Life in the Turn Lane

Observer motorsports writer dies at 50

2009-05-04T09:35:00.002-04:00

Editor's note: Posting live content and commentary from a good race weekend without the contributions of our colleague and friend David Poole doesn't feel at all right. We all miss him and our hearts will continue to be with his family and many, many friends.

We've posted a lot of the tributes written in recent days, audio files and slideshows, along with information about and links to his favorite charities.

We've also put up examples Poole's best work in a section we've named In Memory of David Poole. No, not all of his fine columns and articles appear there. (We'd like to see the server that can handle all of that!)

If there's something you'd really like to see that you can't find there, please drop us a line by way of the site's feedback link. Poole would have insisted we try to find it and, with that in mind, we'll make every effort to help get it for you.

In some cases, what you're after will be in our database and we can add it to the tribute section as production time allows. Other pieces could be in the Observer's archives and would involve some digging. For those, there would be a small fee.

News obituary from ThatsRacin.com and The Charlotte Observer, April 28, 2009

Over thousands of backstretches and hundreds of checkered flags, David Poole made himself into more than one of the nation's leading authorities on NASCAR. He became a part of the sport he loved.

“David Poole was as much a fixture in this sport as the actual cars themselves,” driver Dale Earnhardt Jr. said Tuesday. “He was a one-of-a-kind individual and an extremely talented writer.”

Poole, who covered racing for the Observer, died of a heart attack Tuesday at his Stanly County home. He was 50.

A native of Gastonia, N.C., Poole became the Observer's NASCAR writer in 1997. He built a national following through ThatsRacin.com and a daily program he hosted on Sirius NASCAR Radio.

The National Motorsports Press Association four times named him its writer of the year. He wrote about the sport with the enthusiasm of a fan and the critical eye of a journalist.

“He could be controversial from time to time but he always wrote and spoke what he believed,” said Richard Childress, president and CEO Richard Childress Racing. “He didn't pull any punches with anybody and that's what people respected about him. He was good for the sport.”

To honor Poole, Sirius plans to broadcast a tribute this morning. NASCAR plans a moment of silence before Saturday's race at Richmond.

“He was truly one of the nation's best and he always wrote what he believed,” said Bruton Smith, chairman and CEO of Speedway Motorsports. “Whether you agreed with him or not, he made us all think, and that's what the best writers do. He cared about what he did and had a passion for his work. It came through in what he wrote every day.”

In announcing Poole's death to a hushed newsroom Tuesday afternoon, Observer editor Rick Thames called him “the best in his field, there's no doubt about that.”

Thames said: "David Poole was the fans' reporter, always covering NASCAR with their sensibilities in mind. Their passions were his passions. Their values, his values. If that occasionally clashed with the powerbrokers of the sport, so be it. David told it like it was. And by doing that, he made the sport richer and more genuine for all who love it."

As word of his death spread, tributes poured in from throughout the NASCAR community.

“So sorry,” a reader named Scott wrote on one message board. “I've been ragging on Poole for years through e-mails and his blog. One thing about him, he would always answer back.”

“I listened to him every day on Sirius, even this morning, in all his glory ranting, like only David could, about Talladega!!!” Leslie from Arlington, Tenn., wrote. “His honesty and truth were greatly cherished.”

After dramatic weekend crashes at Talledega – one of which sent two spectators to hospitals – Poole criticized the track's design in a column headlined “Will it take a death for Talladega to change?”

“It seems we've decided we can live with that much damage being done to the sport's customers for ‘good racing,'” he wrote. “How many people have to be listed in ‘guarded' or ‘critical' condition before we say that's too much?”

Roger Curtis, president of Michigan International Speedway, said Poole “made our sport better by expecting as much out of us as he did himself and, believe me, he was never shy about holding us to his standard.”

“David's stature and influence put him atop his profession, and his talent and colorful personality will be greatly missed not only at Daytona but other race tracks across the country,” said Robin Braig, president of Daytona International Speedway.

A big heart

Poole graduated from journalism school at UNC Chapel Hill in 1981. He took a job at the Virginian Pilot in Norfolk but was there just two months when he got a call from the Gastonia Gazette, where he eventually became sports editor. In 1989 he left for a newspaper in Palm Beach but returned a year later for a job at the Observer in part to be closer to his family.

After taking over the motorsports beat from Tom Higgins a few years later, it didn't take him long to make his mark.

“I'd go in restaurants in Mooresville and people would say, ‘Did you read what Poole wrote today?'” Higgins said. “And I'd say that's the first thing I read.”

Early last year, Poole told the story of Wessa Miller, a Kentucky girl with spina bifida and a passion for Dale Earnhardt. He recounted how in 1998 she met her idol at the Daytona 500, a race Earnhardt had never won. She gave him a lucky penny, which he glued to his dashboard before going on to win his first 500.

A few months after he wrote the story, Poole learned that Wessa's father faced unexpected heart surgery. Poole started an account called “Pennies For Wessa” to help the family through its troubles.

“My fondest memories of David will always be his unconditional desire to help those in need,” said Mike Davis, a spokesman for JR Motorsports. “Nobody had a bigger heart. He used his platform as a tool to positively influence those less fortunate, and that is the David Poole I will always remember.”

The racing community came together Tuesday to pay tribute to a writer they saw as one of their own.

“Without driving a car or turning a wrench, David Poole was a racer,” said team owner Rick Hendrick. “He will be sincerely missed.”

Staff writer Jim Utter contributed.

Some Talladega options apparently aren't open

2009-04-27T21:01:00.003-04:00

Why is the idea of changing the track at Talladega Superspeedway so absurd?

All day on Monday, a lot of the same people who said they would look at all options to make things as safe as they can be at Talladega were also saying that altering the configuration of the race track isn’t an option.

“It goes without mention that the most exciting races we have today are both at Daytona and Talladega,” Sprint Cup Series director John Darby in a NASCAR teleconference about Sunday’s last-lap wreck in the Aaron’s 499. “That’s a big part of our sport, and those two tracks have been a big part of our sport for many, many years. There’s more value in continuing our safety efforts at those tracks than turning those two very historical, very exciting race tracks into parking lots.”

“For some reason, there is always a temptation to sensationalize the wrecks at Daytona and Talladega way beyond what happens at Lowe’s Motor Speedway or Atlanta Motor Speedway or any of the other tracks that we race on,” Darby said.

Let me ask you something. How is it possible to “sensationalize” what happened Sunday?

A 3,400-pound car driven by Carl Edwards came frighteningly close to flying into an area where hundreds of people could have been killed.

Is that in any way an exaggeration of what happened? I don’t think so. Is it possible to overstate the potential harm something like that could do? I don’t know how you could.

Then Darby, a man I respect and like very much, turned into a good little NASCAR/International Speedway Corporation soldier. ISC owns Talladega. The Charlotte and Atlanta tracks are owned by Speedway Motorsports. His implication is that the media give Bruton Smith’s company a pass while picking on poor ol’ ISC and its two biggest tracks.

Well, while we’re on that subject, let me ask a question.

Why did nobody at NASCAR ever say reconfiguring Texas Motor Speedway wasn’t an option when the drivers were complaining about it in 1998? What actually happened was NASCAR chairman Bill France Jr. came to Texas on the morning of the track’s second race and took up a spot in the garage area so reporters could come find him. He told them SMI had better fix the track or lose the one Cup date it had, let alone asking for a second.

Let me flatly say two things.

First, if SMI owned Talladega then NASCAR would have forced that company to plow it up and rebuild no later than 1987, when Bobby Allison crashed in almost exactly the same way Edwards did Sunday. There’s no chance NASCAR would have tried as many things to change the cars and the rules to continue racing at Talladega if its sister company didn’t own the joint.

Second, there’s no way anybody – ISC or SMI or anybody – builds a track today and makes it a 2.66-mile trioval with high-banked turns. The track is an anachronism.

Let's not miss the point on Talladega insanity

2009-04-26T20:35:00.002-04:00

TALLADEGA, Ala. -- A lot of people are going to spend a lot of time this week arguing about the wrong things after Sunday's Aaron's 499 at Talladega Superspeedway.

It has already started.

Within an hour of the checkered flag falling, I had two e-mails from fans telling me what happened on the final lap was caused by the yellow-line rule that prevents cars from going too far to the inside to make passes here.

I am sure others also will debate whether Brad Keselowski was far enough inside Carl Edwards' car that Edwards shouldn't have made the block that led to the wreck that led to Edwards' car nearly going into the frontstretch grandstands. Or whether Edwards was entitled to make the block in his effort to win the race.

None of that is the real issue. It's not even close.

Why is there a yellow-line rule? Why are there restrictor plates? Why does NASCAR beat its chest about how it's going to police the drivers from being too aggressive, even though it never lifts a finger to actually restrain the lunacy that goes on in its races here?

Why must a driver spend more time looking in his mirror to see what's happening behind him than he does looking at where he's going? Why must drivers block all over the race track, swerving from lane to lane hoping to deny those behind them a place to go with the momentum they've built up? Why must a driver slam the guy in front him and implore the guy behind him to ram him in the rear bumper in a 195-mph game of bumper cars?

All of those are symptoms or lame attempts at treatment for the real sickness. The real problem here isn't the cars or the rules or even the drivers who do exactly what they're expected to do even though what they're doing is abject insanity.

The real problem is the same as it has been for the 40 years this track has existed. From the very first weekend of racing held here, when speeds were too fast for tires to withstand and anybody with any regard for what's really safe would have called off the race, the problem is and always has been this race track.

It was crazy -- and I mean that word literally -- to ever let things get to a point where Bill Elliott could run 215 mph here. It was crazy to react to Bobby Allison's wreck into the fence, one that looked entirely too much like the wreck Carl Edwards had here Sunday for the comfort of anybody with good sense, by trying to write rules and change the cars to make this place safe. It's crazy to ask drivers to participate in the kind of racing that goes on at Talladega today and it's crazy for them to willingly do so.

It's also sad that fans who profess to love this sport and the people who compete in it not only tolerate this madness, but embrace it and celebrate it.

Instead of talking about how "cool" Sunday's race was with all of its wrecks and the near disaster that happened on the final lap, fans ought to be screaming their demands that NASCAR and International Speedway Corporation do something to make this race track safe to race on.

If you want to talk about the problem, that is the only conversation worth having.

Wherever the "line" is, this goes over it

2009-04-25T23:32:00.002-04:00

TALLADEGA, Ala. -- Lowe's Motor Speedway has been known to get a little outrageous with its promotions sometimes, but the one the track announced late Saturday goes over the line.

Beginning at noon on Monday, the Charlotte track will sell tickets to the NASCAR Sprint All-Star Race on May 16 and the Coca-Cola 600 on May 24 at a special price.

A total of 1,000 combined tickets for those two races will be sold at a price equal to the number of cars involved in the biggest wreck in Sunday's Aaron's 499 at Talladega Superspeedway.

So if there's a 15-car wreck at Talladega, the Charlotte tickets will go for $15 each. Get it?

Now I suppose it could be argued that the best thing for fans would be for there to be only one-car incidents in the race at Talladega so Lowe's Motor Speedway would sell 1,000 tickets for $1 buck each.

But the very idea of tying ticket prices, even for a quick promotion, to the number of Sprint Cup drivers who get involved in a wreck at a place as scary as Talladega can be rubs me the wrong way.

You can tell me to "lighten up" if you want to, but I don't see the humor in what Matt Kenseth went through in his car in Saturday's Nationwide Series race. Kenseth wasn't hurt and everybody is thankful for that, but that doesn't mean anybody should be making light of what happens when cars start slamming into each other at 190 mph.

"The talk around the Talladega race is always about 'The Big One,' "said Marcus Smith, president and general manager of Lowe's Motor Speedway. "But Sunday, if only a few drivers get caught up in the biggest wreck, the deal on Monday is that much sweeter. Plus, it gives the fans a chance to save some real money on another 'Big One,' the 50th running of the Coca-Cola 600."

Fans have to call (800) 455-FANS or go to the Lowe's Motor Speedway ticket office to take advantage of the offer beginning at noon Monday.

Drag racing pioneer Chet Herbert passes away

2009-04-23T22:19:00.005-04:00

If we're lucky, people come along in our lives and provide us with inspiration. They make us want to do what we know will be hard to do but that we also will be worthwhile if we can accomplish it.

Doug Herbert, the drag racer who lives in Huntersville and has his Top Fuel shop in Lincolnton, grew up with such a man living right there in his house. Chester "Chet" Herbert, Doug's father, passed away Thursday in California at the age of 81.

Chet Herbert grew up in Southern California in the age of the hot rod, when the sport of drag racing was just being invented as an organized way to do what people like Chet Herbert were already doing.

When he was 20, Chet Herbert was stricken with polio. He lived the rest of his life in a wheelchair, paralyzed from the waist down. The operative word in that previous sentence is "lived." Despite what polio did to him, Chet Herbert never stopped living.

"When my dad was 12, my grandma bought him a trumpet and hoped he would learn to play it," Doug Herbert said. "He traded the trumpet for a Cushman motorscooter and it was life in the fast lane ever since."

As Chet Herbert spent six months in an iron lung in a hospital in 1948, he started figuring out ways to make better parts for racing in his head. When he got out of the hospital, he developed the first roller camshafts. He was among the first to try nitromethane as a fuel after reading about how the Germans used it to power torpedoes in World War II. Nitro is still used in Top Fuel and Funny Cars today.

Chet Herbert was inducted into the International Drag Racing Hall of Fame in 1993.

