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2010 Oil Slick 200

Nearly five hours of practice time available and nobody did more than 29 laps. Nearly half the field did less than 10 laps each. There are several possible reasons for the low lap count:

• If your car is already fast, why waste it on practice?
• Practice costs money, tires, engines, etc. The low budget teams don't have any to spare.
• There is something seriously wrong with your car. Back to the drawing board.

So here's how the drivers of interest did:

Dakoda Armstrong

A surprising, to me anyway, 5th place run. He did 13 lucky laps and wound up with a best time only 0.17 seconds behind the fastest car. That's about 1/6th of a second. Not too shabby.

Nelson Piquet Jr.

Apparently Mr. Piquet's adapatability need no longer be questioned. 9th fastest for day, 1/4 of a second off the best time, after only 5 laps. Nice!

Alli Owens

Lucky 13th place. Just over 1/3 of a second behind the top speed. Though that's not quite as good as I'd expected.

Ricky Carmichael

16th place, just under 1/2 second off the pace. Motoman done good.

Danica Patrick

17th place. Actually just 0.016 behind Ricky. A top third time is as well as could be hoped for. Though I already saw a blog post gloating over her so-called "poor performace." I wonder if the 36 cars that were slower consider her performace poor. And in true Danica fashion, she completed the most laps of anyone by a clear margin.

Steve Blackburn

19th place. Just under 6/10ths back. Very good for an independant racer.

Leilani Munter

32nd place. Just over a second off the pace. Slower than hoped for but still comfortable for qualifying for the race.

Jerick Johnson

35th place. Good enough, but could be better.

Milka Duno

44th place. A second and a half off the pace and one place short of qualifying for the race.

Jenny Jo Cobb

47th place. Over two seconds behind the leader. Pick it up Jenny.

Schedule

Tomorrow, Feb 5, is qualifying. There is a 50% chance of thunder storms. I don't know what happens if qualifying is rained out.

Update: It seems that without qualifying the grid is set on owner points. Then, if there are any open spots, and there are, the rest would be set by practice time. If my calculations and understandings are correct, our intrepid heroes would line up something like this:

12. Alli Owens
14. Dakoda Armstrong
27. Ricky Carmichael
33. Steve Blackburn
37. Nelson Piquet
39. Danica Patrick
43. Leilani Munter
DNQ Jerick Johnson
DNQ Milka Duno
DNQ Jenny Jo Cobb

Let's hope it doesn't rain.