A pair of promising '08 rookies offer glimpse of future

Jacques Villeneuve will be the first former F1 champ to race in NASCAR in almost 40 years when he takes to the track in Las Vegas. AP

Any bona fide NASCAR historian can tell you that Jeff Gordon's first Nextel Cup race in 1992 was also Richard Petty's last, marking a transition from the great champion of the past to the great champion of the future. They should also take note of what is happening this weekend, on two different tracks in two different series.

Jacques Villeneuve will make his NASCAR debut in the Craftsman Truck Series at Las Vegas Motor Speedway on Saturday, the first of seven season-ending races he is scheduled to start to prepare him for an expected full-season with Bill Davis Racing in Cup in 2008. He's the first Formula 1 world champion to race in NASCAR since Jimmy Clark drove at Rockingham on Oct. 29, 1967. But it was Clark's only start in NASCAR.

Villeneuve's career has been similar to Juan Pablo Montoya's, only better. He and Montoya both won CART Champ Car titles and the Indianapolis 500 before entering Formula 1. Villeneuve won the championship in '97 and has 11 F1 victories, four more than Montoya.

The Canadian also made more money in F1 than Montoya, thanks to a lucrative deal with British American Racing that sent his career into mediocrity for several years. At 36, why does Villeneuve want to dive into NASCAR? He's a racer.

"I needed to do something in racing that was at an extremely high level, which NASCAR is, but something different," Villeneuve explained in a NASCAR teleconference. "And I was missing the ovals, also, so it sounded like a great challenge. I really wanted to get into it."

Villeneuve has done five days of testing for Davis, two in the Toyota trucks at Chicagoland, one day in Cup's Car of Tomorrow at Kentucky and two days in the CoT at Talladega.

"Our goal when we started this program was to just get comfortable in the cars and trucks and get in as many miles as possible," Villeneuve said, "but testing can also be tedious. I'm excited to finally get back to racing."

Another rookie also will make news this weekend across the country when Joey Logano, all of 17 years and three months old, will clinch his first NASCAR title when he starts the Busch East Series race Friday at Dover. He's the first rookie in the series, which began in '89, to win the title.

Logano is tracking toward a move to Cup racing by '09. He'll be in Busch next year, a place he'd be now, but he's not old enough. Logano will be eligible on his 18th birthday, May 24 of next year.

"I know next year I'll be in a Busch car," Logano said in a NASCAR teleconference earlier this week. "I'm just not sure when or where yet."

Logano, originally from Middletown, Conn., but living in North Carolina, has had to be patient his whole career.

"I've been through that type of stuff my whole life, going all the way back to Legends cars," Logano said. "I was nine. I had to wait until I was 12 to race one. Tried a couple of times. Got shot down. I had to wait until I was 16 to run the East series this year."

Logano won the Busch West Series opener at Phoenix, one of two starts in the West series, which runs in the spring. He has five wins running the full East schedule.

Joe Gibbs Racing signed him as a development driver at age 15. The team wants to expand to four cars in Cup and Logano figures to get the first shot at it, maybe as soon as next year in a few cameo appearances.

"Joey's five Busch East wins and one West win prove that he's one of those rare talents in racing," team President J.D. Gibbs said.

This is a weekend in NASCAR history when the careers of Villeneuve and Logano are juxtaposed, making it one to remember. Their paths will cross soon.

Bang, bang finish in Grand-Am

If Nextel Cup had a championship conclusion like the Grand-Am Rolex Sports Car Series did last Saturday, state troopers would have had to been out in force to calm the rioting in the stands and been needed to escort drivers and race officials out of the track.

OK, maybe that's a little too dramatic, but imagine what would happen if Tony Stewart moved Jimmie Johnson out of the way with nose-to-tail contact to make a pass that meant the championship and then was called in for a drive-through penalty that took it away.

There was no explosion after that happened at Miller Motorsports Park, located outside Salt Lake City, in the unappreciated Grand-Am, but it was a bang-bang finish worthy of NASCAR's best confrontations.

Scott Pruett, driving Chip Ganassi's Lexus-powered Riley, nudged Alex Gurney's Pontiac-Riley with a direct hit with seven-and-a-half laps remaining on the 4.486-mile track and slipped past. Pruett, who trailed Gurney and teammate Jon Fogarty by one point going into the final race of the season, moved up to eighth and Gurney fell to 11th.

Grand-Am competition director Mark Raffauf ruled the contact was avoidable and penalized Pruett with the drive through. The Ganassi team ignored the black flag for several laps before coming down the pit lane with three to go in the 139-lap, 623.5-mile race.

Pruett got back up to ninth. Gurney and Fogarty finished eighth.

Pruett called the decision, "classless."

The 47-year-old former Indy car driver was particularly angered that no penalty was called from contact with Fogarty racing for the lead 17 laps earlier.

As Fogarty and Pruett went side-by-side through a corner, they touched. Pruett's left-rear tire and Fogarty's left-front both went flat. Pruett's Riley came out worse, as the tire shredded the body work on the left rear, and he made a remarkable comeback with the help of a couple of cautions. Fogarty also pitted, and the Bob Stallings-owned team put Gurney in the car.

"The first contact, he (Fogarty) just dropped me," Pruett said. "He hit me so hard that I think my helmet left a dent in the back of the firewall. He tore up our Lexus-Riley, but we recovered form that. Then, we were coming around the back and [Oswaldo] Negri got around him (Gurney). I was going down inside him. He ducked down on me a little bit.

"We touched just briefly and got up the line. No spin or nothing, he just got off the line. It's unfortunate Grand-Am felt that incidental contact merited a penalty when the allowed the first deliberate contact."

They were different incidents, one side-by-side and one nose-to-tail, and Raffauf made two different calls.

"I don't think anyone can be proud of how that race finished," Ganassi said.

Gurney would disagree. The 33-year-old son of the legendary Dan Gurney won the first championship of his professional career. He and Fogarty won seven of 14 races, climbing back from a big deficit after finishing 22nd in the season-opening 24 hours of Daytona.

"We deserved the championship," Gurney said. "We broke all the records this year. The race was crazy, especially at the end. It got really dirty out there. I am disappointed in some of my fellow competitors."

In the closing lap, Gurney was behind the second Ganassi car driven by Michael Valiante, which was eight laps down. Gurney accused Valiante of blocking him to help Pruett catch up . Gurney was also driving a wounded car.

"The car had a vibration at the end," Gurney said. "I just had to bring it home after [Pruett] got their penalty. It feels amazing to be champion. It was a great day today."