“My dad was my hero," Doug Herbert said. "He taught me so much about how to be a strong and determined person. Despite the fact that he had polio and was in a wheelchair for much of his life, he never let that stop him from doing anything. He proved to everyone that he could accomplish whatever he set his mind to; which taught me that, no matter how tough something may seem, if you fight hard enough, you can overcome it.

"I always looked up to him. I’m glad I had the opportunity to follow in his footsteps and be involved in a sport that he helped to invent."

After Doug's sons, Jon and James, were killed in an automobile crash in January 2008, he and his father started working on a project together -- a streamlined car in which Doug Herbert wants to set a land speed record at better than 500 mph later this summer on the Bonneville Salt Flats.

"Some of my best memories with my dad were made over the past year," Doug Herbert said. "We had grown much closer since my boys died. ...I will miss my dad very much. I am lucky to have many wonderful memories of him that I will always cherish.”

Chet Herbert is survived by his wife, Leanne; his son, Doug; two daughters, Heather Herbert-Binetti and Tracey Drage, and a sister Doris, who as editor of Drag News, was also inducted into the Drag Racing Hall of Fame in 1993.

A memorial service will be held at 10:30 a.m., Saturday at Covenant Presbyterian Church, 1855 Orange Olive Road, Orange, CA 92865. A private, graveside family service will be held that afternoon at 2 p.m. at the Fair Haven Memorial Park in Santa Ana, Calif.

In lieu of flowers, the family asks that donations be made to Doug Herbert's Be Responsible and Keep Everyone Safe (BRAKES) program that promotes safe driving among teenagers. Send donations to BRAKES, 1443 E. Gaston St., Lincolnton, NC 28092 or go online at www.putonthebrakes.com.

We know where now, but the question is what

2009-04-23T15:10:00.002-04:00

NASCAR announced officially Thursday that the Sprint Cup Awards Ceremony is moving from New York to Las Vegas. After being at the Waldorf-Astoria hotel in Manhattan each year since 1981, this year's championship celebration will be held Dec. 4 at the Wynn Las Vegas hotel.

That's great. Las Vegas is a place where a lot of fun things are always happening. The Cup awards ceremony could be great there. But a change of venue is not what that event needs most.

NASCAR said it doesn't yet know -- or at least it isn't ready to announce -- what format the banquet will take. Specifically, we don't know yet if fans will be allowed to be part of the champion's celebration.

“I can’t say enough about the warm reception from Las Vegas,” said NASCAR chairman and chief executive officer France. “Las Vegas really made it a priority to get the awards ceremony moved there. We were able to come to an agreement on reasonable room blocks, banquet facilities, and approvals to hold fan activities on the famous Las Vegas Strip.”

I don't really have a problem if the ceremony itself is invitation only for the top drivers, their teams and their sponsors the way it was in New York. I'd prefer it if fans could come, too, but that's not a make-or-break thing.

The ceremony will be a success in Las Vegas only if there are events surrounding it that fans can take part in. NASCAR said the "Victory Lap," where cars parade on city streets, will return in Vegas, and that's good. The logistics of that just got out of hand in midtown Manhattan.

I've said this before and it still holds true, but the NASCAR Sprint Cup Awards Ceremony should copy everything it can from country music's "Fan Fest" in Nashville. Make it a weeklong party where fans get several chances to meet the sport's biggest stars. Have some fun with it. Do some things that could be memorable. The biggest thing that was wrong with New York is that NASCAR acted like it was staging a cotillion where everybody was being graded on his or her manners. It's a party, not a church service.

NASCAR also announced that it will combine the Nationwide and Camping World Truck Series banquets into one event at the Loews Miami Beach on Monday, Nov. 23, the Monday after the season-ending championship weekend at Homestead Miami Speedway.

That date makes a lot of sense and I have no problem with combining those two series into one event. The only drawback is that it means that only the top five in each series -- instead of the top 10 in each -- will be honored at the banquet.

The Talladega outrage!

2009-04-22T12:12:00.002-04:00

It's an outrage. An outrage!!!!

Talladega Superspeedway wants to break a world record this weekend. It plans to ask about 125,000 people to do "The Chicken Dance," which would nearly double the existing record of 72,000 set at a fair in Canfield, Ohio, in 1996.

The record attempt is being sponsored by KFC, and the animal rights advocacy group People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals has a problem with that. PETA said it will ask the folks with the Guinness Book of World Records not to certify the record because of its issues with how KFC treats chickens.

Isn't that the dumbest thing you've ever heard?

No, not the PETA part.

People who don't want to eat meat don't bother me. I figure it's their loss. More for the rest of us who don't mind being at the top of the food chain. (Besides, how exactly would a company that's in the business of killing chickens so people can eat them ever get on PETA's good side?)

The outrage here is that Talladega Superspeedway has the gall to ask 125,000 good, decent NASCAR fans to actually do "The Chicken Dance."

If you're not familiar with "The Chicken Dance," congratulations on a life well-lived. It's a pox (pun intended) on humanity. Announcers as minor league baseball games and racing short tracks have been inducing crowds to participate in it for years, and that's bad enough. But the idea of 125,000 doing at one time is mass humiliation.

"If this record is allowed, it could encourage other animal abusers to attempt silly feats that make a mockery of animal protection," Tracy Reiman, executive vice president of PETA, told the newspaper in Birmingham.

The species being mocked in "The Chicken Dance" isn't chickens. You don't see chickens doing the Electric Slide, the Macarena or, God forbid, the Shag do you?

I have to be honest. I smell a rat. I know how people who work for race tracks think. I would just about bet you that somebody from Talladega Superspeedway sought out PETA on this one.

By making sure PETA is lined up against the record-breaking effort, the track allows fans to mask their shame of participating as an act of defying the unpopular animal rights group. Stand up to PETA! Make a fool of yourself! That will show them!

Don't fall for it, folks. "The Chicken Dance" is neither poultry nor is it dance.

What it is is an outrage.

Earnhardt Jr., Mears go on probation

2009-04-21T17:17:00.005-04:00

First, NASCAR said it wasn't going to do anything to Dale Earnhardt Jr. and Casey Mears for their postrace bumping incident following Saturday night's Subway Fresh Fit 500 at Phoenix.

Then, on Tuesday, NASCAR changed its mind. It decided to do nothing.

Actually, it decided to do the same nothing it did to Carl Edwards and Kyle Busch after almost exactly the same kind of incident at Bristol last year. So, for the sake of consistency, instead of not doing anything it did nothing.

OK, technically NASCAR did something. It placed Earnhardt and Mears on probation for six races. The probation begins with this weekend's race at Talladega.

What does probation mean? Effectively, nothing. Actually, all it does is back NASCAR into a corner if Earnhardt or Mears commits some other kind of "actions detrimental to NASCAR" during the probation period.

If a driver on probation misbehaves, does that mean he gets a double dose of punishment for the second act? Nobody's sure, because probation pretty much means anything NASCAR wants it to mean.

When NASCAR said it would take no action against Earnhardt and Mears, though, that was pretty hard to justify. The Edwards-Busch circumstances at Bristol involved a battle for the lead, so its consequences might have been more profound than the Mears-Earnhardt collision that sent Earnhardt's fading Chevrolet into the wall. But the postrace hi-jinks, with Earnhardt turning Mears on the cool-down lap and Mears bumping Earnhardt in retaliation as they went toward the garage, still violated Section 12-4-A (actions detrimental to stock car racing; hitting another competitor’s car after the race had concluded) of the 2009 NASCAR rule book.

Edwards and Busch got six-race probations last year at Bristol and now this latest incident has drawn the same sanction.

That seems fair, I guess.

But it's hard to say it's better than nothing when nothing really is exactly what it is.

Mark Martin a popular winner

2009-04-19T16:23:00.002-04:00

All you had to see Saturday night was the parade.

After Mark Martin's victory in the Subway Fresh Fit 500 at Phoenix International Raceway, victory lane was a very crowded place. Martin's fellow drivers and others in the sport lined up for an opportunity to congratulate the race winner, demonstrating both their respect for Martin and their happiness upon his return to victory lane.

Martin started first and led much of the evening. He and crew chief Alan Gustafson ran their own race and didn't panic when it seemed that strategies employed by some others might work against them.

Martin might have got a big break when Kyle Busch was hit with a penalty for speeding as he left pit road on the final caution. Then again, the reason Busch appeared to put himself in position to make a late challenge to win was that he exceeded the allowed speed. It seemed that Busch decided the only way he could win would be to take a shot hoping NASCAR wouldn't make the call in that situation. But it did.

Ryan Newman stayed out -- it was good to see that somebody at least tried that -- but Martin made quick work of him and went on to win for the 36th time in his career. Martin hadn't won since 2005 and had run 97 races since then. Only 14 times in NASCAR history has a driver won a race after running more than 100 races since a previous victory.

As you've probably heard by now, Martin is just the fourth driver to win a Cup race after reaching his 50th birthday. At 50 years, three months and nine days, he's the third oldest to win. Only Harry Gant and Morgan Shepherd have won at an older age. The remarkable Gant won eight times after he turned 50. Shepherd and Bobby Allison each won once after that milestone and those 10 races are the only time that's happened until Saturday night.

After beginning the season with a string of bad luck, Martin is now just nine points out of the top 12 in the Cup standings. Only 110 points separates Jeff Burton in 11th from Dale Earnhardt Jr. in 19th after eight races, so this year's race to the Chase is shaping up to be a good one.

Martin is right in the middle of it, and that makes things very interesting. If you think his peers were happy to see him win Saturday night's race, imagine the outpouring of support and respect Martin would get if he could finally win is first championship this year.

We're a long way from that, of course, and the fact that Martin's victory at Phoenix made as much history as it did only emphasizes how great the odds are against him. But whenever I tell people about what the statistics show, I also try to remind them that the numbers only tell you what has and hasn't been done. They don't tell you what can or can't be done.

Talking racin'

2009-04-18T19:19:00.002-04:00

I am home in North Carolina, watching the Phoenix race on television like everybody else this weekend, but that doesn't mean I have been totally goofing off.

This is the 50th season for Lowe's Motor Speedway and the Observer is preparing to mark that with a special project. We're going to provide 600 hours of anniversary coverage -- that's 25 days -- beginning May 1 and running through the day after this year's Coca-Cola 600.

In preparing for that, I've been talking to people who've lived the track's history. I'm not even close to being done. I am supposed to talk to Buddy Baker, for example, Tuesday night, and there are a lot of other drivers, current and former, I still have to sit down with to talk about their memories of what I consider to be the template for the modern American race track.

But what I did get done this week was pretty cool.

On Monday, I sat down the three guys who've all done the same job I'm doing now. Tom Higgins, Bob Moore and Bob Myers all covered NASCAR for newspapers here in Charlotte. When Myers left the road, he moved to the sports desk at the Observer. When he retired, that opened the spot on the desk that I wound up getting. About 6 1/2 years later, after the 1996 season, Higgins retired as the NASCAR beat writer and I took the job I've got now.

We sat around for nearly three hours and I listened to those guys talk about all the racing they've seen at Charlotte. Myers was telling us about a "race" he saw one time when Curtis Turner and a couple of his buddies showed off racing around in the dirt outside the track for a couple of Hollywood celebrities who'd come to town. Moore's perspective on the sport's history is really interesting. After working for newspapers he went to work for Sports Marketing Enterprises, the group that handled the NASCAR sponsorship for R.J. Reynolds Tobacco. So he saw that side of things, too.

Friday, I spent the afternoon at Humpy Wheeler's house. It was like taking a graduate school course in NASCAR history. We talked about his 30-plus years at the track for what I am doing for the paper. Then, we had one of those discussions about what sport in America might look like 20 years from now. It'll never make the paper, but if one of these days you're watching a ball game or a race at a massive stadium that exists only in some kind of virtual reality, I hope Humpy and I both are around to say we told you so.

I started trying to do the math while I was shaking my head at the completely shameless sponsor shilling that passed for a Fox prerace show before Saturday night's race. I've covered the Coca-Cola 600 11 times now (I missed a year for a family emergency) for the Observer. Myers was at every 600 from the first one in 1960 through 2004. Higgins and Moore have probably been to at least 40 each. Wheeler was at every one from 1976 through 2008 and a few more before that.

The way I figure it, among the five of us we were good for seeing the 600 right about 200 times. That folks, is a lot of left turns.

Does anybody really know what time it is?

2009-04-16T13:55:00.002-04:00

There has been a lot of talk about starting times for NASCAR races over the past few years, and in some cases things are entirely out of hand. I've said before I think the television audience is considered way too much more than the live audience sometimes, and as a general rule I still think that's true.

This weekend's races at Phoenix International Raceway, however, offer and interesting case study. Friday night's Nationwide race won't begin until sometime after 9:30 p.m. Eastern time, which is awfully late for a televised race for viewers in the East. Saturday night's Cup race starts around 8:40 p.m. Eastern. Both races will probably end within a few minutes on either side of midnight, which is a little later than some the Cup races at Richmond, Darlington and Charlotte will wind up but not all that much different.

The problem for me, as somebody who'll be watching on television this week, is that starts that late give viewers in the East a lot of reasons not to watch. You pretty much have to either plan to do something earlier and get home for the race or just wait around for what will seem like a long time before anything starts.

But, there's another side of this. If you're somebody who is actually going to the track at Phoenix to watch the race, the times make a lot of sense.

Take the Nationwide race. It starts at 6:30 p.m. Phoenix time. If you work until 4 or 5, you could still get out to the track in time to see the green flag. Saturday's race starts at 5:30, which means you get to see the race and can be back home before 2 or 3 in the morning.

NASCAR fans who live out West deserve the chance to see races, too. And those who buy tickets have a right to see the race at a reasonable time.

