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SPARTA, Ky. -- Kentucky Speedway has changed, and we probably wont know whether its for the better until a full weekend of racing has been completed.Thanks to a repave and a mild reprofiling of Turns 1 and 2, almost everything that competitors have learned since the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series started running there in 2011 has been thrown out. For all practical purposes, Kentucky is a brand-new racetrack, to the joy of some and the disappointment of others.Its a totally different race track, for sure, 2013 Kentucky winner Matt Kenseth?said. Id say its basically like starting over.Almost since it opened in 2000, Kentucky was notorious for its bumpy surface. While that created difficulty in setting up cars to handle, it also provided much of the tracks character. The 1.5-mile oval some 35 miles south of Cincinnati was also famous for its weepers and was known as one of the most difficult tracks to dry and make race-ready after periods of rain.Coarser asphalt and a revised aggregate base, along with south-end banking increased from 14 to 17 degrees, are expected to provide relief from the drainage problems. The other major change to the track is a wider pit lane exit and resultant narrower entry to Turn 1, where the width has been reduced from 72 to 56 feet.About a dozen teams tested the new surface for Goodyear on June 13 and 14, prompting the tire maker to change to a slightly harder right-side compound for the Cup Series to address concerns about the potential for excessive wear.We spent two days testing here and obviously Goodyear needed to make some adjustments to the tires coming back to make them live, said?Kevin Harvick, who claimed pole position based on owner points after qualifying for the Quaker State 400 was rained out Friday.As weve gone through practice, we havent had any tire issues so far. But it changed things a lot with the feel in the car and the things you want in the car. So weve scrambled a little bit, and hopefully getting a little more practice will be beneficial because we still arent exactly where we need to be in terms of balance and whats going to happen the longer you run the car.Harvick admitted that he and crew chief Rodney Childers took a conservative approach for practice. Hendrick Motorsports teammates Jimmie Johnson and Kasey Kahne both contacted the wall, and?Kyle Busch had to summon all of his skill to catch a huge tank-slapper.Youre definitely cautious just because you dont know where the limits are, and every time you go out you push or see something you havent done before, Harvick said. You start to gather a notebook in your mind about how far you can push things, how far you can hang the car out or how loose or tight the balance needs to be.The hard thing about repaves at some places is you can be overaggressive and slide up out of the groove, but here, you wind up knocking the side off the car into the fence.The rain that arrived just 20 minutes into Fridays Cup practice made things more difficult for competitors in several ways. After any track is repaved, teams need as much track time as possible to dial in their cars to adapt to the changes. In addition, having more rubber laid down on the track tends to widen the groove for the race, creating opportunities for passing.The decision to jettison qualifying in favor of additional practice time was welcomed by the drivers. Just a few days ago, NASCAR altered its rule for a qualifying rainout to set the grid by owner points, rather than practice speeds as it had been done in the past.That put Harvicks Stewart-Haas Racing Chevrolet on pole, with Brad Keselowskis Team Penske Ford alongside on the front row.With the major changes to the Kentucky track, Keselowski welcomed the extra practice time.The approach is to take all the Kentucky notes and run them through the shredder and start from scratch, he said, adding that he and crew chief Paul Wolfe based their car setup on what worked earlier this summer at Michigan International Speedway. Whats worked here in the past isnt even close to whats going to work here this weekend. That was pretty obvious before we got on the track and confirmed when we did.The cars are challenging to drive like we thought they would be and like we hoped they would be, Keselowski continued. Midcorner speed is way down and straightaway speed is way up, so thats a bit of a handful, but the good kind of handful that really challenges drivers and really forces drivers to really push it to the limit.Keselowski believes that the reduction in midcorner speed brought on by the low downforce package in the Cup Series has the added benefit of reducing the potential for tire issues. But he was concerned about the Xfinity Series race scheduled for Friday night.Its interesting going back and forth between the Xfinity car and the Cup car because the midcorner speed in the Xfinity car is almost 10 mph higher than the Cup car, and the Xfinity cars are just killing the tires.While the focus in the past at Kentucky was getting a car to handle over the bumps, the new challenge is to manage tire wear. With a conservative, ultrahard right-side tire and a high-grip new track surface, expect plenty of two-tire and even no-tire stops Saturday night as teams try to gain track position through pit strategy.The Friday rain didnt help things in that respect.It definitely will make the groove narrower, which is a shame, Keselowski said. The tire on the car this weekend really isnt laying down the rubber that would make the groove wider and wider.It is what it is. We all deal with the same thing and well get through it.One thing the drivers wont have to endure this year is the physical pounding they used to take at the roughest oval on the NASCAR tour. Some of them say theyll miss the bumps and the character they contributed to Kentucky, but Harvick isnt one of them.It feels great, to tell you the truth, Harvick said. My neck doesnt hurt; it doesnt pound your heels and your neck to the point where you cant hardly walk for two