The Ringer Report: Watkins Glen

Road course ringers are a part of every NASCAR series’ season—sports car drivers unable to find a full-time ride in stock cars, but solid enough on tracks like Infineon and Watkins Glen to merit an owner looking for a solid finish calling them up.

While practice is less prominent in the Sprint Cup Series since the advent of the Car of Tomorrow, it is still alive and well in the Nationwide Series, especially when team owners don’t want their young talent to destroy a good car.

With this weekend’s companion races at Watkins Glen, a handful of ringers stepped into both series, but the biggest news coming into the weekend may have been the ringer who didn’t step in.

Jacques Villeneuve was briefly listed as the driver of the No. 43 Richard Petty Motorsports Dodge, replacing Reed Sorenson, who was suffering from the effects of carbon monoxide inhaled during last week’s race at Pocono. Sorenson and RPM, however, decided that he was fit enough to drive, and nixed the deal, leaving Villeneuve out of the NASCAR loop yet again.

In Sprint Cup qualifying, Boris Said topped the ringers, putting his car in ninth. Andy Lally, replacing David Gilliland in the No. 71 TRG Motorsports Chevrolet, qualified 15th, second-best of all ringers. (Gilliland, in a second TRG entry, failed to qualify.)

While Max Papis is running a half schedule this season, his CART experience influenced Germain Racing’s decision to put this race on their calendar, and Papis put his car one spot behind Lally, in 16th.

Another ex-CART driver, Patrick Carpentier, was 17th, replacing Michael Waltrip for this weekend’s race.

The other three ringers to qualify for the Cup race, Ron Fellows, P.J. Jones, and Tony Ave, failed to place better than 37th. Brian Simo, driving for Tommy Baldwin Racing, was the only ringer to fail to qualify, making him 0-for-2 in qualifying attempts this season.

In Nationwide Series qualifying, former Australian V8 Supercars champion and Sprint Cup driver Marcos Ambrose briefly set a track record, before Kevin Harvick topped his lap at the end of the session. Robby Gordon was the next-best ringer to Ambrose, qualifying third.

Said and Fellows qualified ninth and 10th, respectively. Justin Marks (13th), Antonio Perez (15th), Tom Hubert (29th), Kris Szekeres (30th), and Chris Cook (32nd) rounded out the ringers to make the Nationwide race. Cook would step out of the car he qualified, the No. 90 MSRP Motorsports, Chevrolet, in favor of Mike Bliss, recently released from Phoenix Racing. He did race, however, replacing Ken Butler in the No. 23 Aaron’s Dream Machine.

In the race itself, Perez, Hubert, and Szekeres were nothing more than start-and-parkers, completing a combined 45 laps. Marks finished 32nd due to a transmission problem in the race’s closing laps. Cook was one place ahead of him, three laps down.

Despite their solid starting positions, Said and Gordon could only manage finishes of 11th and 14th, respectively, with no laps led. Fellows was one of only two ringers to improve from his qualifying position by the end of the race, placing 5th, but also failing to lead any laps.

Ambrose, however, was the class of the field. He took the lead for the first time at lap 13, leading seven laps. He made an aggressive pass on Kyle Busch in the track’s chicane, the “bus stop,” on lap 64, and never looked back—winning the race by just over a second. It was his second career Nationwide Series win; the first was at this race last year.

Sunday was a washout, moving the Sprint Cup race to Monday at noon. Within 13 laps of the 90-lap event, two of the Cup ringers, Ave and Jones, had parked their cars behind the wall. While none of the ringers were involved in the violent Sam Hornish accident, Fellows, Carpentier, and Said failed to complete the entire distance, winding up 29th, 33rd, and 34th, respectively. In his Cup debut, Lally finished a respectable 27th, the last car on the lead lap.

The best road course ringer on Monday, however, was “Mad” Max Papis. He spent much of the day in the top 10, running as high as fifth at one point. In the end, he wound up eighth, for his first Sprint Cup top ten. While never close to Ambrose, a top-20 driver in Sprint Cup nowadays, he outperformed former open-wheel drivers and current Sprint Cup regulars Robby Gordon and Scott Speed, and was on Juan Montoya’s tail. Papis’ next Sprint Cup start will be at Bristol in two weeks.

Overall, it wasn’t the greatest weekend for the road course ringers, with their only true bright spot being Ambrose’s Nationwide performance.

So many just qualified their cars and pulled them in the garage at the end. Others simply underperformed.

It’s not a shocker that the practice of bringing in ringers is on the decline—the results across both series simply weren’t worth the investment in most cases this weekend.

Want more? Chris Leone's columns and weekly fantasy predictions can also be found on OnPitRow.com.