MOTORSPORT: NASCAR end nigh for Ambrose

Marcos Ambrose isn’t exactly ending his NASCAR career in seventh heaven – unless he wins his final race at Homestead-Miami Speedway.

But the Australian, returning home next week to resume his V8 Supercar career, gained a top 10 finish in his penultimate Sprint Cup race at Phoenix International Raceway.

Indeed, it was 10th place – his seventh top 10 in 35 Cup races this season. Three of those have been top fives.

Immediately after this Sunday’s 400-mile (640km) NASCAR finale in Florida the dual V8 Supercar champion will fly to Australia to test the new Ford Falcon FG he will drive for Roger Penske and Dick Johnson at next month’s Sydney 500 and in all of next year’s V8 Supercar Championship.

Penske, meanwhile, has one of the four drivers in contention for this season’s Sprint Cup crown – Joey Logano, in a Ford.

The other three title contenders, after nine rounds of the convoluted Chase for the Sprint Cup that began with 16 drivers, are Kevin Harvick, the winner at Phoenix, and Ryan Newman in Chevrolets, and Denny Hamlin in a Toyota.

Whoever of that four crosses the finish line first at Homestead-Miami will be this year’s champion.

Among those edged out of the Chase at Phoenix were four-time champion Jeff Gordon, also a four-time race winner this season. Gordon’s last title was in 2001, but he’s only out of contention this weekend because Newman nudged youngster Kyle Larson on the last lap at Phoenix to gain the spot he needed to get in ahead of Gordon. That meant no driver from the mightiest Chevrolet team, Hendrick Motorsports, can be champion this year.

Another ruled out is Penske’s 2012 champion Brad Keselowski, the winner of six Cup races this year – more than any other driver.  Logano has won five. Harvick, in his first season with the Stewart-Haas Racing of Tony “Smoke” Stewart and industrial tools tycoon and soon-to-be Formula One team owner Gene Haas, has won four. Hamlin has won one for Joe Gibbs Racing. Newman, in his first season with Richard Childress Racing, none.

Ambrose has not won this year either. Nor last year. His two Cup victories were in 2011 and 2012 – both at the Watkins Glen road course in upstate New York.

“Having ‘The King’ (Richard Petty, winner of 200 Cup races and his team owner the past four years) in Victory Lane with me was just an amazing thing,” Ambrose said of those victories in an interview with Yahoo about the highlights of his time in America – almost a decade.

“To get to know the Petty family and to experience Victory Lane with Richard was just incredible. Winning a race is great, but sharing it with ‘The King’ was pretty special.”

In 226 Cup races since 2008 – 150 of them in Fords, the other 76 in Toyotas – those two victories at The Glen are Ambrose’s only wins. So never on the ovals of various sizes – from half-mile (800 metres) up to 2.5 miles (4km) – on which the overwhelming majority of NASCAR races are run.

Unless he gets the job done at Homestead-Miami this last time.

As things stand, Ambrose will come home with 18 Cup top-five finishes, 46 Cup top 10s and five victories in the second-tier Nationwide Series.

Of the 10th place in his latest race at Phoenix he said: “The track changed a lot, but Drew (crew chief Drew Blickensderfer) did a great job of making adjustments. We really made the car a lot better all race. It was super tight in the middle, but we made the right calls.  It’s nice to get a good finish. The last few weeks have been a struggle, and it’s nice to get back on track. It was a good day.”

In the 43-car fields of the premier league of American stock car racing, Ambrose’s average starting position throughout his Sprint Cup career has been 18.9 and his average finish 20.14. This year, his fourth with Richard Petty Motorsports, his average finish has been 19.7, and in the past six races it has been 18.83.

In that sense he’s ending on the up, although he’s only 23rd in the series points – his lowest since 2010, and compared with his best of 18th in 2009 and 2012.

And he would have loved, more than anything, to have had an oval-track win.

It’s been thought Ambrose might go back to America each year to do the NASCAR road races at Watkins Glen and Sonoma in California for Penske.
But he has told Yahoo: “I really don’t have any plans to come back [to American racing] at this point.

“You never obviously completely close the book like that, but I’m really focused and excited to be going to the Australian V8 Supercar series and I want
to do that properly for Roger Penske and Dick Johnson.”

Ambrose is not sure what to expect of his NASCAR finale on Sunday.

“I don't know what it’s going to be like when I get the chequered flag at Homestead,” he said.

“I’m sure it’s going to have a bittersweet feeling to it, but I’ve got a lot to look forward to and a lot of good friends and people to say goodbye to.

“It’s been fun the last few weeks, but I want to try and run as good as I can and leave on the right note ... leave showing that I had really good pace and that I left with my A-game on.”

Despite the absence of an oval victory, Ambrose has adjudged his NASCAR career as “nothing but a success”.

“I really came over with a lot of ambition and determination and managed to make it in a country that has some incredible talent,” he said.

“There are some great drivers, all the way from short track racing at the local level, all the way through the Sprint Cup series.

“I got my breaks along the way and made the most of them and I’m just really, really pleased to have made it.”
Soon he will be back in a V8 Supercar.

In Sydney on December 5-7 he will carry the number 66 – in recognition of him contesting his 66th round of Australia’s major racing championship.

It’s also the number that one of Penske’s great American drivers, Mark Donohue, carried for much of his tragically-shortened career – including the first of Penske’s record 15 Indianapolis 500 victories in 1972.

Next year Ambrose will carry a number more familiar in Australian racing – the 17 made famous by Dick Johnson, the man whose V8 Supercar team Penske is taking charge of in the new phase of Ambrose’s career.