust on their tires, can wreck gloriously in this narrow strip of asphalt, then imagine the chaos when 43 stock cars tried to shoehorn their way through and up the backside of the track.
But the entire grid slipped through Senna with nary a nick on the fancy, high-tech advertising schemes that pass for paint jobs, and if the drivers could have heard the crowd over the roar of the engines, they’d have heard mostly boos.
Patience was rewarded, of course, as it usually is in NASCAR racing. Only 27 of 43 starters were running at the finish, much the rest of the field belching smoke, weeping fluids and generally looking like a scrap-metal dealer’s dream come true as they breathed their last in the pits and garage area.
Here, then, is a look back at the three editions of the NAPA Auto Parts 200 that have brought us to this weekend:
2007
Winner: Kevin Harvick, No. 21 AutoZone Chevrolet (owner: Richard Childress)
Posted winnings: $109,450
Pole-sitter: Patrick Carpentier, fast lap of one minute, 2.086 seconds (average 95.531 m.p.h.)
Time of race: 3 hours, 8 minutes, 30 seconds
Average speed: 64.671 m.p.h.
Cautions: Five, for 14 laps
Margin of victory: .338 seconds
Harvick, starting 42nd, threaded his way to the front to win the inaugural Montreal race.
He started at the rear because he wasn’t behind the wheel on Friday to qualify the car, having been in Long Pond, Pa., to prepare his Sprint Cup ride for Sunday’s Pennsylvania 500.
Harvick’s Nationwide (then Busch Series) car was qualified in Montreal on Friday by backup driver Brandon Miller. This was Harvick’s first Nationwide Series victory, which would have been cause for celebration by fans here had he not beaten local hero Patrick Carpentier to the checkered flag, the native of Joliette, Que., running his first stock-car race.
Harvick held off Carpentier in overtime, so to speak, the cars running a 75th and extra lap so the race wouldn’t end on a yellow-flag caution.
“I could tell (Carpentier) was behind me because the grandstands were waving everything they had at him,” Harvick said after the victory celebration. “I knew it wasn’t for me.”
A terrific finish, even if the thrilling duel was almost a subplot.
Australian Marcos Ambrose was motoring toward his first career NASCAR win when he was drilled from behind by veteran Robby Gordon in the Senna Corner with just a few laps to run.
Gordon ignored repeated instructions from NASCAR where to line up for the restart and chose not to leave the track when told to do so, saying he should have been restarted in the lead or in second place, not in 13th, after having been spun by Ambrose.
As Harvick and his crew celebrated the finish, Gordon scorched tire doughnuts into the asphalt at the start/finish line for his phantom victory, then sat on the hood of his car within metres of the podium, pumping his fist into the air.
NASCAR chairman/chief executive officer Brian France and president Mike Helton looked on, unamused even as the crowd went ape.
Gordon would be parked by NASCAR for the next day’s Sprint Cup race in Pennsylvania, as stinging a spanking as NASCAR can inflict.
Max Papis finished the debut Montreal race in third place, just ahead of popular Torontonian Ron Fellows, who deserved a much better fate; Fellows was spun in the Senna corner with a handful of laps to run, Harvick having run into Scott Pruett, who in turn plowed into Fellows.
Ambrose would finish seventh, his first of three close-but-no-champagne results in Montreal.
2008
Winner: Ron Fellows, No. 5 GoDaddy.com Chevrolet (owner: JR Motorsports)
Posted winnings: $109,963
Pole-sitter: Scott Pruett, 1:02.568 (95.082 m.p.h.)
Time of race: 2:51.38 (shortened to 48 laps from 74 by rain)
Average speed: 50.149 mph
Cautions: Four, for 12 laps
Margin of victory: 13.502 seconds
History was made when NASCAR ran its first-ever points race in the rain. And to say it was raining on Ile Notre Dame would be like saying it’s a wee bit dry in the Sahara.
The enduring image of the “race” might be Carl Edwards, who ultimately finished sixth, reaching out of his window with a Swiffer mop, while still running, trying to squeegee the water off his windshield.
Some teams were equipped with wipers; many were not. Some teams had defrost/defog units installed in their cars; many did not.
It made for a ridiculously uneven playing field, some drivers pulling off the track when it became clear that nothing was clear, visibility cut to roughly the end of their hoods.
Fellows, a road-course ace who twice previously had won his class at a rainy Le Mans, was leading when NASCAR finally admitted defeat and called it a day.
“That was difficult, but it was good fun,” Fellows said from within a champagne shower.
Goodyear’s rain tire was a question mark, and not just because it was constructed in 1999.
