Teams honor Lynda Petty at Martinsville:
As the Petty family remembers the life of Lynda Petty on Friday, the NASCAR community is paying respect to the long-time wife of Richard Petty, who lost her life on Tuesday. For this weekend’s race at Martinsville Speedway, Richard Petty Motorsports handed out commemorative stickers honoring Lynda to all the teams in the garage to place on their cars if they choose. Along with the commemorative stickers, the team has developed the hashtag #WinForMissLynda and hope to get it trending on Twitter. RPM also has Petty blue ribbons available in the garage for those that would like to remember the ‘First Lady of NASCAR.’ While Richard Petty will not be at the track this weekend, Martinsville Speedway is will honor the Petty family with NASCAR Hall of Fame member Dale Inman serving as grand marshal for Sunday’s race. ‘The King’ was scheduled to fill that role before Lynda’s passing earlier this week. Aric Almirola’s crew chief Trent Owens, nephew of Richard and Lynda Petty, will not be at the track on Friday, but is scheduled to return for Sunday’s race. In an almost fitting course of events, Sunday’s race at Martinsville is the STP 500, and the #43 team is running a throwback paint scheme similar to the one run by Richard Petty in his final years in the sport.(FoxSports)(3-28-2014)
Hamlin discusses issue with eye at Fontana:
Friday at Martinsville Speedway, #11-Denny Hamlin talked about the series of events that caused him to set out the race at Auto Club Speedway:
“I literally thought on Friday that I was starting to get a sty. It happened sometime during practice whether it came in through the car or through the air conditioning unit through the helmet — something, it came in through somewhere, but I don’t remember the exact time when it happened. Friday evening I definitely felt an agitation right in the corner to my upper eyelid so I thought I was getting a sty because it just felt like one. Then Saturday, I woke up and it was a little worse. I ran through practice and vision was fine, but just a lot of watering and I didn’t see any swelling of the eyelid so I knew it wasn’t a sty at that point. I didn’t go to the infield care center until late on Saturday. Me and my girlfriend went to the mall — we were shopping around and it was bothering me so much that I contacted one of the NASCAR liaisons and asked if anyone was still at the infield care center. They said they would wait on me so they waited on me. They looked at it, they dyed it, they put it under a black light — didn’t see any scratches, didn’t see anything in the eye.
Immediately we started trying to figure out what would be causing it if there’s nothing in it. The only thing I could think of is I was starting to actually get a little stuffy on my left hand side of my face and my nose was running a little bit. I mentioned to them in trying to cover all the possibilities that I showed them a CT scan from January where I had a really, really bad sinus infection — it was the worst the doctor has ever seen and Dr. Petty has been around a really, really long time.
So the only other option, I went to bed Saturday night, woke up Sunday and felt twice as worse — pain was twice as worse and vision was slightly impaired over where it was Saturday. So I stayed in the infield care center for a couple hours and we tried to go over all the possibilities of what it could be and really since they didn’t see anything in it, the only thing we could do was get an optometrist to come to the race track, which it was too late into the day for that, it was too late for me to go to one and come back in time so everyone came to an agreement that the best thing for me was to go to the hospital and get scanned in case.
There’s tons of different possibilities, whether it be a blood clot — anything that affects because there’s more to it, but any time wind would hit my eye it would shoot a pain right to my temple so they thought that there was something really bad going on behind the eye that they didn’t have the equipment in the infield care center — you need some pretty — you need to get a CT scan. By the time I got to the hospital and the optometrist came in with her microscope, saw the metal, got it out — a portion of it, she couldn’t get the rust out she said — it would need a couple more days for that to harden to get out. Once the metal came out, I felt a lot better. We went home, the CT scan showed that I was perfectly clear on the sinus part of it.
Long story short, it won’t keep me from going to the infield care center at any point. I wanted to race of course, no matter what. I felt like if I was going to be a liability I would have pulled myself during the race, but there’s protocols that we have to go through and it’s not just my safety that has got to be taken into account. We’re racing around other guys and that’s one of the fastest tracks we go to. What if I caused a wreck early on? I don’t need to be a liability out there and obviously with this new format we hardly lost anything in points.”(Toyota Racing PR)(3-29-2014)