The People’s Facts – Subway Fresh Fit 600

While you, the Internet, ponder who should make the People’s Pitstop lineup for this week’s race, it’s time to take a look at the race venue.

Track basics: Phoenix International Raceway is a one-mile oval with relatively flat corners. Turns 1 and 2 have the highest banking: a whopping 11 degrees. (Insert your “Home Alone” scream here.) By the way, the “600” in the race’s name refers to kilometers, not miles or laps. For those of you who don’t feel like spending your free time on metric conversions, they’ll run 375 laps, or 63 more than they did last year, when it was 500 kilometers long.

As always, you can get a more in-depth preview by clicking here to download a PDF from our friends at Yahoo Sports.

Recent winners: Mark Martin (2009), Jimmie Johnson (2008), Jeff Gordon (2007)

Who wins here a lot: In this case, “a lot” is a relative term. Johnson leads active NASCAR drivers with four victories on this track. Four others (Martin, Jeff Burton, Dale Earnhardt Jr. and Kevin Harvick) are tied for second place, with two victories apiece.

Change four tires and a knee ligament: Last week, a commenter on this board wrote that Denny Hamlin “may like Virginia, but his knee doesn’t like racing at the moment.” This was before Hamlin won a rain-delayed race at Martinsville, in spite of the ACL he tore in January. Two days after the race, Hamlin had surgery to repair his knee. On Saturday, 10 days after the surgery, Hamlin plans to race in Phoenix.

I’m not a doctor. I don’t even play one on TV. But it’s stunning to me that knee surgery can sideline football players and golfers for months at a time, but drivers can get back into the racecar less than two weeks after having a knee repaired. Can anyone out there with medical training explain this? (Feel free to leave a comment, and no, we won’t call you in the morning.)

We’ll be back with a peek at the goings-on in the football world.