“But they held up very well,” said Joliette, Que., native Patrick Carpentier, who for the second consecutive year ran to a second-place finish. “Everybody had questions about it, but it worked.”
Marcos Ambrose, who had been stung the summer before in a late-race collision with Robby Gordon, finished third after having dominated the race, leading for a race-high 27 laps. A penalty assessed for speeding on pit road deprived him of any chance of victory.
“I feel a little jinxed,” Ambrose sighed. “I felt like it was our race.”
NASCAR finally pulled the plug when cars began wrecking under soggy caution.
Jacques Villeneuve, last seen on this track in 2006, and then in Formula One, began the race from the third row, the fifth-fastest qualifier. Driving for Braun Racing, Villeneuve even led a lap in the late going, but wound up classified 16th when he rammed the rear of Alex Garcia’s Chevy, blinded and wiperless in the driving rain.
“I couldn’t see anything,” Villeneuve said. “Even one metre behind another car, I couldn’t see him.
“When we were at speed, the air would clear some of the water. But under caution, I had to use only the edge of the track. I was driving blind. When everyone stopped, I just ran into the back of (Garcia).”
Fellows was overjoyed with his fourth NASCAR victory, given that this one came on the racetrack named for the late driver who was one of his heroes.
“I watched (Gilles Villeneuve) in 1980 or ’81, in pouring rain,” said Fellows, who finished fourth in 2007 wearing a Musee Gilles-Villeneuve T-shirt under his racing uniform.
“So for me to win here, and in the wet, this is really special.”
2009
Winner: Carl Edwards, No. 60 CitiFinancial Ford (owner: Jack Roush)
Posted winnings: $104,070
Pole-sitter: Marcos Ambrose, 1:20.543 (80.934 m.p.h.)
Time of race: 3:49:19
Average speed: 80.905 m.p.h.
Cautions: 11, for 31 laps
Margin of victory: .393 seconds
Stop us if you’ve heard this before: Marcos Ambrose dominated the race, leading a career-high 60 of 74 laps (he’s now led 124 of 199 laps run in three Montreal races) but wasn’t the first driver to the finish line.
It was Carl Edwards who led the only lap that counts – the final one – to win last year’s edition in a race that scattered car parts so far and wide, they still might be picking them up.
Edwards executed a daring pass on the final corner of the final lap to beat the Aussie by less than four-10ths of a second, further adding to the misery Ambrose must now be feeling about Circuit Gilles Villeneuve.
The Montreal race again was plagued by rain, first during qualifying. Then drivers were instructed to bolt on Goodyear wets on Lap 61.
And Edwards, who had led only two laps before he darted to the front with the finish in sight, took full advantage of having filled Ambrose’s mirror for both laps of the green-white-checkered finish.
“It was wild, and I thought the whole time Marcos was going to get away with this thing,” said Edwards, who first had to pull free from Roxton Pond, Que., native Andrew Ranger as the end neared.
“I broke away from Andrew and I just gave it everything I had on that last lap. Marcos just made that one mistake through the curves at the end and gave me the chance to get by.”
Ambrose admitted to being “pretty devastated” by the turn of events, which for the third consecutive year saw him denied victory that seemed to be in his hip pocket.
If the 2008 NAPA Auto Parts 200 made history for being the first NASCAR points race to be run on rain tires, so did the 2009 event go into the record books: by almost a minute, it broke the standard for the longest Nationwide race ever, until then the 3:48.25 of the 1997 Gateway 300.
It was a messy race – yellow caution flags flew for fluid and debris on the track, in addition to rain and cars stopped on the track.
A sodden crowd did have plenty to cheer about.
Jacques Villeneuve finished fourth after having led a couple of laps.
“It was like being in a pinball machine at every restart,” Villeneuve said. “It was a matter of surviving. There’s nothing that’s not bent on the car.
“. . . If we did that in Formula One, we’d survive five metres and probably be rolling with no wheels attached. This was wild, definitely crazy. It’s a good thing those cars are strong.”
Canadian Tire Series ace Ranger, who was second in that support race earlier in the day, roared home in third. Fellow Quebecer Alex Tagliani was 26th.
After two straight runner-up finishes, Patrick Carpentier made his way up from a 40th-place start to be running fourth after just 15 laps. But a blown engine, one Carpentier admitted was purely his fault because of a bad gear shift, relegated him to 38th.
Defending champion Ron Fellows lasted just 26 laps before he was caught up in an incident with Justin Allgaier and Kyle Busch.
“I was in the middle of a corner,” Fellows growled, “and I was used as somebody’s run-off.”
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