Some news tidbits from the world of NASCAR:

• Actor, producer, director and composer/musician Andy Garcia will serve as grand marshal for the Auto Club 500 on Sunday.

Garcia, who has been nominated for an Emmy, an Academy Award and a Golden Globe, stars in the upcoming comedy “City Island,” with Julianna Margulies, Steven Strait, Dominik Garcia-Lorido, Ezra Miller, Alan Arkin and Emily Mortimer.

The race broadcast is 3 p.m. ET on FOX.

• Want an honest answer? Ask a straight-shooter: Do the drivers feel that the attention paid to Danica Patrick is too much?

“No, we don’t think so, it’s just that [the media] keep pestering us about her gets to be too much,” Tony Stewart said Friday at Fontana, where Patrick will make her second Nationwide Series start. “After a while you wonder how much you can talk about the same topic and we haven’t even gotten her to her first regular race and we’re still talking about the same stuff.

“Our opinion about her hasn’t changed, I still think she has an extremely high amount of talent. I think that if the media will give her enough room to learn and not bug the daylights out of her where she can’t breath, I think she’ll be fine. That opinion from last week to this week, it really hasn’t changed.”

• OK, so everyone knows Kevin Harvick is in the last year of his contract with RCR. He has made no secret, especially last year when RCR struggled, of his desire to be a contender. On Friday at Fontana, Harvick’s future took center stage when he was asked: How many races into this season will you start to panic if Richard Childress Racing is not back on top?

“I’m going to do my job and that’s to drive the car and the rest of it, there’s so many unknowns this year as far as what’s going to happen when we switch to the spoiler,” said Harvick, who finished seventh in the Daytona 500. “I think that’s going to throw a whole monkey-wrench in there. The 42 [Juan Montoya] did well, the 1 [Jamie McMurray] didn’t do worth a crap last year. It’s not really something that you can base off of just putting those engines in those cars. It’s a matter of teams and I think the 42 has good chemistry, I think the 33 [Clint Bowyer] ran well to a certain point last year. It’s just a matter, for us, it’s a matter that we’ve been together for a while and understand what we’re talking about amongst each other and feel like we’re heading down the right path.

“There’s no way to tell until you get in there and start racing. I really think these first four or five races or whenever we take the wing off, are not really a fair judgment. You’re looking at 10 races in before you really know where you stand. You’re either going to be really happy or really sad because it’s going to be really hard to turn it around 10 races into the season.”

• He’s NASCAR’s most popular driver, but Dale Earnhardt Jr. hasn’t won a race since June 15, 2008, at Michigan. However, a second-place finish in the Great American race has some wondering if Junior feels like he’s rekindled some of the ol’ mojo.

“I feel pretty good about my team,” said Dale Earnhardt Jr., who finished second in the Daytona 500. “I feel pretty good about Lance [McGrew, crew chief]. Just give me a good car and I can run real good with it. We just have to have the communication and Lance has got to understand what I am telling him about the car. I’ve got to be able to communicate as well as I can all of that information to him.

“We built a lot of new cars; we did a lot of hard work, Lance especially, during the offseason to put us in a position to bring better cars to this race and to Vegas and so forth. We will see how it turns out when we get on the race track here soon.”

• The world-renowned Blue Angels — the U.S. Navy Flight Demonstration Squadron — will provide race fans with an aerial spectacle immediately following the national anthem on Feb. Sunday at Auto Club Speedway. It is the first time the exclusive flying squadron will perform a flyover at the Speedway.

For more information or to purchase tickets to the “West Coast Premiere of NASCAR,” call (800) 944-RACE (7223) or visit www.autoclubspeedway.com.

• Stock-car racing and basketball will come together for “NASCAR on FOX40 Night” at Arco Arena on Feb. 26. Infineon Raceway will partner with the NBA’s Sacramento Kings and FOX40 on this race-themed evening, as Sacramento hosts the Utah Jazz.

The evening will include an Infineon Raceway display complete with Kyle Busch’s No. 18 Toyota show car, ticket giveaways for the Toyota/Save Mart 350 Sprint Cup Series race weekend on June 18-20, halftime pit crew challenges, appearances by the Infineon Raceway Girls and more.

Fans also will have the chance to win the “Be a King for a Day at Infineon Raceway” prize pack, including two reserved tickets for the race, two pre-race pit and track passes, high speed hot laps, an Infineon Raceway goodie bag and NASCAR on FOX accessories.

For more information or to purchase tickets, visit www.sacramentokings.com or www.fox40.com. To learn more about the race weekend at Infineon Raceway, visit www.infineonraceway.com or call (800) 870-RACE.

• At Fontana, Robby Gordon will debut the No. 7 Toyota with Warner Music Nashville / Whitney Duncan — a joint effort between Robby Gordon Motorsports and BAM Racing.

“Fontana is a really cool race for me because it allows me to return to my home track and race in front of my friends and family,” said Gordon, who has a best finish of ninth in 15 starts at the 2-mile track.