Last week, JTG Daugherty racing announced that they hired AJ Allmendinger to replace Bobby Labonte in the #47 Toyota for 4 or so races.

“We’ve kind of gone backward the last three years,” co-owner Brad Daugherty said. “We can’t exactly put a finger on it without being able to benchmark it against a second team. It’s really hard. He’s available, so we thought we’d stick him in there to see if he has a different perspective on what we’re doing and what we’re not doing.”

I don’t really see how Allmendinger, with his limited stock car experience, is going to provide better feedback than Labonte. Maybe “different” is all they were looking for. Unless they just got tired of mowing the grass.

Anyway, this week Labonte announced that he will now drive the #51 Chevy that Allmendinger recently vacated. So at least he’ll keep his streak of 703 consecutive starts alive.

It’ll be interesting to see who runs better during the races, and who actually manages to put together some decent finishes.

Looking at the pit road map for the Coke 600 tomorrow, I noticed a little bit of an unusual pattern in pit selection.

Below is a modified pit road selection chart:

The first 4 qualifiers are marked with a red number signifying their qualifying position. No real surprise there – the pole sitter Denny Hamlin took the #1 pit stall. 2nd place took the first pit stall that had an opening in front (for better pit exit), and so did the 3rd place qualifier, and the 4th place.

Then, 5th – 7th picked pit stalls that had an opening behind (for better pit entry).

But what surprised me a little was the fact that the 9-13th place drivers all picked pits near the back of pit road. Not until you get to 14th, 15th, and 16th picks do you see cars in the front of pit road.

Finally – used to be that the top 20 cars generally occupied stalls at the front of the pit road, and the slower (expected to be a lap down) cars took the back. However, in this map, it seems like there are “slower” cars almost every other pit stall from front to back of pit road (32 car in 6th position, 35 in 8th, 13 in 10th, etc…).

Interesting…

As suggested in a comment on the last story, it might be useful to look at top-5s in the context of races run, and have a look at the percentage of races that these drivers were able to convert into top-5s.

For the sake of brevity, I’m going to look at the four drivers mentioned in the last post.

In order of top-5 percentage:

1) David Pearson – 574 races, 301 top 5s (52%), 105 wins (18%)

2) Richard Petty – 1185 races run, 555 top 5s (47%), 200 wins (17%)

3) Bobby Allison – 717 races, 336 top 5s (46%), 85 wins (12%)

4) Jeff Gordon – 700 races run, 300 top 5s (43%), 87 wins (12%)

UPDATE – decided to add Jimmie Johnson to this list:

5) Jimmie Johnson – 410 races run, 172 top 5s (42%), 62 wins (15%)

On this last podcast, we covered the fact that Jeff Gordon recorded his 300th top 5 of his career at Darlington.

Most reporting did not really give us a sense of the magnitude of his achievement.

On the podcast, I mentioned that Richard Petty, Bobby Allison, and David Pearson were the only other NASCAR drivers to earn more top 5s.

But the question remained – how many more does Gordon have to get before he moves higher up the list? I couldn’t find this information while we were recording, but according to an article on nascar.com, he doesn’t have far to go.

“[Gordon] now ranks behind only NASCAR Hall of Famers Richard Petty (555), Bobby Allison (336) and David Pearson (301) in career top-fives.”

So two more top-5s, and he’ll move ahead of David Pearson. 37 more, and he’ll move ahead of Bobby Allison. If he is able to earn a top-5 in about 30% of his remaining races (approximately his top-5 percentage from last year), it will take him 6 or 7 more races to pass David Pearson, and another 3.5 seasons to pass Bobby Allison, and another 24 seasons to pass Richard Petty.

If he maintained his current top-5 percentage of 43%, he’ll only have to go 17 years to eclipse Richard Petty. Either way, he will not be driving in the sport that long.

But he has a shot at the other two.

Just heard that Denny Hamlin does not have a backup plan, and is planning to be in the car for the entire race at Darlington.

Time to update my ESPN fantasy picks – Denny is great at this track, and 13th in the first practice.