Yeah, an 8:40 start is hard on reporters who have Eastern time zone deadlines. That's one reason I am not going. Jim Utter is there for the Observer and if you can barely get one story in part of your Sunday morning press run there's really no reason to pay to have two people there. Jim might well be the only daily newspaper writer from the eastern two-thirds of the United States who attends the Subway Fresh Fit 500. That's not all good for NASCAR, but that's an entirely different topic.

The way the sun sets over Turn 1 at Phoenix it might even be better to start the races a little later, but NASCAR needs as much of a television audience as it can get, especially for the Cup race.

It's a delicate balance figuring out when to drop the green flag, and the balance is even harder to strike when you're racing out West.

Voices carry

2009-04-14T14:09:00.002-04:00

It was tough to hear Monday that Harry Kalas, the longtime announcer of the Philadelphia Phillies who also did extensive work for NFL Films, had passed away.

Kalas was distinctive. His voice evoked memories of Michael Jack Schmidt and all things Philadelphia.

If you grew up loving baseball the way I did, an announcer's voice became part of the city or team he worked for. Milo Hamilton was the Atlanta Braves for me. Vin Scully is as much a part of the Los Angeles Dodgers as Sandy Koufax and Don Drysdale. Jack Buck was just another way to say St. Louis Cardinals.

I remember the first time I heard Wes Durham doing a Georgia Tech football game. My first thought was "Why would Woody Durham be on the radio here?" Wes is the son of longtime North Carolina Tar Heels announcer Woody Durham and Wes sounds JUST like his father.

One thing NASCAR has going for it is that its broadcasters -- the good ones -- do so many events that last for so long that people get used to them.

Fans have become accustomed to having Motor Racing Network's Barney Hall and Fox's Mike Joy in their homes each weekend. They know Eli Gold's voice when they hear it. Many of them do a passable imitation of the legendary Chris Economaki, who has spent several racing generations in the garages and pit stalls at NASCAR and open-wheel race tracks.

The late Benny Parsons was so good as an analyst on television that a lot of fans almost forgot about the fact he was a championship-quality driver. Ned Jarrett had a brilliant career as a driver, but his contributions to the sport can't be effectively measured without acknowledgment of his work as a broadcaster. The death of Neil Bonnett not only took a driver that fans loved, but a man who had a long future ahead of him as race analyst.

I loved Buddy Baker in the booth. These days Baker is still telling his stories on Sirius Satellite Radio and he's entertaining long-time fans of the sport while helping to make new ones.

Of course, there's Darrell Waltrip. When Waltrip retired from driving and moved into the booth at Fox, I told someone I know at that network that he would be NASCAR's John Madden and I believe that's how things have played out.

There's a long, long list of names I could mention -- Bob Jenkins, Dr. Jerry Punch, Ken Squier, Joe Moore, Allen Bestwick, the late Hal Hamrick and many, many more -- that would make some race fans remember a moment or a call and smile.

Let's do this, and this is something we'll carry over onto "The Morning Drive" on Sirius NASCAR Radio on Wednesday morning. If you could have any three people working in the booth for one race, what threesome would that be?

I think I'd have to say Mike Joy, Benny Parsons and Buddy Baker. I'd have Chris Economaki, Jerry Punch and Allen Bestwick in the pits. And on the radio I'd have Barney Hall and Eli Gold in the booth.

Changes at the top coming for ISC

2009-04-14T10:44:00.002-04:00

Jim France will step down as chief executive officer of International Speedway Corporation effective June 1 with Lesa Kennedy succeeding him in that role.

Jim France is the son of NASCAR founder Bill France Sr., brother of former NASCAR chairman Bill France Jr. and uncle of current NASCAR chairman Brian France. Brian France is Lesa Kennedy’s brother.

Jim France will retain his role as chairman of ISC’s board of directors. Lesa Kennedy will remain vice chair of the ISC board.

The announcement was made to ISC stockholders Tuesday morning.

“While I will miss being involved in the daily operations of ISC, I will continue to provide strategic oversight and support to Lesa and the rest of the ISC senior management team,” Jim France said in a memo to ISC employees. “Under Lesa’s outstanding leadership, the company’s Board of Directors has every confidence that ISC will remain a dynamic and successful company for many years to come.”

John Saunders, currently the executive vice president and chief operating officer of ISC, will take over as ISC president – the title previously held by Lesa Kennedy.

Roger VanDerSnick, currently senior vice president of marketing and business operations, becomes executive vice president and chief operating officer. Daniel Houser moves from vice president to senior vice president while remaining chief financial officer and treasurer.

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Weekly, regional banquets coming here

2009-04-09T11:32:00.001-04:00

NASCAR will honor its weekly and regional touring series champions in a pair of banquets in the Charlotte area in mid-November.

The Whelen All-American Series champions will be honored on Friday, Nov. 13 and the champions of the Camping World East, Camping World West, Whelen Modified, Whelen Southern Modified and Canadian Tire series will be crowned the following evening.

The ceremonies will be held at the Embassy Suites Hotel/Concord Convention Center and will cap a week of activities for participants, team owners and track owners in the various series.

“This is a tremendous opportunity to raise the bar for all of NASCAR’s developmental racing series, by bringing the champions from all of our series to the core of much of the motorsports industry,” said George Silbermann, managing director of racing operations. “We are planning a number of special activities for our series champions, for attending track operators, and for the industry. We look to take full advantage of what this hub of the stock car racing industry has to offer.”

The Whelen All-American Series ceremony will feature the national champion, track champions from all 58 NASCAR-sanctioned tracks and champions from each state and Canadian province.

Good news, bad news in Cup

2009-04-08T18:33:00.001-04:00

AJ Allmendinger got some very good news on Wednesday, but Aric Almirola got the other kind of phone call earlier this week.

Richard Petty Motorsports announced that Hunt Brothers Pizza will sponsor Allmendinger’s No. 44 Dodges in six points races as well as the NASCAR Sprint All-Star Challenge events. That means the team is now set to run through the Sept. 12 race at Richmond.

That means Allmendinger will at least get the full 26-race regular season as he tries to pull a surprise and make the Chase for the Nextel Cup. He’s 20th through seven races.

The sponsorship is for the April race at Talladega, the all-star event and the Coca-Cola 600 at Charlotte in May, Chicagoland in July, Bristol in August and Atlanta and Richmond in September.

“My focus has been on the track trying to get the car to perform its best,” Allmendinger said in an interview on ESPN2’s “NASCAR Now.” “I always figured if we went out there and did our job in the race car everything else would take care of itself.”

Almirola, on the other hand, said he was told in a telephone call Monday night from Earnhardt Ganassi Racing officials that his No. 8 Chevrolet team had suspended operations.

“We knew it was coming,” Almirola said on “NASCAR Now.” “On the Monday after the Texas race I knew I was going to get a phone call and it was going to be good or bad. And it wasn’t good.”

The team, lacking sponsorship to continue, has suspended operations. Earnhardt Ganassi Racing officials say a search for sponsorship will continue, but published reports have said up to 50 employees could lose their jobs.

As for Almirola, he said he doesn’t know what the setback will mean for his career.

“Every day that goes by and I am not in a race car I feel I am slipping further and further behind in my learning process,” he said.

Almirola said he is trying to stay positive.

“I am disappointed for sure,” he said. “But I don’t think the end is here. It’s bad but I don’t think it’s the end of the world by any means. …It’s humbling experience but at the same time it’s a part of life. Not all of life is going to be hunky-dory.”

Making Mom proud

2009-04-07T11:44:00.005-04:00

I was in Daytona when my mother died a week before the 1999 Daytona 500. She cared about sports because I did and she followed the North Carolina men's basketball team because that's where I went to school.

A couple of years before she passed, she was in the hospital after surgery and they still had monitors on her to check her vital signs. Those signs were being watched at a central nurse's station on that floor. Mom was watching a Carolina game on television and it was a close one. She was getting worked up.

All of a sudden people start crashing into the room, pulling in equipment and scrambling to address a crisis. Mom was so worked up that she'd set off alarms at the nurse's station. They thought she was "coding." She and I laughed about that for the rest of the days she was with us.

I thought about her Monday night when I watched Tyler Hansbrough and his teammates celebrate their victory over Michigan State in the NCAA men's basketball championship game. Whenever Mom saw anybody as happy as Hansbrough was in a circumstance such as that, she's always say something like, "And don't you know his mama is proud of him?"

I remember that statement whenever I see somebody accomplish something that's as important to him or her as a national championship was to Hansbrough and his teammates. I hear Mama Sue saying it, for instance, every time somebody wins his first NASCAR Sprint Cup race. There's always a great story about what it took for a driver to reach that goal, and there's almost always this stew of joy and relief and happiness that's remarkable to see.

I've seen it when a golfer wins his first tournament and his first major. I've seen it in NBA, NFL and Major League Baseball locker rooms. I've seen it after state championship high school games.

I believe it's one of the biggest reasons we all love sports as much as we do.

I know it's one of the biggest reasons I do.

Changes making a difference for Gordon

2009-04-06T09:48:00.002-04:00

FORT WORTH, Texas – Jeff Gordon hadn’t won a Sprint Cup points race in a long time before he won Sunday’s Samsung 500 at Texas Motor Speedway – since October 2007 at Charlotte, a span of 47 races.

But when it comes to giving winner’s interviews, he hasn’t lost his fastball.

Gordon’s session with the print media after Sunday’s win went for nearly 40 minutes and covered a wide range of topics.

One I didn’t get into in my story for Monday’s paper as much I wanted to was how this track had a lot to do with changing how Gordon changed his approach to the difficult task of balancing his role as one of NASCAR’s biggest stars with that of being a husband and a father.

Last spring, Gordon’s 2008 season was off to an OK start. He’d had three top-five finishes including a second at Martinsville in the race before the one here and he and crew chief Steve Letarte thought things were going along OK.

Until this race a year ago, Gordon’s wife, Ingrid, and their daughter, Ella, who will 2 in June, came to the track when Gordon did at the start of race weekends whenever they could. Gordon loved being able to be with his family on Friday nights and Saturday mornings in the motor home they have at the track.

It was here, though, that started to change. Gordon’s car wasn’t good from the first lap on the track a year ago at Texas and it didn’t get any better as the weekend went along. Almost as if she could sense the problem, Ella didn’t have a good weekend either. She cried a lot and Gordon spent much of the night up trying to comfort her.

“It was a miserable weekend,” said Gordon, who then finished 43rd – last – in the race on Sunday.

“We kind of made a decision at that time that they were mainly going to come on Sundays,” Gordon said. “This is a tough sport. You’ve got to take it seriously, and you’ve got to be committed. And this is my job. So they come every chance that they can. And when it doesn't work out, you know, it doesn't work out.”

So Gordon was missing them in victory lane after he’d won here for the first time ever. But that thought process shows as well as anything how as great as Gordon has been in his career he, too, had something to learn even after winning 81 races (82 now) and four championships.

The idea is for Gordon to focus on the race car until he and Letarte have done their work getting ready to race. When it works, the family then comes in Saturday night or Sunday morning to watch Gordon race.

It’s part of re-commitment Gordon said he made with Letarte and their whole team after their winless season in 2008.

“I'm so proud of Steve,” Gordon said. “He stepped up and made some crucial changes in our team at the end of last year, as well as continued with that road over the off‑season. And I saw that effort being put in and that's when I decided, you know, to start training more, to make sure that my family had the opportunity to come to the race but not necessarily Friday and Saturday, so that I could give this team 100 percent of my focus as well as any time they need to test or do anything that I'm there 100 percent for them.

“I don't know how many more years I do have left. So when you know that the cars are there and the team's there and you still think you've got it or you want to prove to yourself, I wanted to make sure there were no excuses. …So I'm giving these guys everything that I've got and we're just ‑‑ we're doing things a little different, and it's all paying off.”

How was this good?

2009-04-04T17:04:00.002-04:00

FORT WORTH, Texas -- It is not Kyle Busch's job to provide good racing. Quite the contrary, it's his or any other driver's job to make a race look exactly like what most of Saturday's O'Reilly 300 did.

Busch demolished the field, one filled with fellow drivers stepping down from the Sprint Cup Series, in winning his second Nationwide Series race of the year and his 12th over the past two seasons. His No. 18 Toyota started from the pole and just beat every other car in the race to submission.

I walked out to pit road just before the midway point of the race to take a look at how many people paid to see the race and thought it was a pretty good crowd. Not tremendous, but respectable.

But I can't imagine that anybody who saw that race went home saying, "Man, I can't wait for the next chance I get to pay money to see a Nationwide race."

Busch has won the past three Nationwide Series races here. He led 300 of the 400 laps in the two races last year and led 178 this time. Brad Keselowski closed in over the final laps and got a caution on Lap 187 that set up a little bit of drama for the folks on television to talk about, but Busch still finished it off. There was a scrum for second after the last restart, but there was never any doubt about the winner.

People who run race tracks tell us all the time that they need Busch and Jeff Burton and Tony Stewart and Matt Kenseth and other Cup drivers to run on Saturday to help sell tickets for Nationwide races. But if having those Cup guys with Cup-level resources competing against the people with Nationwide Series budgets means the latter have no real chance of competing, does it really do the second-tier series any good?

How do you fix it? I've always felt that if you didn't give Nationwide points to anybody currently in the top 30 in Sprint Cup points, you'd change the equation just a little bit. But at a time where tracks need help selling every ticket they can't, I wouldn't hold my breath for anything to change.

An update with a lot of thank yous

2009-04-02T22:46:00.002-04:00

The NASCAR Foundation's online auction to benefit Pennies For Wessa ended late last week and the total raised was about $4,600.

