NASCAR Nationwide Series Kentucky Showdown: Meijer 300 Nationwide Race Preview

The Nationwide boys head to Kentucky, where Carl Edwards plans to begin his quest for a championship while Brad Keselowski continues to dominate a series that has seen less and less full time cup drivers in the past few years.

This year only Carl Edwards, Paul Menard, Brad Keselowski and Michael McDowell are racing both series full time.

We’ve seen Kyle Busch, Denny Hamlin, Kevin Harvick, Matt Kenseth, Greg Biffle, Mike Bliss, Joey Logano, Clint Bowyer, Jamie McMurray, Dale Earnhardt Jr, Ryan Newman, Tony Stewart, David Reutimann, Scott Riggs, Casey Mears, Mike Bliss, Brian Vickers, Kasey Kahne, David Gilliland, and pretty soon Marcos Ambrose, take laps in a Nationwide Car so far this year. This week though, we will only see the 4 full-time Nationwide/Cup guys with Scott Riggs and Joey Logano making the trip too, since the rest of them are all focusing on the Cup race.

Expect to see some new guys up front again. Last week 3 of the full time double duty guys finished 1,2,3. I don’t see that happening again, not with Justin Allgaier, Jason Leffler and the RWI guys running so good.

Entry List, and some news after the JUMP!

Entry List:

I have this great internet filter (since I’m doing this at work today) that loves to clog up my computer and makes me lose everything that I work on for this blog many times. So often I will write these articles 4 or 5 different times, in different ways. I’ve gotten better at saving in steps to not lose anything.

We’ll see if I can keep from throwing this computer to the ground today.

My mouse also loves to fly all across the screen, which I haven’t figured out how to stop it from acting like a kid who forgot to take his Ritalin.

I didn’t realize that Nemechek was back in his own car this week. He may still move aside for Jerik Johnson again, who has a great first name. Matt Carter is in the #61 again for Josh Wise, who is in the #7 again this week. Wise is hoping for a better run then last week when he lost control of the car and crashed.

After Ricky Stenhouse spun and missed the race last week, Roush has pulled him in favor of Brian Ickler, who leaves the #16 Ford in favor of Colin Braun this week. Ickler helped keep the 16 car in the top 30, and should go a long way to helping put the #6 car in the top 30 also.

As you can see, only one car will miss the race this week, and it would take a lot for it to be the #6. Or another spin would do it.

You’ll notice that a lot of cars do not have sponsors this week. Most of them will probably pick up minor sponsors before the race, or they will run blank. That’s the state that Nationwide is in this year. Its even more expensive this year with the COT being introduced. Which is why a new team may chose to just run the COT races. Case in point: