Sam Hornish Jr. could complete his season without a top-10 finish. Getty Images Mark Beech's Mailbag Have questions or feedback? E-mail Mark Beech. Name: Email: Hometown: Question: SEND

GREEN FLAGS

Are we witnessing the end of NASCAR's open-wheel era? Just one season after Juan Pablo Montoya electrified the racing world by moving from Formula 1 to NASCAR, the whole experiment seems to be stumbling towards a ghastly conclusion.

To wit: Montoya -- who's slumped badly since a relatively promising rookie season -- recently learned that his car's primary backer, oil-industry giant Texaco, will not return to NASCAR next year, leaving the former Indy 500 champ with only a partial sponsorship (Wrigley's) for 2009; '07 Indy champ Dario Franchitti, after losing the sponsor for his car a few months ago, announced earlier this week that he would return to the IndyCar circuit; and IndyCar star Sam Hornish Jr. remains on pace to complete his season without a single top-10 finish.

Just what in the name of Mario Andretti is going on here? To my uneducated eye, the sorry state of NASCAR's open-wheel stars is the result of a couple of factors:

1. The economy: Outside of Cup superstars like Jimmie Johnson and Tony Stewart, there are actually very few cars out there these days with just one sponsor. The price tag to back a Cup team has just gotten too high, and the result has been that teams have sought out multiple sponsorships for the cars in their fleet. I don't know that Texaco's decision to abandon Montoya had to do with his struggles on the track, but I'm absolutely certain that it did not help matters. He was supposed to be a superstar, after all.

2. Superteams: Neither Montoya nor Franchitti, who both drive for Chip Ganassi, nor Hornish, who drives for Roger Penske Jr., are members of one of NASCAR's dominant teams. Whatever their drawbacks were as Cup drivers, the fact is that the sport is dominated by two or three teams, and these guys did not have the good fortune to be part of any of them.

3. Perhaps, just perhaps, racing a stock car is the most challenging discipline in motorsports: Forgive me, I'm no expert, but I do know that Montoya struggled mightily to get a feel for his car, and it just doesn't seem to me that he or Franchitti or Hornish ever got over this basic problem.

Unlike F/1 and IndyCar machines, Cup cars' gas tanks are located in the "trunk." The sleeker cars in open-wheel series have tanks that sit right under the drivers seat, thus negating a problem that is a fact of life in Cup racing: namely, that the cars center of gravity shifts depending on how much gas is in the tank. As a car goes through a run on a tank of gas, the shifting center of gravity affects handling.

One driver put it to me this way, "You need to be able to drive a car wicked loose for the first 10 laps of a run, so that it can be fast over the course of the long run. If the car is comfortable from the start, you'll get so tight on a long green flag run that you'll lose too much time in the corners."

Now, there are obviously exceptions to this rule, and two obvious ones are Stewart and Jeff Gordon, two guys who spent time cutting their teeth in open-wheel racing before jumping to stock cars. But in the case of Montoya, Franchitti and Hornish, something seems to be missing. Perhaps the problem is that they are trying to learn at the Cup level. There's a lot of pressure on the circuit -- the stakes and the costs are extremely high, and few teams have time for novices.

That's too bad because the potential for the sport would have been great had even one of the three been an unqualified success. For now, though, the future is uncertain, as open-wheel dreams seem to be closing down.

HOW TO DRIVE

Richmond International Raceway

Joey Logano talks about making his Cup debut at Richmond: "I think I'm going to approach it the same way I did Dover (where he made his Nationwide-Series debut earlier this season). Personally, I don't think it's as big of a jump as it was to go from the Camping World Series to the Nationwide Series as it is from the Nationwide Series to the Cup Series because you're already racing against a lot of Cup guys. We already race at tracks like this and I've done a lot of Cup testing. I feel more comfortable doing this than I did at Dover. You have to focus on your own race and not worry about what everybody else is doing."

PIT STOPS

2: Number of drivers (Greg Biffle and Kevin Harvick) who will clinch a berth in the Chase just by starting at Richmond

17: Points separating 13th-place David Ragan from 12th-place Clint Bowyer

48: Points separating Bowyer and Kasey Kahne, who is in 14th place

56: The margin overcome by Jeremy Mayfield to qualify for the 2004 Chase

RICHMOND MEMORIES

September 9, 1973: Richard Petty dominates the Capital City 500, leading 429 of 500 laps en route to victory. It is his seventh straight win at Richmond, the last of a string begun three years earlier. In his career, Petty won 13 races at Richmond, with the last triumph coming in 1975.