It's been a dramatic week for Reed Sorenson.
On Tuesday Sorenson was surprisingly fired from Turner Motorsports, despite sitting third in points with just five races left in the 2011 season. The team, who also announced that employees were told of potential layoffs to come, has pinned Brian Vickers to fill the seat of the No. 32 Dollar General Chevy for the next two races in Kansas and Charlotte.
On Friday, Sorenson said Turner hadn't given him an explanation to why he was suddenly let go.
"We're the best out of our three cars in points. Mathematically, we still have a chance to win the championship and a pretty good chance, if we ran well, to beat the No. 2 car (Elliott Sadler). To say it was a surprise is the least I can say about it."
Sorenson went on to say that he's "not mad, I'm upset because of where we're at in points and how hard we've worked up to this point."
While he didn't give his former driver any explanation, team owner Steve Turner told the media on Saturday that Sorenson was fired because "I never leave my race shop to run third."
"This was a car that I felt like, I call (the No. 32) our 'flagship car,' and monitoring the radio the last few weeks, I was getting zero feedback- we'd make changes and make changes and make changes and the car wasn't reacting," Turner
"So I felt like I needed to make sure where my problem was. And that's what we did. ... We were getting feedback (from Sorenson). It wasn't positive feedback. The feedback between the crew chief and the driver, we weren't improving the car. The car was staying the same. You've got to start changing somewhere."
But why now, with just a handful of races left and a chance to win the championship? Sorenson's teammate, Jason Leffler, has already been told he's leaving the team because his current sponsor, Great Clips, is leaving at the end of the season. The same is happening to Sorenson with Dollar General.
So why wasn't Leffler let go as well? After all, while Sorenson collected a win at Road American earlier this season, Leffler hasn't won in 143 races (his last win was at O'Reily Raceway Park in 2007), and has led during just two races this season.
You can also compare Sorenson, who led the points for six weeks throughout the season, to Justin Allgaier, who looks to be keeping his job at Turner Motorsports. Allgaier sits fifth in points, with a win at Chicagoland in June and 15 top tens. Allgaier has had eight finishes on the year of 15th or worse compared to Sorenson's five, and has finished lower than Sorenson in their last three starts.
Despite all that, it was Sorenson who was left without a job as Turner "evaluates our racing program as we look to the 2012 season."
Prospects for finding a ride next season appear slim to none for Sorenson, but he was able to convince driver Scott Wimmer to give up his No. 82 K Love MacDonald Motorsports Dodge so he could still make a run at the points title.
"I appreciate what he did for me. He could have easily said no. I'm just glad Wimmer was nice enough to let me do it. Hopefully we get enough points on Saturday to make it all worthwhile for everybody."
On finding a job for the rest of the season and next, Sorenson said "I'm going to be trying to get in anything I can and trying to get in the best car, for sure, but it's tough with money these days. I don't know who's going to have a ride available."
Thanks to Racing Reference, SB Nation, Scene Daily , NASCAR.com, Yahoo! Sports, USA Today, and Jayski for the quotes, statistics and information used in this piece.
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