Motorsports

Speed read

By BRANT JAMES
Published May 21, 2005

BANK IT: Save the gas and give Jeff Gordon the $1-million check. Lowe's Motor Speedway president and general manager H.A. "Humpy" Wheeler has selected Gordon to win his fourth all-star race tonight. Wheeler, a showman who shines in the public aspect of his job, has correctly predicted the result of nine of 16 all-star races. He anointed Gordon at his yearly prediction news conference on Monday.

"Jeff Gordon has this place figured out," Wheeler said of the newly smoothed racing surface. "He knew more about what we did to the track than anybody and he even picked out the little secret things we did."

Of course, the last three times Wheeler chose Gordon - in 1999, 2002 and 2004 - he finished third, 11th and sixth, respectively.

RAISING KAHNE: Kasey Kahne was on his way to becoming a NASCAR heartthrob well before he won his first race last weekend at Richmond. That Dudley Do-Right chin and those dreamy blue eyes just make the girls crazy, as evidenced by a scene last week in NASCAR Drivers: 360 in which he is mobbed like a Backstreet Boy (or whoever the girls like these days). "It's just different," Kahne said. "I'm getting more and more used to it. That was a pretty good looking girl and there were a lot of cameras around, so I didn't know what to do."

[Last modified May 21, 2005, 01:03:17]