Add $5,000 donated by Rusty Wallace from his participation in the Saturday Night Special race at Bristol and another $1,000 from Richard Childress and more than $10,000 was raised for Wessa Miller and her family. That's awesome.

There have also been a number of donations made directly to penniesforwessa.org since the auction began a few weeks ago, so we've done a lot of good for the young lady who 11 years ago gave Dale Earnhardt a lucky penny before he won the 1998 Daytona 500.

As great as it was to see all of that money raised, it was just as nice to see how much fun Wessa and her parents, Booker and Juanita, had when they visited Bristol for the race a couple of weeks ago. They met a lot of people who were very nice to them and had a great time.

Wessa got to meet her favorite driver, Dale Earnhardt Jr. She also seemed to connect to Bootie Barker, Michael Waltrip's crew chief. Barker is also in a wheelchair and because the No. 55 team's hauler has to be accessible for him Wessa was able to go up into the transporter and see what that's like.

I would never be able to list all of the people who were part of making that weekend successful. Tom Sullivan and Kim Hyde and Shannon Wiseman and Lori Worley and Wes Ramey and my wife, Katy, and well, as I said, I can't list them all, but thanks to everybody involved.

It has been an important few weeks for Wessa. Last Sunday she was baptized at her church in Kentucky. Heaven continues to smile on the Millers, because as nice as it is that so many people have helped their family out financially, they've always been rich because they've got each other.

Hamlin, Busch deal disasters differently

2009-04-01T14:00:00.003-04:00

Sometimes you wish these guys wouldn’t make it so easy.

Sunday afternoon Denny Hamlin loses a race at Martinsville that he dominated after getting contact from the guy, Jimmie Johnson, who winds up beating him. Hamlin gets out of the car and calmly and patiently answers questions.

Hamlin is not happy about losing. In fact, he’s fed up with it. But he behaves as an adult, expressing clearly both his frustration and his determination with his comments.

A day later, Kyle Busch is leading the weather-delayed Truck Series race when he gets rapped in the rear by Kevin Harvick.

Harvick eventually wins the race while Busch, because of a clear-cut error he made in running over the pit-road commitment line, has to serve a penalty and finishes 17th.

When the race ends, Busch parks his truck and climbs out. He sheds his helmet and HANS device, dumping it on the bed of the truck, and then proceeds to jog down pit lane while other trucks are still coming off the track. He hops pit wall, crosses the race track, jumps the outside wall and runs off into the parking lots.

It wasn’t just a tantrum, it was tantrum as grand gesture. He didn’t literally pull down his driver’s suit and his skivvies, but he still did what my dear, departed mom once characterized as “showing his fanny.”

Busch didn’t have to say a single word to any reporter following the Truck Series race. He could have simply waved off every television, radio and print reporter – it happens all the time. Or, he could have simply said he felt like he wasn’t raced fairly and left Harvick to answer his own questions about the end of the race.

It’s not impossible to behave as a professional after a disappointing outcome. Hamlin demonstrated that. What Busch demonstrated was something else altogether.

Remember the date, and be wary

2009-04-01T07:42:00.003-04:00

It's April 1st, folks. Remember that.

If you read a story that sounds too bizarre or too far out there to be true, chances are good that it's not true. It's probably somebody's idea of a joke for April Fool's Day.

I am trying to walk a fine line here, because the last thing I want to do is drive people to an internet site where sometime late yesterday there was a story posted that got race fans all riled up.

If you know the story I am talking about, I hope you've figured out by now that there's no truth to it.

If you haven't seen the story and don't know what I am referring to, let me just say that a magazine's web site is not going to be the one that breaks -- at the exclusion of all other media outlets -- what would be the biggest story in racing this year 36 hours after a supposed statement is released from an official government source.

When I was in college, I was part of a April Fool's day stunt at our college newspaper. We filled in a few of the answers in the master crossword puzzle, a couple of them incorrectly, so that when you got your paper the next morning it looked like somebody had messed up your puzzle. That went over like, well, about like you might think it would have. But we were in college and we thought everything we did was funny back then.

I know better now.

Hey, folks, that's racin'

2009-03-30T10:55:00.002-04:00

I guess there's supposed to be something controversial about how the Goody's 500 finished Sunday at Martinsville Speedway, but the question I have is what else could have happened?

First, Denny Hamlin made a sensational move on a restart to take the lead away from Jimmie Johnson.

Now if you wanted to make a big deal out of it, you might argue that without help from teammate Kyle Busch, Hamlin never would have been able to make that move work. Hamlin said up front that he asked his spotter to get with Busch's spotter and ask for room to move to Johnson's inside. But hey, that's teamwork and that's not fair!

Hang on, though. The next time there was a restart, Busch was still the first car a lap down and Johnson was second. Busch hung back and left room in case Johnson wanted to try the same move. Isn't that all you can ask for?

So then Johnson chases Hamlin down and with 15 laps to go Johnson drives hard into Turn 3 to try to get to Hamlin's inside in an effort to take back the lead. What happened next depends on which car you were driving or which one you were pulling for. Either Hamlin tried to crowd Johnson to the low side and Johnson bounced off the curb into Hamlin's car, or Johnson laid a bump on Hamlin and took the lead away.

I have to tell you, I think both guys did precisely what they had to do. How can you blame Johnson from trying to win? How can you blame Hamlin from trying to keep it from happening? They didn't wreck each other or anybody else, and more to the point they didn't get out of their cars after the race and act like they were fighting over marbles at recess.

Martinsville is short-track racing. The fans who came got what they paid for. The drivers tried everything they could to win the race. Everything that happened was what's supposed to happen.

On to Texas.

The sun is out at Martinsville

2009-03-29T11:47:00.002-04:00

MARTINSVILLE, Va. -- The rain is gone and there will be Sprint Cup racing today at Martinsville Speedway.

Yesterday was a mess and the Truck Series will have to wait until Monday to compete. The trucks that made the show are sitting in a tight little bunch in the infield, covered by tarps. Sprint Cup haulers had to back up a little to provide the room for those trucks, so quarters are cramped in the Cup garage.

Traffic this morning was, well, a mess.

What we had was a mini-Texas. Remember the first race at Texas Motor Speedway when a week of rain rendered parking lots useless and led that what still ranks at the mother of all NASCAR traffic jams? On a smaller scale, that's what happened this morning here.

Almost all of the available parking at Martinsville is unpaved, and some of it is at the bottom of some pretty big hills. Those areas are mud bogs and only vehicles with four-wheel drive were allowed in those areas.

That backed everything WAY up. It took me about an hour and 45 minutes to go the final 2 miles to the track and then get from U.S. 220 to the media parking lot at the bottom of the hill behind Turn 4. My demon-possessed car shut off completely on me once and just wouldn't go. I was sitting there trying to figure out what I was going to do to get it out of the way but it started back up and I was able to get where I needed to be. It's 50-50 whether she'll be functional for the ride home tonight, but what a race day without a little drama?

I've said this before and I am sure I will say it again, but race fans just never cease to amaze me. I am getting paid to be here today. If I had left my house this morning intending to get to the track and buy one of the tickets that were left for this race, I know I would have turned around and headed back home long before I finally got parked.

Even the parking lots that are open are muddy and there's nothing the track could have done about that. It didn't quit raining until sometime overnight and by daybreak people were trying to get here. That leaves no time to put down gravel or straw or anything to try to make the going less sloppy. But as I write this it's noon and people are still making their way toward the track.

If the NFL pushes, NASCAR has to give

2009-03-27T13:02:00.000-04:00

MARTINSVILLE, Va. -- OK, first of all, is there anybody who seriously doubts that the NFL will add two games to its regular-season schedule if it can find any way to pull that off?

More games means more money -- from ticket sales, from television and from everywhere. There aren't many businesses, let alone sports-related businesses, that leave money hanging on the trees.

So let's assume that by 2012 or so the NFL pushes its season back a couple of weeks and the Super Bowl falls in mid-February -- the Sunday before the third Monday. That's also the traditional date for the Daytona 500, of course. So what would happen?

NASCAR would blink. Period. End of discussion.

There's no way NASCAR can have the Daytona 500 on Super Sunday. Forget that. It will not happen. The reasons stack up like a pile of wood. Yes, you could start the race at noon (which is when it should start anyway) and have it done well before the football game starts. But where does it go in the next day's paper? How deep into SportsCenter would the first NASCAR highlight be? Would anybody want to talk to the Daytona 500 winner the next day? Then there's all the corporate reasons. Sponsors can't blow out two events on the same day. It just wouldn't work.

There is wiggle room in the racing schedule. NASCAR could push its schedule back a week now, eliminating the open date that falls after Atlanta, and be done with it. It also could condense Speedweeks from the schedule it has now to something more reasonable, which wouldn't hurt, either.

But the NFL is going to do what it wants to do and NASCAR is just going to have to deal with that. That's just the way the world is.

Young drivers making their moves

2009-03-26T10:42:00.001-04:00

Jordan Anderson and Jake Crum, a couple of 17-year-old drivers, are taking big steps in their racing careers.

Anderson, who is from Forest Acres, S.C., is scheduled to make his first 2009 start at Carolina Speedway in Gastonia this weekend, has an endorsement deal with The Wheeler Company. That company is one founded by former Speedway Motorsports Inc. president H.A. “Humpy” Wheeler.

“I know what it takes to succeed in the world of NASCAR, and believe Jordan has what it takes to make it to the Cup Series by his 21st birthday, which is our goal,” Wheeler said. “He is the complete package: driving ability, maturity, determination, personality and character...and he does it all from getting his own sponsorships to towing his own car.”

Wheeler has worked unofficially with Anderson for more than four years. Anderson won the pro car division at the Lowe’s Motor Speedway Summer Shootout in 2007 and 2008.

“I am humbled that Mr. Wheeler and his team have such faith and interest in my development and success,” Anderson said.

Crum, meanwhile, has signed a letter of intent with Venturini Motorsports as a developmental driver in the Automobile Racing Club of America series. Crum is the defending UARA Stars series champion.

“I am very excited about the opportunity to join Billy Venturini and everyone else at Venturini Motorsports,” Crum said. “The Venturini’s have been around the sport and the series for a long time. I know their experience makes them a strong team and I am looking forward to being able to race for them.”

Nationwide team fined: The No. 72 Nationwide Series team was penalized by NASCAR for violations found in the fuel sample taken from its car after qualifying at Bristol.

Crew chief Andy Punch was fined $10,000, suspended from April 4 through April 29 (four races) and was is on probation until Dec. 31. Driver Benny Gordon lost 50 driver points and team owner Frank Varishchetti was docked 50 owner points.

The team was found in violation of section 12-1 (actions detrimental to stock car racing); 12-4-I (any determination by NASCAR officials that the race equipment used in the event does not conform to NASCAR rules), 20A-15 (NASCAR reserves the right to have all cars use the same brand of fuel in a given event) and 20A-15.2C (the gasoline must not be blended with alcohols, ethers, or other oxygenates and it must not be blended with aniline or its derivatives, nitro compounds or other nitrogen-containing compounds) of the 2009 NASCAR Nationwide Series rule book.

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2 more Earnhardts join NASCAR mix

2009-03-24T19:24:00.000-04:00

Kerry Earnhardt, the oldest son of seven-time NASCAR champion Dale Earnhardt, is coming back to NASCAR’s Nationwide Series competition and he’s bringing his son, Jeffrey, with him.

They were announced Tuesday as part of Rick Ware Racing.

Kerry Earnhardt will try to make the field for the Nationwide race at Texas on April 4, the first of several races he’ll run this year. Jeffrey Earnhardt has seven races planned, beginning at Dover on May 30, keeping him eligible to run for rookie of the year in 2010.

Rick Ware Racing fields the No. 31 and No. 41 Chevrolets. The No. 31 is attempting a full schedule while the No. 41 will run on a part-time basis.

Kerry and Jeffrey will both try to make the Nationwide race at Atlanta later this year. Dale Earnhardt Jr. is also scheduled to enter that race with his team.

Jeffrey Earnhardt is scheduled to enter the races at Dover, Chicago, Watkins Glen, Montreal, Michigan, Atlanta and Charlotte.

All-star format to be announced: The format for this year’s Sprint All-Star Race is expected to be announced today at an early afternoon news conference at Lowe’s Motor Speedway.

Last year’s race was run in four segments of 25 laps each. The only thing we know so far is that this year’s race should be the same total length of 100 laps or 150 miles.

Kyle Busch wins, takes a shot at Dale Jr.

2009-03-23T09:56:00.004-04:00

You don't have to like Kyle Busch. In fact, you can hate his guts and pull against him every time he starts a motor if that's what floats your boat.

But let me tell you this. After Sunday's race at Bristol, which Busch dominated for his 14th career Cup victory, he provided a pretty solid definition for what it takes to be a racer.

The question was whether he uses the reaction he gets from fans -- boos and jeers, primarily -- to fuel the fire that burns within him.

"Not really." he said. "I think it's cool it works that way, but I don't use it.

"What I use is the car in front of me. If there's a car in front of me, I'm going to chase him. ... I want to pass that guy. If I'm the leader, there's another car in front of me, he's going a lap down. The more guys you get a lap down, the more you don't have to deal with at the end of the day. There's always some motivation to go forward. There's always somebody ahead of you that you can pass that's going to mean something. Even if you are the leader."

So Kyle Busch wants to beat people. He wants to do better than you do, no matter who you are. That is the absolute definition of competition. That's why you're in professional sports. You're not there just to have a good time. You can do that on a lower level. But if you're going to be in the big leagues, and that's what Sprint Cup racing is, that's not the measure.

