FanHouse Warmup: Lifelock.com 400

Where: Chicagoland Speedway
Time: Saturday 8:00pm/EDT
TV/Radio: TNT, MRN Radio
Twitter: Updates @ FanHouseRacing
Forecast: 58 degrees, Partly Cloudy
Distance: 267 laps (400.5 miles)
Pole Winner: Brian Vickers
2008 Winner: Kyle Busch

According to a story in the Daytona Beach News-Journal, instead of making cuts during the 2009 season as General Motors (Chevrolet) and Chrysler (Dodge) have, Ford's director of North American Motorsports Brian Wolfe said the company made their cost-saving moves at the end of the 2008 season.

"We're in a little different position than two of the other players in the sport."

Those players are GM and Chrysler, which competes in NASCAR with its Dodge brand. Wolfe said Ford had to make some "tough cuts" at the end of the 2008 season, which included an end to direct financial support to Nationwide and Truck Series race teams.

"But we have kept our engineering support," he said. "That is really critical; that hasn't changed. The Cup teams, that we have long-term contracts with, have stayed the same. We're pushing along with our plan."

Of course, these cuts are probably a telling example of why Ford never had to go through bankruptcy as a whole, but it'd be tough to imagine that FoMoCo didn't slow any support to even the flagship team of its NASCAR brand -- Roush-Fenway Racing -- when it had to make "tough cuts" at the end of last season.

The contracts may be in place, but it seems that any cuts would have had to impacted the bottom line of Roush and other Ford operations, and I'd bet that while the engineering support is still there, it probably didn't grow as it did in previous seasons from year to year.

So does that have anything to do with Ford's performance -- and more notably, Roush-Fenway's decreased performance versus its 2008 run -- in the first half of the 2009 season? Potentially.

After all, what else would have kept Carl Edwards out of victory lane in 2009 so far to this point?

Richard Childress Racing came to Chicagoland going in a completely different direction with its race cars, not in a bid to maintain its successful run at the 1.5-miler, but just to simply get back to being competitive.

Driver Jeff Burton said the changes weren't anything the team has seen before, but the results in qualifying seem to indicate the team has taken a step in the right direction -- but only with one car. Clint Bowyer qualified his No. 33 Chevrolet in 5th while teammates Jeff Burton (23rd), Kevin Harvick (28th) and Casey Mears (38th) didn't do so hot.

Burton and Bowyer, meanwhile, have run just well enough to still have a shot at this year's Chase. They sit 15th and 16th, respectively.

It was just three years ago that Juan Pablo Montoya found himself in the Chicagoland media room announcing that he'd be making the move from Formula One to NASCAR with Chip Ganassi Racing.

It's been a lesson in adaptation for the Columbian, but his third year in the sport has shown that he can certainly drive anything with wheels. Montoya comes into Saturday night's race on the verge of making his first Chase for the Sprint Cup, sitting 11th in points.

Montoya rolls off 19th.

The latest edition of the Dale Earnhardt Jr. saga continued this weekend when cousin and now ex-crew chief Tony Eury Jr. came back to the track to lead the Hendrick Motorsports research & development team of Brad Keselowski.

In between work time, Eury Jr. talked with the media and made clear that the scrutiny and criticism made what started as an impossible job -- you know, Dale Jr. was supposed to win like 14 championships in the next 6.53 years of racing -- that much tougher.

"A lot of people put him on a pedestal that he doesn't need to be on," Eury said of Earnhardt. "They put a lot of pressure on him to be somebody he's not going to be.

"Dale Jr. is a great race-car driver. But he has so much pressure on him, he doesn't enjoy it right now."

As much as a lot people don't want to admit it, Eury Jr. is right. You don't win 18 times in NASCAR's top division thanks to a name -- just ask Michael Waltrip -- and to think that the team's struggles weren't compounded by trying too hard to overcome the pressure would be nonsense.

Such is the territory, however, for NASCAR's most popular figure.

Meanwhile, the signs of improvement are slowly creeping in with Earnhardt qualifying 5th for Saturday night's 400-miler.

Before we drop the green flag, here's a look at some interesting stats that have come from the Sprint Cup's 9-year run at Chicagoland:

-- A Ford has never won at Chicagoland, with Tony Stewart and Kevin Harvick holding the most-wins lead with a tie at 2

-- Jimmie Johnson is yet to win at the track, but in 7 starts he's got 5 Top-T finishes

-- Kasey Kahne has raced Chicago five times, but has yet to score a Top-10 finish.

-- Matt Kenseth has led the second-most laps at Chicagoland with an even 300 out front (Stewart had led 325) but is yet to win

-- Harvick and Kenseth have completed every single lap ever raced at Chicagoland


Geoffrey Miller: Kyle Busch