Saying goodbye to a good mate: Marcos Ambrose to run final Sprint Cup race Sunday at Homestead - MotorSportsTalk

G’day, mate, for a final time.

Sunday’s season-ending Ford EcoBoost 400 at Homestead-Miami Speedway will mark the final start in the No. 9 Richard Petty Motorsports Ford for Marcos Ambrose.

The Australian native will be heading back to his homeland to return to race in the V8 SuperCar Series, where he won two championships before beginning the NASCAR phase of his racing career.

Ambrose will be racing for a team partly owned by legendary IndyCar and NASCAR team owner Roger Penske.

“It’s been about nine years since my family and I came over the ‘water’ to try out this experiment of NASCAR,” Ambrose said in a RPM media release Wednesday. “It’s been great. We’ve won races, had good runs and met a lot of wonderful people.

“But, it’s time to take my family back across the ‘pond’ and go home. I made that decision this year, and once we did that, we started working towards that plan. That’s what this year has been like, and everyone has been very supportive.

“It’s a grind, and you need to be focused all the time on the task at hand. It will be nice to get some more weekends off and get back to V8.”

But before he heads back to his homeland, Ambrose would love to leave NASCAR with a flourish in Sunday’s race – and maybe spoil the day for some of the four remaining championship contenders.

“We are finishing our NASCAR season, and we just want to spoil the guys in the Chase,” Ambrose said. “I have had a good time here in NASCAR. It’s the most competitive form of racing in the world, and there is nothing like it.”

Ambrose will make his 227th career start Sunday. He has two wins, 18 top-five and 46 top-10 finishes, along with three poles. His career average start is 20.0 and average finish is 19.7.

His best season finishes have been 18th in both 2009 and 2012.

He also made 77 Nationwide Series starts with five wins, nine top-five and 18 top-10 finishes. Also, Ambrose started 22 Truck races in 2006, with a pair of top-five and four top-10 finishes.

In addition to racing for RPM, Ambrose also drove for the famed Wood Brothers, Michael Waltrip Racing, as well as JTG Daugherty Racing.

Ambrose joined RPM in 2011 and scored both of his Sprint Cup wins with the team, along with 11 top-five and 33 top-10 finishes.

Perhaps his biggest legacy that he’ll leave NASCAR with is his success as one of the best road course racers in NASCAR history.

“I have good runs, memorable races that I’ll carry with me for sure,” Ambrose said. “It was great winning for ‘The King’ (Richard Petty) and racing for wins at Watkins Glen.

“These are memories that I’ll have for a lifetime. I would have liked to win on an oval, sure, but I feel like I’ve accomplished a lot too. Now, it’s just time to go back home with my family.”

Ambrose has kept the door open about possibly returning to NASCAR for occasional one-off races, particularly on the road course circuits at Sonoma and Watkins Glen, as long as they don’t interfere with his V8 SuperCar activities.

“I will miss NASCAR, and I will watch it too,” he said. “I will watch the night races in the morning in Australia with breakfast, and that will be fun. I’m looking forward to that.”

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On a personal note, we’ll miss you, Marcos. You were always a professional and true gentleman, both on the racetrack and in dealings with the media.

Hopefully, we’ll see you back on this side of the pond from time to time. Good luck in your new venture. We look forward to reading about your championship-winning season in 2015!

Follow me @JerryBonkowski

Media and fan attention focused on a controversial run-in between Haiden Deegan and his Monster Energy Yamaha Star Racing teammate Jordon Smith during Round 10 of the Monster Energy Supercross race at Detroit, after which the 250 East points’ Hunter Lawrence defends the young rider in the postrace news conference.

Deegan took the early lead in Heat 1 of the round, but the mood swiftly changed when he became embroiled in a spirited battle with teammate Smith.

On Lap 3, Smith caught Deegan with a fast pass through the whoops. Smith briefly held the lead heading into a bowl turn but Deegan had the inside line and threw a block pass. In the next few turns, the action heated up until Smith eventually ran into the back of Deegan’s Yamaha and crashed.

One of the highlights of the battle seemed to include a moment when Deegan waited on Smith in order to throw a second block pass, adding fuel to the controversy.

After his initial crash, Smith fell to seventh on the next lap. He would crash twice more during the event, ultimately finishing four laps off the pace in 20th.

The topic was inevitably part of the postrace news conference.

“It was good racing; it was fun,” Deegan said at about the 27-minute mark in the video above. “I just had some fun doing it.”

Smith had more trouble in the Last Chance Qualifier. He stalled his bike in heavy traffic, worked his way into a battle for fourth with the checkers in sight, but crashed a few yards shy of the finish line and was credited with seventh. Smith earned zero points and fell to sixth in the standings.

Lawrence defends Deegan — *Jordon Smith failed to make the Detroit Supercross Main and fell to sixth in the points. – Feld Motor Sports*

“I think he’s like fifth in points,” Deegan said. “He’s a little out of it. Beside that it was good, I don’t know. I wasn’t really paying attention.”

Deegan jokingly deflected an earlier question with the response that he wasn’t paying attention during the incident.

“He’s my teammate, but he’s a veteran, he’s been in this sport for a while,” Deegan said. “I was up there just battling. I want to win as much as everybody else. It doesn’t matter if it’s a heat race or a main; I just want to win. I was just trying to push that.”

As Deegan and Smith battled, Jeremy Martin took the lead. Deegan finished second in the heat and backed up his performance with a solid third-place showing in the main, which was his second podium finish in a short six-race career. Deegan’s first podium was earned at Daytona, just two rounds ago.

But as Deegan struggled to find something meaningful to say, unsurprisingly for a 17-year-old rider who was not scheduled to run the full 250 schedule this year, it was the championship leader Lawrence who came to his defense.

“I just want to point something out, which kind of amazes me,” Lawrence said during the conference. “So many of the people on social media, where everyone puts their expertise in, are saying the racing back in the ’80s, the early 90s, when me were men. They’re always talking about how gnarly it was and then anytime a block pass or something happens now, everyone cries about it.

“That’s just a little bit interesting. Pick one. You want the gnarly block passes from 10 years ago and then you get it, everyone makes a big song and dance about it.”

Pressed further, Lawrence defended not only the pass but the decision-making process that gets employed lap after lap in a Supercross race.

“It’s easy to point the finger,” Lawrence said. “We’re out there making decisions in a split millisecond. People have all month to pay their phone bill and they still can’t do that on time.

“We’re making decisions at such a fast reaction [time with] adrenaline. … I’m not just saying it for me or Haiden. I speak for all the guys. No one is perfect and we’re under a microscope out there. The media is really quick to point a finger when someone makes a mistake.”

The media is required to hold athletes accountable for their actions. They are also required to tell the complete story.

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