Fans who don't like Busch probably want somebody to shut him up. There's a way do to that, of course, and that's to start beating him as often as Busch has been handing everybody their hats this season and last. Busch has won 10 times and finished in the top five 20 times in 41 races with Joe Gibbs Racing. He's led 2,190 laps in those races, too. That's getting the job done.

Busch took a little shot at Dale Earnhardt Jr. after Sunday's race, too.

"For me, I don't think I would enjoy having the most fans out there," Busch said. "I actually like the way I am, the role I portray. And I think that there's probably too much pressure on one guy's shoulders who doesn't seem to win very often. But for us, it's a blast to go out there and do what we do."

Now if you're a Dale Earnhardt Jr. fan that should make your blood boil.

More to the point, if you're Dale Earnhardt Jr. (left) or a member of his team it should make your blood boil.

That quote ought to be put up on every billboard in the No. 88 team's shop and they should find a clip of it and play it on a continuous loop until that team goes to work and figures out how to go out and start beating the No. 18 when it counts -- on Sunday.

It's a Millers' Tale from Bristol

2009-03-21T15:31:00.002-04:00

BRISTOL, Tenn. -- They tell you that when you're in the news business you're never supposed to become part of a story. They do not, however, tell you what to do when the story becomes part of you.

Wessa Miller and her parents, Booker and Juanita, are at Bristol this weekend. They spent the day Saturday in the garage meeting lots of people. There was a short press conference about the online auction at www.nascar.com/foundation from which proceeds will go to penniesforwessa.org, a charity fund that I set up for Millers after I wrote about them more than a year ago. Wessa got to go on stage during the prerace ceremonies and she seemed to love it.

I first talked to the Miller family on the phone in late January or early February of 2008. When she was 6, Wessa went to the 1998 Daytona 500 as part of the Make-A-Wish program and met her favorite driver, Dale Earnhardt. She gave him a penny and Earnhardt glued it onto the dash of the No. 3 Chevrolet. The next day, Earnhardt finally won NASCAR's biggest race.

Earnhardt brought Wessa and her parents to the spring race at Bristol later that year, then brought them back the next two years as well. He also gave them a new Chevrolet van, and they still drive that thing. Booker runs a garage behind his house in Phyllis, Ky., and his knowledge and hard work have kept that van running for the past 11 years.

Saturday was a big day for penniesforwessa.org. Rusty Wallace said he was going to give $5,000 of what he earned in Saturday's pro-celebrity race to the fund. Richard Childress gave $1,000. NASCAR Angels arranged for new tires and a tune-up for the van, which has "Lucky Penny" stickers all over it.

People have been very generous on the online auction, too. Some of the items close out on Monday, the rest will be on sale through Friday.

Obviously, I have a rooting interest here. I want to raise as much money as possible so the Millers can get anything they need to help them with Wessa. It'd be nice to get enough for a new van with all the wheelchair access they need. They've already used some of the money to renovate their bathroom to make their lives a little easier.

Somebody asked me Saturday what it was about the Millers that made me want to help them. I gave an answer and then wished I had said it a different way. What I said was that what the Millers consider a good day would be a horrible day for you and me. That's not exactly what I meant. What I meant was that if we had to do what all the Millers do on what they consider a good day, we'd wonder if we could ever make it through another day like that.

Friday night, when my wife and I had dinner with the Millers, she was looking for a 1988 penny to give to Dale Earnhardt Jr. when she gets a chance to see him. Hey, it worked once for the family. Wessa will be at Sunday's Food City 500, too, and she will absolutely be pulling for the No. 88 car.

I can't pull for anybody -- that's not what reporters do. But I do pull for good stories, and no matter what happens today this weekend has been a good story. A lot of very nice people have done a lot of very nice things for the Miller family. And they deserve every bit of it.

If you want to donate to Pennies for Wessa, go to penniesforwessa.org or send a check to Pennies For Wessa, Attention: Mike Damron, Community Trust Bank, P.O. Box 39, Mouthcard, KY 41548.

Celebrity-Pro race teams named

2009-03-18T19:37:00.001-04:00

The team lineups have been set for Saturday night’s celebrity-pro race at Bristol Motor Speedway.

The celebrities will run 15-lap (or 10-minute) heats and the finishing order of that will determine the starting lineup for the 35-lap race for the pros.

Ray Evernham and Rusty Wallace were the first to announce their pairing, forming what a team of ESPN colleagues.

Another ESPN celebrity, Brad Daugherty will be teamed with Junior Johnson, who won 21 Bristol races as a car owner. And ESPN’s Andy Petree is paired with Sterling Marlin
Television and radio personality Riki Rachtman is paired with Jimmy Spencer. Virginia Tech football coach Frank Beamer is paired with Cale Yarborough. Bill Jordan of Realtree Outdoors will team with his hunting buddy, Terry Labonte.

Greg Anderson, the three-time National Hot Rod Association Pro Stock champion, will race with David Green. Funny Car driver Ron Capps will be with Jack Ingram and Top Fuel driver Doug Herbert is teamed with Larry Pearson, who this week replaced his father, David Pearson, in the pro lineup. David Pearson is out with a back injury.

David Akers, the kicker for the Philadelphia Eagles, is teamed with Harry Gant and Terry Bowden, football coach the University of North Alabama, is racing with L.D. Ottinger. Former NFL player Mike Compton will team with Phil Parsons.

Akers, Beamer, Bowden, Compton, Jordan and Rachtman will run the first heat to determine the order of the inside starting row of the 35-lap pro event. Anderson, Capps, Daugherty, Evernham, Herbert and Petree will run the second 15-lap heat to set the outside starting row of the main event.

The winning team is guaranteed $25,000 for their charities and a total of $10,000 will go to the charity or charities of the second-place duo. Every other team will get $5,000, $2,500 per driver, for their charities.

ESPN2 will carry the race beginning at 6 p.m. with Jerry Punch, Dale Jarrett and Ned Jarrett in the booth.

Wins will determine Formula One champion

2009-03-17T16:14:00.004-04:00

Those wacky lads with the FIA World Motor Sport Council are at it again, deciding Tuesday that the 2009 Formula One championship will be awarded simply to the driver who wins the most races.

F1 teams had proposed revisions in the points structure that had been used, wanting to see teams get 12 points for a win, nine for second and seven for third. The current system goes 10-8-6 for those finishes.

The current system will be kept in place to break ties. So if two drivers finish with the same number of race wins, points will be used to name a champion.

Would that work for NASCAR? I don't think so. I've always believed victories should mean more than they do in stock-car racing's points system, but I don't think they should be a trump card over every other measure of performance.

The F1 championship would have gone to a different driver 13 times since 1950 under the new system.

Wonder if F1 fans will start arguing that, for example, Felipe Massa is the "real" 2008 champion since he had more wins than Lewis Hamilton, who actually won the championship under the rules that were in place? NASCAR fans who don't like the Chase for the Sprint Cup format just love to beat their heads against that pointless wall.

The day's news: Some good, some not so much

2009-03-16T20:06:00.003-04:00

These days it's a good thing when you can report anything about people running races at any level, so Monday's best bit of NASCAR news was details of plans for the No. 5 Nationwide Series car owned by JR Motorsports.

Ryan Newman, Scott Wimmer and Tony Stewart will join Dale Earnhardt Jr. and Mark Martin in running 21 total races this year. Wimmer will run six races and Newman will do four. Stewart will run at Charlotte in October.

The only races left open on the No. 5 team's schedule are road course races at Watkins Glen on Aug. 8 and at Montreal on Aug. 30. Drivers for those races are to be announced.

Newman will run at Dover in May, Chicagoland in July, Michigan in August and Kansas in October. Wimmer's races are at Darlington in May, Milwaukee in June, O'Reilly Raceway Park in Indianapolis in July, Bristol in August and Richmond in September.

Earnhardt has five races left in the car, beginning at Texas. Martin will drive it in May at Richmond.

Budweiser out of NHRA: Budweiser announced Monday that this will be its last as the official beer sponsor of the National Hot Rod Association as primary sponsor of Kenny Bernstein's Top Fuel team, which has a car driven by Brandon Bernstein. Budweiser and Bernstein had been together 30 years.

Furniture Row adjusts schedule: Furniture Row Racing has added the Texas race to its schedule for Regan Smith, so it will now run 13 Cup races this year. The team has also decided not to run the No. 78 Chevrolet in the road course races at Sonoma and Watkins Glen as well as the May race at Dover. The team added races at Darlington, Pocono (June) and Indianapolis.

"We all sat down and re-evaluated our schedule to see what suits our racing program the best," said Joe Garone, Furniture Row Racing's general manager. "Since we're a sponsor-owned team we have the flexibility to move in and move out of race markets. We will most likely make additional changes as the season progresses."

Shalom and Amen for the Rev. Marchman

2009-03-15T21:51:00.002-04:00

There's news from Daytona Beach late Sunday night that the Rev. Hal Marchman has passed away.

If you're a NASCAR fan or even if you just watched the Daytona 500, you'ver heard the Rev. Marchman give the invocation before the sport's biggest race. Bill France Sr. asked him to deliver a prayer before the inaugural event in 1959 and the Rev. Marchman kept the job for nearly five decades.

The Rev. Marchman usually ended his invocation with the term "Shalom and amen."

He had been suffering from dementia and memory loss for several years, but the Daytona Beach News-Journal's website, news-journalonline.com said a member of the Rev. Marchman's family said his death Sunday at Indigo Palms Memorical Care facility was due to a sudden bout with illness.

"Rev. Hal Marchman was a true friend to Daytona International Speedway and will be sorely missed," said Robin Braig, president of Daytona International Speedway told the News-Journal's web site. "He touched many lives at the Speedway, from the competitors to the race fans.

"We're thankful and grateful for his many years of service to the Speedway, but also to the community. Our thoughts and prayers are with the entire Marchman family."

An idea whose time has come

2009-03-14T16:59:00.002-04:00

It's good to see that the folks at Mansfield Motorsports Park and the Automobile Racing Club of America have decided to name the June 20 race at that track the Tim Richmond Memorial ARCA RE/MAX 200.

The decision makes sense for many reasons. First, the track in Mansfield, Ohio, is not far from Richmond's hometown of Ashland, Ohio. Second, this year marks 20 years since Richmond's death in 1989.

"I believe it is time to share his memory with new fans and give his still-existent fan base an opportunity to remember many of his great and precious moments," said Sandy Welsh, Richmond's sister. "This celebration will also provide us the opportunity to draw attention to AIDS, the disease that cut Tim's life short, and assist those that are suffering from this cruel disease. We want to do what we can to motivate the discovery of a cure for AIDS and give Tim's life even more meaning."

Richmond started his brief but brilliant racing career in 1976 when he turned some laps in a Sprint Car at Lakeville Speedway in Lakeville, Ohio. By 1980 he was winning rookie of the year honors in the Indianapolis 500. After moving to NASCAR, he won 13 races and had 42 top-five finishes and 78 top 10s in just 185 career Sprint Cup starts.

Richmond also had an ARCA vicotry on his resume. He won the ARCA 200 at Daytona International Speedway in February of 1981 in his first career start in that series.

The June 20 race will be ARCA's first race at the half-mile Mansfield track.

"Tim Richmond won the 1981 ARCA 200 at Daytona, and he won in supermodifieds at our Toledo Speedway track," said ARCA President Ron Drager. "We're proud to have played a role in the development of Tim's amazing racing career, and we look forward to helping make the inaugural Tim Richmond Memorial ARCA RE/MAX 200 at Mansfield a success."

Tire test next week at Lowe's

2009-03-12T18:16:00.003-04:00

Tire testing, the only kind of testing that's allowed this season, comes to Lowe's Motor Speedway next week.

Kasey Kahne, who won the NASCAR Sprint All-Star Race and the Coca-Cola 600 last May, will be joined at the test by Jimmie Johnson, Marcos Ambrose and Paul Menard. They're scheduled to be on track Tuesday and Wednesday from 9 a.m. until noon and from1 to 5 p.m. each day.

The track will open its frontstretch grandstand free to race fans each day. Spectators should enter through Gate 5A next to the main ticket offic.

Fans who already have tickets to this year's all-star race and Coca-Cola 600 will have access to an infield grandstand on Wednesday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., and can participate in a fan forum featuring all four drivers from 12 - 1 p.m. Ticket holders will need to check in at the speedway's ticket office to receive verification of their ticket purchase before entering the infield at Gate 26.

'Tire chaser' issues statement: I asked the folks at Michael Waltrip Racing if Jimmy Watts, who was suspended for four races for chasing a tire into the infield at Atlanta, wanted to talk about how he feels about the aftermath of that incident.

The team declined, saying it and Watts want to move on. But in response to my request and requests from other reporters, Watts issued a brief statement Thursday through the team.

"To go after the tire was a quick reaction and obviously the wrong decision," Watts said. "I want to apologize to my team, my competitors and to NASCAR.

"Everything happens so fast on pit road that I just didn't realize how far I had gone out until I grabbed the tire. I put myself in jeopardy and I know how hard NASCAR works to make the pit crew members safe on pit road. I stand by their decision and will serve my four-race suspension."

More for the "Reality Tour:" The race shop tour I am offering for the Monday after the all-star race as part of the NASCAR Foundation/Motor Racing Outreach online auction for Pennies for Wessa keeps getting better.

Marcus Smith, president and general manager of Lowe's Motor Speedway, has offered to allow the winning bidder and myself to start the tour with lunch at the track's Speedway Club. Better yet, he says we can take one of the track's pace cars on the tour. That means we won't have to cross our fingers that my personal bucket of bolts can complete the trip.

