NASCAR Car Number Countdown - #16
Thursday, January 31st, 2008
The 2008 season is “Go Time” for quite a few drivers in the NASCAR Cup series. In the Roush Fenway Racing organization, “Go Time” just barely describes the situation. Jack Roush has announced that he will decide during this season which team on his roster of five will get cut in order to bring his organization in line with NASCAR’s limit of 4 teams in 2010. Matt Kenseth certainly can relax and breathe easy that his seat is there for him in the #17 for as long as he wants to stay. Carl Edwards can also rest easy since he has performed well in his three full years on the circuit. In each of those seasons he has finished in the top 12 in season points with Roush. Now one of Roush’s other drivers (Jamie McMurray, David Ragan, Greg Biffle) are the more likely candidates to be leaving the organization. However, the driver of the #16 may not get a pink slip, but instead could choose to leave on his own.
Stats for all cars running the #16:
- Number of Races: 823
- Number of Wins: 25
- Number of Top 5s: 117
- Number of Top 10s: 232
- Number of Poles: 21
- Number of Drivers: 90
Spotlight Subject: Driver Greg Biffle
Of the three Roush drivers most likely to leave it is my opinion that Greg Biffle certainly has the most options available to him over the next season. Roush’s team president, Geoff Smith, has stated that they’re currently re-negotiating the contracts for both Carl Edwards and Greg Biffle which are set to expire at the end of this season. I look for Carl’s contract to be wrapped up first and fairly quickly, thus freeing him up to move on and focus on the 26 races to the Chase. What Greg decides to do will then either allow McMurray and Ragan to breathe a sigh of relief, or gasp for air as they’ll understand it’s one of them that will be going. (more…)
Near the beginning of our Car Number Countdown to the Daytona 500 we put the spotlight on one of the more recent females to race in NASCAR, 
female drivers, but Sara and her husband Frank would also become the only married couple to compete against one another in a NASCAR race. Her best career finish would be a 5th at Heidelberg Raceway in Pittsburgh. It would be the only top 5 finish by a woman in NASCAR. Sara would compete in 6 of the 8 races held in 1949 and she would finish 13th in the season points. 
Imagine if the name of this website wasn’t OneBadWheel.com, and the subject matter was not NASCAR related. Instead, imagine that the website is OneBadClub.com with a focus on helping you with your fantasy golf game. I wonder if the majority of this site’s regular readers would still be visiting this site. Regardless whether you would or not, we’re at #18 in the Car Number Countdown to the Daytona 500 and today’s spotlight subject could just as easily be on the hypothetical OneBadClub.com as he is on OneBadWheel.com. So perhaps you would be reading about him anyway.
So what do you do when your race teams haven’t been performing up to expected levels by the media, fans, or even yourself? Well, you call in reinforcements to help in a sport where costs have gone to the moon. This new partner can maybe equip the cars with ski racks on the roof. They might give the pit crew a few soccer (foot?) balls to practice their coordination with. Or maybe take your old Cup cars (now that the COT is here full time) and put them on one of your newly associated used car lots. Don’t forget to raise the hoods up, tie off some helium balloons, and write “Free Steaks with Purchase of Stock Car” on the windshield in multi-colored writing. Top it all off with a huge inflatable hockey player on top of the sales office to help draw in the passing traffic. After all, if an inflatable gorilla on the roof will bring in customers, surely an inflatable Canadian hockey goalie would do even better, right?
While Preseason Thunder certainly helped build a little more anticipation for the Daytona 500, for me nothing really says “it’s almost time” than the running of the Rolex 24 Hours at Daytona. As of this posting the teams are in the final hour of the race. Occasional NASCAR driver Scott Pruett is leading the DP class, and drivers Jimmie Johnson and Kurt Busch have been representing NASCAR drivers very well too. Yes, I’m getting excited about Speedweeks in Daytona and the fact that we’re now only 20 days away from the Daytona 500 itself. Even before the Great American Race, we’ll have the Budweiser Shootout and the Gatorade Duels! Yes my friends, we are getting close! Therefore, at car #20 for the Countdown to the Daytona 500 we’ll spotlight a driver who actually won the Daytona 500 in a car #20.
Just as the #43 will forever be associated with Richard Petty, so too will the #21 be forever tied with a family owned and operated team in NASCAR racing. This family has had some of the biggest names in racing drive their cars over the years. When considering who to spotlight for car #21 in the Car Number Countdown to the Daytona 500, it was nearly impossible for me to single out just one of those drivers in history. This being the case in part because the #21 itself has been with this one team for most all of NASCAR’s Cuper Series history.
I was born in Ohio, but in my mid-teens my parents moved to Florida. Around ten years ago I moved to the Carolinas. Thus, some of my redneck friends here refer to me as a “half back.” That’s alright though, because a couple of my southern redneck friends are pretty darn cool, even if they both have the same name (Kevin H. & Kevin D.). One of them even has a PHD! These are the kinda guys who have killed quite a few brains cells with all the Budweiser they’ve consumed. They’ve drank so much of the beer that they’ll swear to you they paid for the Budweiser blimp. That said, in the short time that I’ve known Kevin & Kevin they’ve proven to be very good friends. One year we were short on income and couldn’t afford to have heat in the house for the winter. These two cats, and another named Bob, showed up at the house one Sat. morning with pickup trucks, a trailer and chain saws and said, “C’mon, we gonna git you sum wood.” (Note, if it wasn’t for the trailer and chain saws, I would have thought they were taking me to a peeler bar!) They used their gas and spent their entire Saturday off to take me out to a friend of theirs who had a large chunk of wooded land. We spent the day cutting and splitting wood for me and my family to burn in the fireplace. We loaded up the the trucks and trailer with the wood and hauled it back to the house where they helped unload and stack it so that it would stay dry. None of them wanted or would accept money for it. The most they’d let me do was buy them a sandwich. Another example was this past summer when my lawn mower broke down and the grass was getting kinda tall. Kevin H. loads up his mower and sneaks over to the house one day when he knows I’m out running errands. I pull up to the house as he’s making the final 5 passes in the yard. With friends like this, I have no choice but to spotlight Kevin H.’s favorite driver now that we’re at #22 in the car number countdown to the Daytona 500. This guy will do about anything for you. He has offered to let me use his PHD before. That didn’t make sense to me before, and I honestly just chalked it up to the dead brain cells from the Budweiser. However, after listening to the John Boy & Billy Show this morning, I now know his PHD is a Post Hole Digger. Rednecks, gotta love ‘em!
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