Kenseth Fastest, Busch, Stewart Crash In Daytona Practice

Matt Kenseth was the Pied Piper overall in practice for Saturday night’s Bud Shootout at Daytona International Speedway Friday in an afternoon that saw stories breaking on and off the track.

Kenseth turned the fastest overall lap, coming in the first of two sessions, with a lap at 201.762 mph.  Jeff Burton was second, turning in a lap just a tic slower than Kenseth, at 201.739 mph.  Georgia’s David Ragan was third fastest, and the only other driver to break the 200 mph barrier, with a lap at 200.151 mph.

Jamie McMurray was fourth fastest (199.858 mph), with Ryan Newman fifth (199.592 mph).

McMurray paced the final practice, which saw only 12 cars hit the track for the rain-shortned session.  McMurray turned a lap at 197.698 mph.  Team mate Juan Pablo Montoya was second (197.698 mph), with Greg Biffle third (196.331 mph), Kasey Kahne fourth (196.529 mph), and Marcos Ambrose fifth (195.495 mph).

At least four drivers will start Saturday night’s Budweiser Shootout in backup cars, after a crash in Friday’s first Shootout practice sidelined their primary cars.

Brothers Kurt Busch and Kyle Busch, and Penske Racing teammates AJ Allmendinger and Brad Keselowski all were forced to backups after a pileup in turn four damaged their cars beyond repair.

Contact between the No. 14 Chevrolet of reigning Sprint Cup champion Tony Stewart and the No. 51 Chevy of Kurt Busch triggered the wreck. Though Stewart’s car also sustained serious damage, his team opted to try to repair the car rather than resort to a backup.

The Shootout drivers were drafting in a three-wide pack, with Stewart pushing Busch, when the driver of the No. 51 had to alter his line slightly to move around the No. 56 Toyota of Martin Truex Jr. Busch spun into the path of his brother, and Allmendinger and Keselowski were collected in the melee.

Stewart took the blame for starting the wreck.

“He moved a little bit, but I’m still the one pushing, so I’m responsible for it,” Stewart said, whose crew was working on the car as the second practice session began. “They say they can get it fixed. I feel real confident in our fab shop. We’re got a lot of really good guys from the shop here, and they’ll get this (car) back together.”

Kurt Busch’s backup car was a bare-bones version, with no seat and no decals of sponsor Tag Heuer. Busch’s crew will have to move the seat from the primary car to the backup as well as wrap the backup in the sponsor livery.

“It was just a deal where Tony was trying to help, and we were just trying to learn the draft, and a couple of slow cars were merging in front of us,” Busch said. “I just slid up to go around them — what I thought was smooth — and I got turned around. But we’ll be all right.”

Allmendinger, who succeeded Busch in the No. 22 Dodge at Penske Racing, had a front-row seat for the wreck that eliminated his car.

“Everybody is getting the feel of it out there,” Allmendinger said. “The No. 51 car was moving around a lot. He was three-wide a couple of times. I kind of got through the middle of the three-wide pack and thought we were OK.

“It looked like the 51 and the 14 were hooked up, and the 51 made a late move around the 56. When you’re pushing somebody, and you just get off-center to the left side of the car, it’s going to turn it. To me, that’s what happened, and after that, I was just behind it.”

In other news, the No. 48 car of Jimmie Johnson slated for next week’s Daytona 500 had issues making it through tech, with NASCAR confiscating the ‘C’ pillars from Johnson’s Chevy.

“The 48 car had a body modification on it that was outside of what our tolerances are, what the original surface definitions for the body were,” Sprint Cup Series director John Darby told reporters. “There were some obvious modifications that the template inspectors picked up on and did some additional inspections with some gauges and stuff and found that they were just too far out of tolerance to fix.

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In fact, the 48 team was attaching the new, legal “C” posts as practice began for the Budweiser Shootout at 5 p.m. ET.

According to sources, the specifics of the violation involved a modification to the shape of the “C” posts designed to take air off the rear spoiler and give the car an aerodynamic advantage.

This is not Knaus’ first infraction involving a body modification. In June 2007 at Sonoma, Knaus and Steve Letarte, then crew chief for Jeff Gordon, were fined $100,000 each and suspended for six races for modifications to the front fenders that fell outside the allowable norms.

NASCAR won’t determine what penalties, if any, Knaus will incur for the current violations until after the Daytona 500. NASCAR vice president of competition Robin Pemberton said repairing the cars should end the matter until the series leaves Daytona.

“We’ll be done with it,” Pemberton said. “After it gets through inspection, we’ll go on for the next 10 days or so and go through Speedweeks and, like always, we’ll reconvene at the R&D center post-race and do all our cleanups for whatever happens for the next week or so.”

Based on past experience, those “cleanups” could include substantial penalties for Knaus and the No. 48 team.

Knaus has borrowed trouble at Daytona before. In 2006, after Johnson’s qualifying run, Knaus was dismissed from the track after NASCAR found an unapproved modification to the rear window of the No. 48 Chevy.

Knaus served a four-race suspension, but Johnson went on to win the Daytona 500 and the first of his record five straight Cup championships.

During the 2009 Chase for the Sprint Cup, Knaus pushed body position tolerances to the limit, prompting NASCAR to take the cars of Johnson and Mark Martin to its research & development center in Concord, N.C., for laser measurements after the last seven Chase races.

Those measures were considered preventive, and no penalties were incurred.

But Darby acknowledged that Friday’s violations were most closely related to the 2007 infractions.

“I think it kind of falls in line with other body violations that we’ve seen in the past,” Darby said. “Somebody mentioned Sonoma. It’s typical to that. Or I think there was a car here in a Fourth of July race that had a roof that was too small, some other things.

“We’re pretty serious about the body configurations of the cars for all of the right reasons. This was a modification that had been made to the car that put it outside that box.”

NASCAR introduced a new-generation racecar in 2007, and with it a far lower tolerance for unapproved modifications to the body. Not only does a car have to pass inspection at the racetrack, but it also must conform to comprehensive construction specifications NASCAR provides to each team.

“In the old days, teams used to work in between the templates, and that all stopped in 2007, and that’s ultimately where the violation of this one lies,” Darby said.

The No. 48 car earmarked for the Saturday night Budweiser Shootout passed inspection on Thursday. The Daytona 500 cars of Hendrick Motorsports teammates Gordon, Dale Earnhardt Jr. and Kasey Kahne likewise passed inspection on Friday.

Portions of this story by Reid Spencer