There's a direct link to the item available now. It's a long link, so hopefully you can just click and go. Here it is:
http://auctions.nascar.com/cgi-bin/ncommerce3/ProductDisplay?prrfnbr=103194866&prmenbr=63306014&aunbr=103541576&topPic=&MoreSubs=

Warning: Horribly bad pun ahead

2009-03-11T20:02:00.006-04:00

Here's a quick Wednesday evening update or two or three of my "pet" projects. (You'll have to read to the end to see what a bad pun that truly is.)

Update No. 1 is on the shop tour I am going to do the Monday after the Sprint Cup All-Star Race to a winning bidder on the Pennies for Wessa auction being held at www.nascar.com/foundation. You can add two tickets to the all-star race, courtesy of the fine folks at Lowe's Motor Speedway, to the package.

So now the bonanza that's up for grabs is two tickets to the all-star event on May 16 followed on May 18 by visits to several race shops with me acting as your friendly tour guide and driver.

Update No. 2 is from Atlanta race winner Kurt Busch, who has decided to officially let the fans help him pick the name for his reverse victory lap that followed the Kobalt Tools 500.

“It has been unbelievable – I’ve been just blown away by it all,” Busch said of the response to the lap. “It’s amazing to see the attention it (the celebration lap) has gotten. We’ve done hundreds of media interviews since Sunday and every time it’s inevitable that they’ll get around to wanting to discuss our unusual victory lap."

Fans can post a comment on this blog and offer their suggestions. Busch and his minions will pick a winner and give a lucky fan who suggests it a gift basket after announcing the winner at Bristol on March 20.

Update No. 3 is where the pun begins.

Ryan Newman is doing a follow-up edition to his book "Pit Road Pets." The new book will be subtitled: "NASCAR Stars and Their Pets, the Second Lap." But it also will include photos of fans with their pets, too.

"My wife, Krissie, came up with the idea to include the fans in our second book because they are the heart of NASCAR," Newman said. "The fans are out there volunteering for their local animal shelters, adopting pets from rescue groups and spaying and neutering their pets. They are making a difference at the grassroots level across our nation. We think adding the fans to the next Pit Road Pets book will make our second edition extra special."

A photographer will be taking pictures of NASCAR fans with their pets at the Pit Road Pets tent in the Earnhardt Campground at Bristol 9 am until 2 p.m. on March 21 and March 22.

"We're going to try to squeeze as many photos of NASCAR fans and their pets as possible in the book," Ryan Newman Foundation Executive Director Rosalie De Fini said. "Everyone will get their time to shine because all the photos we take of fans and pets will be posted on the Ryan Newman Foundation website, www.ryannewmanfoundation.org."

See, it's an actual pet project ...

A bid to help Pennies for Wessa

2009-03-11T12:08:00.002-04:00

At the risk of opening myself up to ridicule from some regular readers of this blog, today's offering is about what I'm planning to do on behalf of the Pennies For Wessa auction now being conducted by The NASCAR Foundation and Motor Racing Outreach.

The auction runs through March 27 at www.nascar.com/foundation and includes a lot of really cool items - autographed photos and posters and even a Washington Redskins helmet autographed by Joe Gibbs as well as VIP packages to race events later this year. The money will go to help Wessa Miller, the young lady who in 1998 gave Dale Earnhardt a lucky penny before Earnhardt won the Daytona 500.

Wessa and her parents, Booker and Juanita, are coming to Bristol on March 21-22 to see the races and get to meet some of the drivers in the garage. They came to Bristol in 1998 as Earnhardt's guest after Earnhardt had won at Daytona with the penny glued to the dash of his No. 3 Chevrolet.

"NASCAR Angels" is doing a piece on the Millers and ESPN plans to do a story on them for the Nationwide Series prerace show that day.

I was trying to decide if I could do anything that somebody might be interested in bidding on. Here's what I came up with.

For somebody who's going to be in or around Charlotte during the May races here, I will pick the winning bidder up at Lowe's Motor Speedway on the Monday after the all-star race in my own car (I call it Christine because I am not sure it's not demon possessed). We'll go over to the Hendrick Motorsports museum, then we'll go to Kannapolis and do the Dale Earnhardt min-tour there. We'll go from there up to the Richard Childress Racing museum in Welcome and then we'll come back through Mooresville. I'll even spring for lunch and dinner.

I know it sounds like the "Kramer Reality Tour" from the Seinfeld show, but it's all I've got. Maybe somebody out there would be willing to help the cause and kill an afternoon riding around in my heap of a car.

Check out www.nascar.com/foundation for the auction site. My "reality tour" isn't up there yet, but it will be in the next day or so. But go now and you can see some really cool items that have actual value!

Empty seats at Georgia track an issue, and Smith knows it

2009-03-10T06:57:00.007-04:00

Bruton Smith blew into the media center Friday at Atlanta Motor Speedway and held court with reporters for quite a while. The military would call this a diversionary tactic.

I drifted in and out of the gaggle, making sure I wasn't missing Smith plowing any new ground. He talked about how NASCAR should take the final race of the Sprint Cup season away from Homestead - or, as he likes to call it, Homeinstead - and move it back to Atlanta or out to Las Vegas. He talked about how the Cup banquet should be in Las Vegas and not New York. He talked about a lot of stuff.

I didn't write about any of it (until now, I guess) because it wasn't anything I hadn't heard before and because I had a good idea what he was up to.

For weeks leading up to Sunday's Kobalt Tools 500, there had been whispers all around the sport about how few tickets had been sold for the race at the 1.54-mile track located south of downtown Atlanta. The weather was perfect and there was a huge walk-up crowd (when compared with other years) and they still might have sold half the seats.

OK, let's be totally fair here. If Atlanta Motor Speedway had 75,000 or so, which is where I would put the crowd I saw (NASCAR's estimate of 94,000 on the official race report was WAY high), that's still more than fans than there would be at a sold-out Homstead-Miami Speedway. It's about what California had, maybe a little less, and about what places like Kansas and Chicagoland will hold later this year.

I say that people who see the stands half-empty at Atlanta and think the crowd is "terrible" need to keep in perspective that 75,000 for any professional sports event in the Atlanta market is not shabby. But it's not good, either.

Smith keeps insisting that the track will sell out its second date this year, which moves to Sunday night of Labor Day weekend. People at the track say they're encouraged by the response to that new date, moved back from around Halloween weekend in previous years.

We'll see.

Some of the drivers were asked about the empty seats after Sunday's race and they said they're baffled. Racing at Atlanta is usually not terrible and it's a great facility. Traffic there used to be awful and maybe that reputation lingers despite the fact that there have been improvements made in that regard. The track has tried everything reasonable in terms of ticket and concession prices in this tough economy.

This ain't Bruton Smith's first rodeo. By chumming the waters with talk about how NASCAR ought to do this and that with other races at other places he got some of the heat off of his track at Atlanta, at least for a little while, over the weekend. But he's smart enough to know that nobody's going to have their attention fully diverted, at least not for long, from how many seats went unsold Sunday.

Smith would like to have a second race in Las Vegas and he's promised up and down that he'll bring Cup racing to the track he bought in Kentucky last year. He might be singing the song that one of those dates "should" come from one of International Speedway Corp.'s tracks, but he knows as well as I do that's not going to happen.

If Kentucky gets a date next year, Smith will put it there from within the Speedway Motorsports portfolio. And after seeing the crowd Sunday at Atlanta, that track has a great big target locked on it, no matter how many countermeasures Smith tries to deploy.

Busch takes celebration in a new direction

2009-03-09T08:22:00.003-04:00

HAMPTON, Ga. -- The victory lap that Kurt Busch took after Sunday's victory in the Kobalt Tools 500 was something different.

He didn't do what the late Alan Kulwicki once called a "Polish Victory Lap," driving forward the wrong way around the track going from Turn 4 back toward Turn 1. It was, in fact, a mirror-image of that lap. Kurt drove in reverse around the track beginning with Turn 1.

So should we call it the Hsilop Victory Lap (pronounced Shylop), since that's Polish spelled backward?

Busch said he and some of his buddies came up with the idea for the reverse run one night over a few beers. The buddies wanted Busch to call it "The Donkey."

God knows why. Surely we can do better than that.

Here are some potential names for the lap. Tell me which ones you like, or give me your own ideas:

Victory Pal -- Pal is Lap spelled backward. Get it?

Miller Time Rewind -- Sponsorship driven, but I don't know that Miller necessarily wants to be associated with driving backward.

The Vice Versa -- Because it was the opposite of what you'd expect the winner to do.

Doubleback -- This is among my favorites. Busch's car number is 2, so that's where the "double" comes in.

Backout -- Instead of a burnout, you do the backout.

Throwback -- Busch said he drove Sunday at Atlanta like he it was old-school Darlington or old-school Rockingham. So this would definitely apply.

Backlash (or Backstroke, or Stickback, or Throwback, or Runback, or Rollback) -- Just about any "back" pun would work.

Tip It Back Lap -- Another sponsor-related opportunity. After the 2 car wins, tip back an ice-cold Miller and have a ball. You could even see the ad campaign surrounding this one, which came from a caller on "The Morning Drive" on the Sirius NASCAR Radio show Monday morning.

Wow, who could have seen that coming?

2009-03-07T11:57:00.002-05:00

HAMPTON, Ga. -- Kyle Busch won the pole Saturday morning for this afternoon's American Commercial Lines 200 race in the NASCAR Camping World Series at Atlanta Motor Speedway.

In other news, the sun came up in the east this morning.

Seriously, who else would be on the pole for the Truck race? Actually, it's only his fourth pole in 57 Truck Series starts. It just seems like he wins them all, I guess.

Busch ran 176.403 mph in the No. 51 Toyota to get the top spot. Rick Crawford was second at 175.950 mph with Kevin Harvick, Todd Bodine and Ron Hornaday Jr. rounding out the top five.

The Truck Series qualifying began about 25 or 30 minutes late because of unexpected morning
fog and mist that finally burned off and allowed the track to be dried.

As soon as the Truck qualifying ended Sprint Cup teams took to the track for the first of two important practices for Sunday's Kobalt Tools 500. They got in about 25 minutes in a first session that was scheduled for 45. After a short break the Cup cars will return for a final practice that runs until 1:30.

Greg Biffle, Carl Edwards and David Stremme had the fastest laps in the first practice.

You know that great forecast? Never mind

2009-03-07T09:44:00.002-05:00

HAMPTON, Ga. -- The Weather Channel says there's a zero percent chance of precipitation today in the Atlanta area.
With all due respect to the weather experts, they don't know Atlanta Motor Speedway's luck.
Camping World Truck Series qualifying was set to begin at 9:35 a.m. Eastern, but it's now 9:50 and the only things that have been on the track are safety trucks and jet dryers. That's because it has been misting rain.
The forecast STILL calls for partly cloudy skies, temperature in the 70s and no rain. This is supposedly something that's going to "burn off," so nobody thinks today's scheduled activities are in any real danger.
But it wasn't supposed to do this, either.

The weather is beautiful, wish you were here

2009-03-06T13:26:00.002-05:00

HAMPTON, Ga. -- People literally do not know how to act here at Atlanta Motor Speedway.
The weather here is fantastic. It's sunny and will be around 70 for a high today. The sun is supposed to linger through Sunday and it's supposed to be warm each day. It might rain Monday but that's OK, at least from the racing standpoint.
This is odd. No, it's not odd. It's downright weird.
It's about time Atlanta Motor Speedway gets a break like this. So many times we've been here and it has been raining -- or worse. It snowed here for a little while on Saturday morning just last year, and even when the sun has come out it has often been cold and blustery.
I don't know yet how many people this nice weather will bring out for Saturday's Truck Series race and Sunday's Sprint Cup race. But you have to believe that more people will show up to enjoy the great weather than would have decided to come if it was cold and rainy.
I've always believed that Atlanta Motor Speedway would be better off it were located as far northeast of Atlanta as it actually is south of the city. Put this track up somewhere between Commerce, where the drag strip is, and Suwanee, where Road Atlanta is, and I think you'd have more people show up here.
I've also always thought that part of Atlanta Motor Speedway's problem is that it's near Atlanta. This might sound like the same old Charlotte vs. Atlanta bias, but I think Atlanta is just an awful sports town -- especially pro sports. A lot of people can get fired up about Georgia Bulldogs football down this way, but that's about it. Some of that is justified, since this city's professional teams have kicked their fans in the teeth time and time again.
But any fan who has been loyal to Atlanta Motor Speedway over the years has probably got just about every kind of foul-weather gear you can imagine in his or her closet because at some point over the past few years he or she has needed it to endure a race here.
So for all of the people who do make it out here on Sunday, a nice day of weather will be a nice and well-deserved reward.

Take that camera and....

2009-03-05T09:28:00.003-05:00

So apparently there are some people who're upset now because somebody put pictures of Kyle Busch's victory party after his win at Las Vegas Motor Speedway on the Internet.

The pictures show Busch spraying champagne out of one of those big ol' bottles on the folks who joined him and his team for the party in the Hard Rock Hotel after his win in the Shelby 427.

The party happened when the team elected not to fly home Sunday night because of the weather back in North Carolina. They waited until early Monday, so Sunday night they decided to have a little bit of fun.

What's wrong with that, I ask?

If you're looking for me to give you a link to the pictures and the several pages of comments about them here, forget about it. I wouldn't do anything to help drive traffic to that web site because the whole idea of it drives me nuts.

Busch and his team wanted to celebrate. They got a place where they could get off by themselves and do their own thing. As far as I know there was nobody at the party who got so out of hand that he or she wasn't able to make the very early flight home on Monday (maybe they just celebrated right on through the night -- but again, what's wrong with that?). As far as I know nobody did anything heinous.

