FanHouse Warmup: Toyota SaveMart 350

Where: Infineon Raceway, Sonoma, Calif.
Time: Sunday 5:00pm/EDT
TV/Radio: TNT, MRN Radio
Twitter: At-track updates at FanHouseRacing
Forecast: 78 degrees, Mostly Sunny
Distance: 110 laps (218.9 miles)
Pole Winner: Brian Vickers
2008 Winner: Kyle Busch
NASCAR's annual trip to wine country is a highlight of the Sprint Cup season because its one of two trips the series takes to a track that turns right. And as FH's Holly Cain argued earlier in the week, they 'oughta be doing this more.

Too many of NASCAR's tracks are of the cookie-cutter variety at a 1.5-mile length with two similar corners and a dogleg frontstretch. Now, of course, you can't argue that the drivers don't have to really drive and muscle their way to a win, but you can argue that its harder to pick up.

On the otherhand, watching drivers at odd-shaped tracks like a road course, Darlington or even Phoenix gives you a true appreciation for the talent level of these guys.

Is Sonoma the best road course NASCAR could run at? Not exactly because its quite technical, but there are other road courses with the high-speed Watkins Glen feel to them that always take a good bit of talent to win. Let's bring on a few more of those.

Saturday was a crazy day at Infineon with Jimmie Johnson, Marcos Ambrose, David Gilliland, John Andretti all being involved in incidents that should have an impact on Sunday's race.

Read more about that here, and also about why Joey Logano was likely fit to be tied after the Camping World Series West race.

Infineon Raceway may be one of two tracks with the other being Watkins Glen where one can look at the final practice speed chart to get an idea of who will be strong on Sunday. At most tracks, the fastest lap of a practice has a lot to do with new tires and a cool race track, but the key is usually how a driver does 10 or 20 laps later in the run.

The road courses, though, require a driver to run a perfect lap every time through each of the 10 corners (at Infineon) and that's a very easy proposition to mess up.

So who was fastest and should be good on Sunday? A.J. Allmendinger paced the final practice session with Ron Fellows, Robby Gordon, Juan Pablo Montoya and Kasey Kahne rounding out the Top-5. Pole-sitter Brian Vickers was 11th fastest while traditional road course dominators Jeff Gordon and Tony Stewart were 20th and 37th, respectively.

Last year's winner Kyle Busch was 29th fastest.

All of that could be thrown out the window -- the fastest driver stuff -- thanks to the fuel mileage situation. The long lap times of a road course allow teams to short pit, meaning you'll probably see a lot of teams judging when to pit by running to the end of the race on fumes, not how far they can go on a run.

The Sprint Cup cars average between 35-40 laps per run, meaning teams will pit three times during the race. That leads to a question, I think, if NASCAR needs to look at smaller fuel tanks for road courses.

It's a short race already (200 and change miles) so why not make things a little more interesting?


Geoffrey Miller: Juan Pablo Montoya