days.Puma Scarpe Uomo . Andrew Luck lost his favourite target and the Indianapolis locker room lost one of its most revered leaders when Reggie Wayne was diagnosed Monday with a torn anterior cruciate ligament in his right knee that will cost him the rest of the season. Puma Scarpe Saldi . After Martin Skrtel put the Reds in front from close range at Stamford Bridge after only four minutes, Hazard hit back in the 17th with a superb strike. Etoo gave Jose Mourinhos team a decisive lead from Oscars back pass in the 34th. http://www.pumaoutletitalia.it/ . Belfort (24-10) needed just 77 seconds to down Henderson in the headlining bout of Saturdays "UFC Fight Night: Belfort vs. Henderson" event at Goiania Arena in Goiania, Brazil. The fight served as a rematch of the pairs 2006 meeting, which Henderson won by decision. Scarpe Puma Saldi Uomo . Goals from Jerome Boateng, Franck Ribery and Thomas Mueller extended Bayerns unbeaten run to a record 37 matches. "This record is incredible," Bayern coach Pep Guardiola said. Puma Scarpe Nuove Uomo . Jim Rutherford, President and General Manager of the Carolina Hurricanes, announced Wednesday that the team would assign Swedish forward Elias Lindholm to his nations team for the upcoming tournament.TORONTO -- The things that make hockey beautiful are the same things that limit its popular appeal. Its almost too exotic for its own good. It requires ice, and not a little bit: great big sheets of it, clean and flawless. The ice means that hockey also requires skating. Like mastering a language, learning to skate rewards early adoption. Most of us can run, so we can come to understand and even play a lot of sports that we didnt grow up playing. We have already met their first demand. Hockey has a higher barrier to entry. If you cant skate, you cant play.I cant skate. Im Canadian, but my family is an immigrant family, and I was too late to the pond. A Canadian who cant skate is like an American who cant light a firework. Youre surrounded by people taking delight in something that has escaped you, everybody laughing at a joke thats gone over your head. Theres a fountain in front of Torontos iconic City Hall. In the winter it becomes a rink, of course, and I cant tell you how many times Ive watched people circling that square with a grace and speed that fills me with envy.World Cup of Hockey schedule: Watch on ESPN, ESPN2, WatchESPNBut I still love hockey, and I can identify the moment I fell for it and why. When I was very young, maybe 5 or 6, my dad took me to my first hockey game. We watched the Toronto Maple Leafs at Maple Leaf Gardens. We didnt have a lot of money, and its the only game we ever attended together. I can remember walking to that fabled arena, holding my dads hand so I wouldnt get lost in the bustle of the building crowd. I can remember being almost blinded by the glare off the ice. I can remember watching the first period and maybe part of the second, trying to take in all of hockeys crazy action, to parse its peculiar brand of collision physics.And then I can remember leaning into my dad and falling fast asleep.In Canada, hockey occupies the same place in our collective consciousness that baseball does in America, only it has inspired more riots. The rink, the heart of so many of our small communities, is our version of the ballpark as cathedral. The back of our $5 bill used to have an engraving of kids playing shinny on it. The prime minister prior to our current dreamboat was a hockey historian. Arguably the most famous song by The Tragically Hip, our unofficial national band, is about a hockey player who was killed in a plane crash. Most Canadians can tell you that the last goal Bill Barilko ever scored won the Leafs the Cupp.ddddddddddddIf you havent watched a lot of hockey, that romance and poetry will probably be lost on you. Thats understandable. On the surface, its a brutal game, bloody and ferocious, with its welts and bruises and lost teeth. It moves at a frenetic pace, too, the tiny puck sometimes lost in the blur, the shifts only a minute long, the changes in momentum almost too quick to appreciate. Baseball is complicated but slow enough to digest. Hockey is simple but too fast to see.I think everything changed that night at the Gardens when I fell asleep. Thats when hockey started making sense to me, when I didnt try so hard to watch it and instead let it filter through my dreams. The sound of the game stuck in my brain like a song that makes you smile every time you hear it.The distinctive sound that hockey makes is one of its happier accidents, the twin benefit of constructing a game exclusively out of hard surfaces and playing it during the quietest time of year, when the birds are gone and no leaves are rustling in the trees. Ice instead of grass, boards instead of chalk, skates instead of shoes, sticks instead of hands, pucks instead of balls -- each of its base elements makes a noise when it comes in contact with any of its others, all of them frozen solid. The hiss of a blade carving into a wet rink or the bang of a puck shot wide are unmistakable, as distinctive as fingerprints.Hockey might be the only sport that you can follow nearly as well in the dark, which is handy when the winter sun sets well before dinner. Other sports have their telltale noises -- baseballs crack of the bat, basketballs infernal squeaking of sneakers -- but hockeys sounds combine to make a symphony that tells so much more of its story. In other sports, the best plays are often lauded for their relative quiet: the swish of the perfect basket, the soundless connection between a quarterbacks spiral and the soft hands of his receiver. Hockey might never be still, but it is also never silent.I didnt wake up that long-ago night in Toronto until my dad carried me outside the Gardens and the cold hit my face. I can remember looking up at him and feeling confused and lost, except that I was in his arms. That was good enough for me. I closed my eyes again, and for the second time in the same night, I didnt need to see to know everything I needed to know. ' ' '