The chief complaint about the pictures on the Internet appears to be that Busch is "wasting money" by spraying champagne on people. The message, apparently, is that there are people who're out of work in racing and yet here are people on this team who're cavorting as though they don't have a care in the world.

Really? Just because there are problems in the sport nobody is allowed to have some fun after scoring a big victory? Just because there are people who're sad that means nobody in racing can be happy?

Give me a break.

NASCAR folks living the travel dream

2009-03-02T08:06:00.004-05:00

LAS VEGAS -- If you hang around NASCAR for any length of time, you will hear somebody say the phrase "living the dream."

I have no idea who started it or why, but a lot of people use it as a stock sardonic reply to the idea that some of the people who think having a job in racing is a dream gig don't have any real idea that it's not all sunshine and lollipops all of the time.

This year during Speedweeks, the track public relations office had a sign on the wall with that phrase on it. It's to the point now that some folks will just say "LTD" and everybody knows what that means.

I say all of that today because the snow that fell overnight in Charlotte the return trip from Sunday's race at Las Vegas Motor Speedway has hardly turned into a "dream" for a lot of the NASCAR folks.

Several of the race teams delayed the departure of their own planes from Sunday night until in the daylight hours of Monday to give conditions time to improve before trying to get into Concord, which is where most of the NASCAR air fleet is based.

That may not sound like a big deal, but that's several hundred people who had to spend an extra 12 hours in Las Vegas about 2,700 miles from home. Work they would be doing today back at the teams' shops will have to be rescheduled and all of those people had to be fed and housed, causing the teams' additional expense.

Some teams fly most of their personnel commercially, especially on trips this far west. There are also dozens and dozens of people who work in the media, public relations and other industry-related jobs who were scheduled to go out on overnight flights late Sunday. Most of them, at least the ones to Charlotte, were canceled and I heard several people saying Sunday night they were being told it will be Tuesday -- at the earliest -- before they can expect to get out now.

(Before you even say it, this isn't about me. As of about 9 a.m. Monday, my flight home is still supposed to leave on schedule. Knock on wood.)

Speed on pole for Nationwide race

2009-02-28T13:37:00.003-05:00

LAS VEGAS -- Scott Speed became the ninth driver to win the pole in his first career NASCAR Nationwide Series race Saturday at Las Vegas Motor Speedway.
Speed ran a lap at 182.451 mph in a No. 99 Toyota prepared by Michael Waltrip Racing to earn the top starting spot for Saturday afternoon's Sam's Town 300 at the 1.5-mile track.
Kevin Harvick will start second in the Nationwide race. Greg Biffle starts third.
Speed's pole-winning run was a bright spot for Toyota on what has so far been a trying weekend.
Lee White of Toyota Racing Development said Saturday that engine issues that forced four teams using TRD-built motors to change them Friday were "embarassing."
Speed, Brian Vickers, David Reutimann and Marcos Ambrose all had issues with the lifters and camshafts. Kyle Busch, who won the pole for Sunday's Cup race, also changed engines Friday but that was unrelated to the engines in the other Toyotas. Busch's Joe Gibbs Racing team builds its own engines and does not use the TRD engines.
White said TRD used the same engine components in last fall's Cup race at Texas without issue. They brought it back last weekend at Auto Club Speedway and Brian Vickers had the same problem after he won the pole. But during the race there were no issues.
TRD personnel looked at the issue this week and thought they had developed something that would take care of it. But, White said, it now appears they went in the wrong direction.
White said TRD and the teams would look closely at how the replaced engines performed in Saturday's Cup practices. He said TRD is preparing to go back to a previous generation of components for next weekend at Atlanta if that becomes necessary.
Michael Waltrip's team has not changed engines in the No. 55. White said it appears that once an engine gets beyond about 75 miles without showing a problem they've been OK.
Robby Gordon and Max Papis also use TRD engines and they have had no problems so far. Papis' car is using the previous generation components.

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SMI tracks to hold driver forums on Speed stage

2009-02-27T18:20:00.001-05:00

LAS VEGAS – Speedway Motorsports Inc. announced a new program Friday for its race weekends that will bring more drivers out to meet more fans more often at the 13 SMI race weekends this year.

“This might be the biggest ‘no-brainer’ that we’ve ever put into motion,” said Marcus Smith, the president and chief operating officer of Speedway Motorsports, who announced the plan in the middle of Las Vegas Motor Speedway’s Neon Garage along with track president Chris Powell and four-time Cup Series champion Jeff Gordon.

Drivers and other racing personalities will appear on the Speed network’s stage each week during SMI events. Speed’s stage is located at each SMI track in an area where fans don’t have to pay more than their ticket price to get into. Speed and Performance Racing Network personnel will conduct the fan forums.

Gordon, Kyle Busch and team owner Richard Childress will be part of the first “PRN Up to Speed” program at 9:30 a.m. local time here Sunday.

“Fans love to see and hear from their favorite drivers,” Smith said. “So we’re inviting the drivers, owners and other racing personalities to come out during our race weekends. …Giving our fans even more for their dollar is something we strive for every year.”

Gordon said he’s glad to see tracks working to find the most efficient ways to help get the drivers and fans together. The struggling racing economy is spurring this kind of effort, but Gordon said he hopes that’s not the only reason it’s being done.

“If the economy turns around six months from now I hope we keep doing these things because the fans deserve it,” he said.

It’s easy for fans to say that drivers doing something like this is the least they can do for the fans, but that’s not true. The least the drivers can do is nothing, and it takes an effort for drivers like Busch and Gordon to go out four hours before running a 285-lap race to talk to fans. No, they’re not moving mountains. But they are trying to do what they can to help out and that’s a good thing.

The Neon Garage concept in use at this track is pretty darn cool, to be honest. It’d cost a bunch of money to redo current tracks like this one or the FanZone at Daytona, but if there’s ever another track built for use by NASCAR’s top series that new track’s infield has to look something like the one here.

On the Road with "The King"

2009-02-26T07:55:00.001-05:00

LAS VEGAS – If I told you there’s nothing between Fontana, Calif., and Las Vegas, I’d be lying. There are several towns, like Victorville and Barstow and Baker.

There’s the Zzyzx Road exit, too. Apparently that’s pronounced Zie-zix – it rhymes with “Isaac” and not “physics.” (Google is a wonderful thing).

But it was about 225 miles from where I was Tuesday morning to where I was going, and maybe 25 miles of that seems inhabitable. The rest was highway and high desert.

What made my drive challenging is that somehow I managed to get what might be the only rental car in use in America today without cruise control. What made my drive bearable, though, was “Richard Petty’s Audio Scrapbook.”

The scrapbook is four audio CDs, each about an hour long. I got through three of them on the ride over to Vegas and will finish the fourth one off going back and forth the to the track this weekend.

The guys who did this project did exactly the right thing by not overthinking the process. It’s legendary Motor Racing Network anchor and long-time Petty family friend Barney Hall sitting down with The King and with Dale Inman, Richard’s long-time crew chief, and having them talk and tell stories.

Bobby Allison, David Pearson and Richard’s wife, Lynda, also join in from time to time. One of my favorite tracks so far was the one where Lynda talked about the first time she met Richard. Who knew that in high school the future seven-time NASCAR champion carried his school’s bass drum around and helped make sure the cheerleaders didn’t do cheers for defense while their team had the ball?

This is the kind of thing I hope somebody at the future NASCAR Hall of Fame in Charlotte has the good sense to turn into a regular feature of that museum. At least once a month, race fans ought to be able to go to the hall and listen to a legend tell racing tales.

Not everything in the “Richard Petty Audio Scrapbook” is fun and games. Petty talks about the incident he had in Dallas, Ga., when he was drag racing for a season after NASCAR banned the “hemi” engine. Petty’s car veered off the track and through a chain-link fence into a crowd of spectators. An 8-year-old boy was killed.

Petty and his wife also talk emotionally about the loss of their grandson, Adam, who was killed in a wreck during a practice session at New Hampshire Motor Speedway in 2000.

But there are many good moments for Petty to talk about, too. His conversation with Pearson about their rivalry and their most memorable races is classic.

“Richard Petty’s Audio Scrapbook” is available at book stores. You can also order it at www.rpetty.net or by calling (877) 543-PETTY. Autographed copies are available on line for the price of $43.43.

And if you don’t understand the significance of that price, these CDs probably aren’t for you.

Up front is where focus belongs

2009-02-25T10:50:00.001-05:00

LAS VEGAS – One of the big topics on “The Morning Drive” on Sirius NASCAR Radio this week has been how television coverage of races concentrates too much on selected cars and doesn’t “give” enough time to everybody in the field.

Sigh.

Folks, this is not community tee ball where everybody gets to play. This is the big leagues of auto racing. Sprint Cup is the biggest deal there is in American motorsports. It’s a meritocracy. Your driver isn’t going to be “given” coverage, he has to earn it.

There are two ways to earn coverage. First, pass somebody. Run up front, contend for wins and get them, make the Chase for the Sprint Cup. Second, be somebody. Have a story that’s compelling. Move the needle when it comes to the fans. Make people care about you.

Every second during a televised race where they’re showing me a battle for 26th what I know they’re telling me is that the racing up front is bad. I don’t CARE who’s running 26th unless it’s somebody who for the past 20 weeks has finished 10th or better.

If Matt Kenseth is running last this week at Las Vegas after winning at Daytona and California, that’s news. If "Your Name Here" is running 43rd and nobody is surprised by that, he’ll get on camera when he’s being lapped and he ought to be glad that’s the only time his name might be mentioned.

It’s not up to Fox or ESPN or TNT (or, for that matter, the Charlotte Observer) to help somebody get and/or keep a sponsor. Heck, if you ask me television goes too far overboard as it is to try to “showcase” sponsorship. Of course, they get a check for just about everything they do in that regard. If a reader found out I was taking $200 a week to make sure I mention a certain sponsor then that reader would go crazy – and he’d be right to.

Besides, I think the whole premise of this argument is flawed. Television did a great job covering the AJ Allmendinger, Jeremy Mayfield and Scott Riggs stories at Daytona. Fox tries hard to keep up with what Larry McReynolds calls “comers and goers” during a race. No, a guy running 19th doesn’t get as much air time as the leader or a former champion, but he shouldn’t, either.

An update or two from the Left Coast

2009-02-23T18:00:00.004-05:00

RANCHO CUCAMONGA, Calif. -- Monday was laundry day for your correspondent, who'll make the drive back over the mountains to Las Vegas Tuesday to move into position for the season's third Sprint Cup/Nationwide weekend at the Las Vegas Motor Speedway.

That means I won't be back in Charlotte for the press conference and noon Tuesday formally announcing the plans for an United States-based Formula One team. That press conference will be held at the Speed cable television network's studios and carried live on that channel.

I've talked to Ken Anderson, who along with Peter Windsor are to be the "principals" of that team in F1 terminology, one time on the telephone when he confirmed the rumors that this announcement was coming up. That was two weeks ago while I was in Daytona and since then I've had probably 10 e-mails from people who want me to get them in touch with Anderson so they can go to work for the F1 team. I also had a couple of people who sell real estate looking for contacts so they could offer buildings that now stand idle.

I don't think they believed me when I tell them that I've only had that one conversation and everything I know I've put in the paper. Today's announcement should provide at least a few more details.

What it will more likely do is set off more speculation about who might be chosen to drive for an American F1 team. The focus of this new team, Anderson told me, was going to be American and that would mean American drivers. Danica Patrick's name, predictably, already came up and she shot that down. I asked AJ Allmendinger about it Friday at California and he seemed amused by the question, but he also said that he'd be a fool to say absolutely not when as of right now he doesn't have a full-time ride for 2009.

By 5 p.m. Tuesday, I suspect somebody will have spun up a rumor about a prominent Cup driver or two. Kyle Busch was supposed to go to Japan late last year to take one of Toyota's F1 cars for a spin. That fell through, but the fact that Busch would be interested in touching the wheel might be enough to set some people off.

Inside the NASCAR circles this week, I heard a lot of skepticism about the USF1 idea. These guys know how tough it is to find sponsorship for NASCAR teams right now and scoff at the notion that Anderson and Windsor can find the money -- upwards of $100 million -- and the sheer number of smart racers it would take to get a team from idea to reality in time to go racing in 2010.

I guess we'll have to see about all of that, won't we?

On another quick matter, people listening to The Morning Drive on Sirius NASCAR Radio Monday morning got a little "bonus" coverage when one of our commercials didn't fire as it should and co-host Mike Bagley and I were still on the air when we didn't know we were.

We were continuing a conversation we'd had with a caller about the idea of pulling races away from Auto Club Speedway in Fontana. Mike was saying how fans out here don't have as many places they can choose to go as fans back east, and I was telling him that I have no problem with the fans out here. I think they're good fans, but they just know better than to expect good racing at a track which hasn't given them that.

At one point when I thought we were off-air, I said, "This track sucks. It stinks. It blows chunks." When the show was over, I got calls warning me that went out over the air. My reaction was "So?" It's not like I didn't write that two or three times over the weekend.

During Sunday night's Cup race, Darrell Waltrip was talking about how an engineer once told him he dealt with drivers who had multiple complaints about their race cars. "Fix the first problem first," was what DW said. The idea is that the first thing the driver complains about is the problem that needs to be addressed first. Fix that, and some of the other problems might go away, too.

In terms of racing in Southern California, NASCAR faces several challenges. The crowds have not been good. There has been difficulty finding the right marketing message. But the "first" problem here is this track is wrong. It's a 2-mile track and it seems like it's almost a mile wide. A driver can spin here and not find anything to hit. The leader becomes Superman in clean air.

