Now, Roush is officially declaring truck series driver David Ragan as the new driver of the No. 6.

Ragan is currently 27th in the truck points, but don’t let that fool you. He’s split time with Martin, giving up his normal ride when Martin wanted to dip his toe in the truck series waters. In 25 career truck starts – 15 this year and 10 in 2004 – he’s got two poles, one top five and six top 10s.

His only Nextel Cup start ended early at Dover last month. He started 37th but completed only 46 laps before retiring.

Still, the announcement ends speculation about Kluever, who had not lived up to expectations while being groomed as Martin’s heir apparent.

Kluever has run the entire Busch season and is 17th in points. He’s got one pole and two top 10s, with an average finish of 20th. Perhaps most glaring is his seven DNFs.

That led to speculation about Martin returning for yet another season at Roush, or if Roush would go in a different direction altogether.

And now we know. Perhaps if Martin’s situation had been resolved sooner, Roush would have been able to make a run at one of the free agents out there, the ones that have long been signed. Ragan seems only slightly more experienced that Kluever, but fits the profile of the young, up-and-coming driver that sponsors crave.

—PERHAPS YOU’VE HEARD that NASCAR will make the jump from XM satellite radio to rival Sirius, beginning next year.

I still don’t know quite how I feel about that. I made the jump to XM in aftermath of the demise of WHFS. Though I wasn’t a regular HFS listener, something about the format flip really didn’t sit right with me.

And honestly, NASCAR on XM was a draw, but hardly the biggest one. Still, it was a nice bonus.

Sirius has made no bones about the fact that they will invest whatever money necessary to bring in new subscribers – look at the money they’ve thrown at Howard Stern, the NFL and now NASCAR.

Yeah, it stinks NASCAR will leave, but I’m trying to take a broader, longer-term view of the whole thing. Neither XM or Sirius is awash in profits at the moment. And if NASCAR’s departure helps solidify the future for XM, I’m all for it.

Then again, maybe it won’t matter. Speculation that the two outlets will merge has built over the past several months, and perhaps it won’t be long before we’ll get everything on one convenient unit.

And it’s not like NASCAR is totally leaving. On its general sports talk channel, XM already has shows with Dale Earnhardt Jr. and Jimmie Johnson, and there’s been no talk that those shows will follow NASCAR races to Sirius.

We’ll see what happens. I guess I’ll just have to find a terrestrial station if I find myself on a long drive on a Sunday afternoon.

Earnhardt, from the sound bites that I watched and read, downplayed the wreck. Johnson was more adamant, and had every right to be.

It’s impossible to say whether Vickers wrecked Johnson intentionally; there are simply factors that we don’t know and can’t know, unless we were Vickers at that split second.

But there’s an awful lot of circumstantial evidence against him, regardless of what he says.

If you remember, Vickers was one of the first drivers to kick off silly season. He asked for, and received, his release from Hendrick Motorsports and wound up signing a 2007 deal with Toyota’s Red Bull Motorsports.

To limit the institutional knowledge he’ll take with him (and, proportionally, hurt Hendrick in the process), Vickers has been barred from meetings at Hendrick.

So, for the final part of the season, he is essentially a Sunday-only member of the team. That, one would expect, could engender some animosity towards the organization and, presumably, teammates, though it’s impossible to know for certain.

A bigger piece of evidence may have come even before that. In the spring race at Talladega, Vickers was again in contention and looking for his first win.

He led at the white flag, 2.67 miles from his first win. But as he went into Turn 1, the second-place driver — guess who — jumped out from behind him and sped past. Johnson held on for his 21st career victory and moved into the top spot in the Nextel Cup standings.

Vickers, meanwhile, was relegated to third; it also became crystal clear that he was fourth in the four-car Hendrick pecking order.

Maybe there was an air of revenge when the circuit came back to Talladega. Again, this is unknowable unless Vickers comes out and says so.

In my mind, the most damning (circumstantial) evidence came on Sunday itself. How could Vickers drive 499 mistake-free miles, often in tight packs of cars that were nose to tail, three- and four-wide, and then make such a critical error on the 500th mile?

Vickers hit Johnson in the quarterpanel, and pretty deep — closer to the wheel — into the quarterpanel at that. It seemed like a far larger miscalculation than one could reasonably expect from a competent driver.

Again, there are mitigating factors that are certainly plausible: None of us are perfect, and a mistake surely could have been made. Perhaps in the excitement of the final lap, Vickers’ judgment was off.

But to me, there’s only one answer. Vickers was going to get his win, no matter how he had to get it.

The aftermath of Sunday’s last-lap wreck. (Photo by Mark Young/Associated Press)

—NO BLOG ON TUESDAY. Taking the day off. Apologies for the late notice, and even after I said I’d get better at that. Shame on me.

He and 2007 rookie Regan Smith will share the No. 01 Army Chevrolet, currently driven by Joe Nemechek. Nemechek isn’t going anywhere, and will pilot a third MB2 entry. (Sterling Marlin, in the No. 14, is also an MB2 driver.)
But at least the speculation is finally over with. The rumor mill pegged Martin to stay at Roush or join Ford-sponsored Robert Yates Racing. So, in order: As Roush and his people have maintained, Todd Kleuver will take over the No. 6 next year. Yates will be set with David Gilliland next year, but is still looking for a driver and a sponsor for the No. 88.
In a year with a lot of driver movement, Martin was the final linchpin. And in some ways, it’s not over with yet: Martin and Roush are supposedly close to a deal for him to drive in the truck series. But they reportedly have been close for some time, yet no announcement is on the horizon; and each time the subject is broached, the answer is the same.
The clear draw, though, was Martin’s Cup status. Now that that’s settled, we finally have a mostly clear picture of the how the ’07 season will look, the 88 notwithstanding.
• BACK FROM PETERSBURG, and I learned a lot about drag racing — all without seeing any on-track action.
The thing that struck me was that if you watch Driving Force or any of the NHRA broadcasts on ESPN, you’ll often see folks in golf carts or on scooters. Now I know why: The garage/work area is massive.
In retrospect, that should have been obvious. There are how many top fuel teams, how many funny car teams, how many pro stock teams, how many bike teams — it would be like stacking Cup, Busch, truck and ARCA teams into one staging area.
And then there were many more teams with souped-up production cars that, while I’m not positive, I don’t think are part of the national touring series.
The funny cars were considerably bigger than I would have imagined. And like stock cars, the body is basically a shell to hold everything inside; there was one body simply hanging off the side of one of the haulers.
It was a cool experience to be there and be around before folks really put their game faces on, which probably would be today if the rain holds off. And it here is anything like there, that’s not the case.
(Photo by Chris Graythen/Getty Images for NASCAR)