Fix the race track. No, don't bank what you've got and put restrictor plates on the cars. That's dumb. Make the track 1 or 1-1/4 miles and put progressive banking in it. Put on a decent race or two and then see if that doesn't help you fill up the seats and get more attention from the SoCal media.

Fix the first problem first.

Edwards on Nationwide race pole

2009-02-21T14:25:00.003-05:00

FONTANA, Calif. -- Carl Edwards ran a lap at 179.635 mph Saturday morning to win the pole for the Stater Brothers 300 for the NASCAR Nationwide Series.
Kyle Busch was second fastest with Michael McDowell third, Mike Bliss fourth and Greg Biffle fifth.
The Cup Series cars don't get onto the track until 5:15 p.m. Eastern for their final practice before Sunday's Auto Club 500. That will be after the Camping World Truck Series race, where Busch also starts from the pole.
The weather looks good for the rest of the day. There are some high clouds but the sun will be popping in and out as the afternoon goes on. Tomorrow's forecast still looks pretty good. There was some worry that rain could be moving in late in the day on Sunday, but the latest updated forecasts indicate that's probably not going to happen.
In case you missed it late Friday, Brian Vickers' team decided that it needed to change engines in the No. 83 Toyota after Vickers won the pole for Sunday's race. Vickers is still officially the pole-winner for this race, but he will have to drop to the rear of the field for the start of the Auto Club 500. That means the inside line will move up, putting Jamie McMurray on the inside of Row 1 when the green flag flies at 6:20 p.m. Eastern.

Hendrick teammates top California practice

2009-02-20T17:14:00.004-05:00

FONTANA, Calif. -- Jimmie Johnson's Chevrolet was easily the fastest in Friday's first "open" practice session of the season at Auto Club Speedway.

The three-time defending Sprint Cup champion ran a lap at 181.892 mph to top the chart in the session prior to qualifying for Sunday's race. Time trials begin at 6:40 p.m. (Eastern).

Jeff Gordon, Johnson's Hendrick Motorsports teammate, was second fastest at 180.873 mph. Greg Biffle, David Reutimann and Ryan Newman rounded out the top five.

Travis Kvapil was fastest among the go-or-go-home cars. He was 15th fastest overall, just ahead of AJ Allmendinger and Tony Stewart.

There are 48 cars here, which means five won't make the race. If nothing changes from practice, Tony Raines, Todd Bodine, Sterling Marlin, Mike Garvey and David Starr would fail to qualify.

The slowest car among those in the top 35 was the No. 20 Chevrolet driven by rookie Joey Logano.

Exploring another side of the NASCAR drug policy

2009-02-20T13:22:00.004-05:00

FONTANA, Calif. – It’s hard to take any position that even suggests opposition to drug testing in any manner, and it’s hard to try to have any kind of nuanced opinion on the matter, either.

Like a lot of things in our culture, people want to keep things simple on this issue. If you’re using drugs, you should be punished. If you’re not using drugs, you should be absolutely willing to be tested at any time for any reason. Otherwise, you must have “something to hide.”

On Thursday NASCAR revealed the name of a Sprint Cup team member who had been suspended for violating the sport’s substance abuse policy following new, stricter drug testing implemented this year.

On the one hand, you have to understand why NASCAR released the name. One goal of any drug policy is deterrence, and the idea of having yourself identified as a violator would seem to have that impact. If you don’t want to have your name announced, don’t use drugs.

Another reason is that if NASCAR hadn’t announced the name and then someone had found out about the suspension, it might have been a much bigger story than it is.

But there is another side to this.

We don’t know what substance it was that this person was found to have used that violated the policy. NASCAR hasn’t come out with a specific list of what’s OK and what’s not, and there are people in the garage who’re scared to take just about anything for fear of winding up being singled out as a “druggie.”

What if you’ve got a runny nose and you decided to take cold medicine? Will that trigger a positive if you happen to be selected for random testing that day?

Another question is whether the true intent of a policy should be punishment instead of treatment. If a crew member tests positive, should the first action be to suspend him or her indefinitely or should it be to try to work with that team employee to address whatever situation he or she might be in?

I know that a lot of you will say that the first thing ought to be getting an offender out of the sport, and if you’re talking about a driver or somebody who has his or her hands on the race car that’s going to be on the track with 42 others, then there’s a safety issue involved. So it is hard to defend someone who tests positive. That’s not my intent.

But I am just wondering if it wouldn’t be more productive, in the long run, to have a policy that doesn’t have “indefinite suspension” as the penalty for a first offense. Maybe the first offense should trigger some sort of mandatory counseling and/or treatment program, paid for by NASCAR, to address the issue while not necessarily turning every positive test into a media event.

Academy Award for scheduling ... NASCAR!

2009-02-19T06:56:00.000-05:00

The next two weekends are, I believe, particularly important for NASCAR in a lot of ways.

Last year's Daytona 500 went pretty well. The season got off to a pretty good start with the 50th running of the sport's biggest race and there was some momentum as we headed out West to Auto Club Speedway and then on to Las Vegas.

Then, the California race weekend was a disaster. A combination of bad luck with the weather, bad decisions by NASCAR and just plain bad leadership by the people running the California track made for a simply awful weekend that lasted well into the evening on Monday with both the Nationwide and Cup series races being completed on that day.

Then came Las Vegas, where Carl Edwards won but then faced major penalties for a rules violation and Jeff Gordon had a scary wreck that exposed a weakness in the safety features that had been left incomplete when the Vegas track was redone. SAFER barriers were not in place on the wall that Gordon's car hit, and thankfully safety features of the new car helped prevent him from serious injury.

This year's season didn't get off to as good of a start as last year's did. The rain-shortened Daytona 500 left a lot of questions that fans would like to see answered. A lot of what happened was out of anyone's control, but the fact that the 500 started at 3:40 p.m. is not one of those things. The late start limited options on resuming the race after a rain delay and NASCAR needs to look very seriously at starting its races earlier as a result of the lessons taught by what happened Sunday evening.

That's why the start time for Sunday's race at California makes absolutely no sense. The start time is listed at 3 p.m. Pacific time, which is 6 p.m. Eastern. The green flag will probably more in the 6:15-6:20 range. That's pitiful.

There's no reason to start a race that late in the Pacific time zone, especially this weekend. The race won't be half over when the Academy Awards show comes on television. Why would Fox want to compete with the Oscars for viewers? I know you're thinking there's not a big crossover audience, but the idea of moving races around to get more viewers is to attract people who wouldn't automatically be inclined to watch. That's not happening against the Oscars.

It's like NASCAR is tone deaf. Fans are SCREAMING about the late time starts. Television networks pay a lot of money to the sport and their wishes should be considered. But those wishes shouldn't be outright commands. There's a balance and right now I think NASCAR's on the wrong side of the scale.

It's also important that we see some good racing over the next two weekends.

The car of tomorrow isn't going away, and the teams are still learning about it. But given the state of things in the NASCAR economy right now, two straight weeks of races where the leader can't be touched is the absolute worst thing the sport needs right now.

There is intrigue going into these two races. Without testing, nobody really knows how good any team is going to be. It could be that a team or two has found something in the offseason that will be so good they will even be surprised at how well their cars go. Other teams might try things that don't work. That could jumble things up, and NASCAR needs something like that.

NASCAR needs in the worst way two weekends' worth of nice weather, good racing and compelling storylines from its inital trip West this season.

Daytona rain left TV ratings bump high and dry

2009-02-17T14:02:00.003-05:00

Nobody from NASCAR would ever come right out and say this, so I will. One factor behind why the plug was pulled so fast on Sunday night's Daytona 500 was television ratings.

Fox Sports announced the ratings results Tuesday and the race got a 9.2 national rating with a 19 share. That means 9.2 percent of all households were tuned to the race at an average point during the telecast, and that 19 percent of households where the television was in use was watching Daytona.

Fox points out that the average viewership of 16 million was higher than the average viewership for the Final Four (15.4 million viewers), Beijing Olympics (15.2 million), 2008 NBA Finals (14.9 million), Kentucky Derby (14.2 million) and the final round of The Masters (13.1 million) and US Open (12.1 million). Last year's Indianapolis 500 drew 7.2 million viewers.

But here's where the rain comes in. Last year's race got a 10.2 rating and had 17.8 million viewers. Part of that was because the rating grew from 10.4 to 12.1 in the final half-hour of racing. It stands to reason that more viewers would show up for the finish of the race. That's one reason the 500 was started at 3:40 p.m., so that it would end around 7 p.m. at the beginning of prime time.

This year, the rain came just after 6:30. The rating hadn't yet begun to build as rapidly as it might have. And when the racing stopped, Fox and NASCAR knew that people all across America were tuning out. Even if the race had restarted, it was going to be at least a couple of hours before it resumed because it would take that long to dry the track.

If Fox continued with its coverage through a rain delay of that length, viewership would have plummeted and the whole average rating would have dropped, too. By ending the broadcast as quickly as possible, Fox minimized the loss of ratings as much as it could.

Does that mean that somebody from Fox told NASCAR to pull the plug? Or even asked for that to happen? Not necessarily. But television is an important part of the NASCAR business equation, and the people making the call on whether the race would be resumed are part of the NASCAR business leadership. They understood that viewers were clicking away or would be if it appeared a long delay was in order.

NASCAR had plenty of other reasons to make the decision it did. There are a lot of bad things about a decision to resume a race at 10:30 or 11 p.m. -- or even later. You've got fans parked everywhere around the track and you need people to help them get out of there. You have major roads closed off in anticipation of the mass egress following a race. In this case you had information suggesting it might keep raining for a while, too. Television wasn't the only factor. It might not have even been a major factor. But it was a factor.

The race had the highest ratings in Greenville, S.C., with a 21.2. Greensboro was second at 19.9. Charlotte was sixth behind those two as well as Dayton, Indianapolis and Knoxville. The rating in Charlotte was a 15.6.

Ticket deal for May races 'til 9 p.m. Tuesday

2009-02-16T19:00:00.004-05:00

It took Atlanta Motor Speedway just 15 minutes to sell 1,000 at $17 each Monday morning to mark Matt Kenseth's Daytona 500 victory in the No. 17 Ford.

Now Lowe's Motor Speedway is stepping up with a Kenseth-related offer. From 5 to 9 p.m. Tuesday, the Charlotte track will sell five tickets to the NASCAR Sprint All-Star Race and the Coca-Cola 600 at the special price of five for $50. That offer is good for the first 1,700 tickets sold in that four-hour period.

"Matt won his first Cup race at Lowe's Motor Speedway and now he's notched another special win with the Daytona 500," said Marcus Smith, president and general manager of Lowe's Motor Speedway. "In honor of his season-opening win in the No. 17, we're keeping our ticket office open late."

The tickets are in the Jewel Box and Toyota Fourth Turn Terrace grandstands. Tickets are available at the Lowe's Motor Speedway ticket office from 5 - 9 p.m. or by calling (800) 455-FANS or (800) 455-3267. The first 50 fans who purchase the "5 for $50" special at the ticket office will receive a Matt Kenseth die-cast collectible car.

It can't be the Daytona 380

2009-02-16T11:42:00.002-05:00

Charlotte Observer sportswriter Ron Green Jr. offers these thoughts on Sunday's Daytona 380, er, 500:

If the Daytona 500 is truly the biggest event in NASCAR racing, it can’t end prematurely because it’s raining.

They wouldn’t call the Super Bowl after three quarters because of lightning. They’d wait around until they could finish it.

The U.S. Open isn’t over until 72 holes (and sometimes 18 more) are complete, regardless of the weather and the inconvenience.

It rains all the time at Wimbledon but they wouldn’t call the championship match with someone leading two sets to one. Postpone it, sure. But end it? Nope.

I know the way the Daytona 500 ended Sunday night followed NASCAR’s rules, such as they are. But it’s not the Daytona 380, it’s the Daytona 500 and it’s a race on which legacies are supposedly made.

Who’s making the decisions, Bud Selig?

If it’s as big as everyone says it is – and I’m a fan of the Daytona 500 – it needs to be run to its proper conclusion.

Sure, it would be a royal pain to bring everyone back on Monday to run 48 laps. But it would be worth getting it right.

This isn’t meant to take anything away from Matt Kenseth, but the guy led one green-flag lap and happened to be in front when rain clouds arrived. Had they run the last 48 laps, imagine what might have happened with Dale Jr. out there.

It’s one thing to cut short a race at Richmond or Pocono.

But not the biggest race of the year. There’s a reason it’s called the Daytona 500.

No excuse for what Dale Jr. did

2009-02-16T10:26:00.001-05:00

This crash during Sunday's Daytona 500, started when Dale Earnhardt Jr. (88) bumped Brian Vickers (83), took out several of the race's top contenders.

DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. -- There are no excuses for Dale Earnhardt Jr.

He messed up Sunday. Actually, he messed up several times. He missed his pit stall. He stopped his car on the outside line of his pit box. He put himself and his team in a deep, deep hole and he was doing whatever he could try to dig himself out of it.

And then he really messed up.

On Lap 146, heading down the backstretch, Earnhardt was trying to put himself in position to be the first car a lap down. He made a move to the inside and Brian Vickers, also battling for that same position, saw him coming. Vickers, doing the same thing all drivers do in restrictor plate races, moved down the track to block There's a double yellow line down there, and nobody can go below that to make a legal pass. Not even Earnhardt.

Earnhardt's move was thwarted. His only real option was to back out of his throttle and either try to push Vickers up past the cars to their outside or try to go around Vickers on the high side.
But Earnhardt took another path. He went below the double-yellow and put himself in a position to do something that caused a problem. Which is what he did.

Here's the point. What Vickers did was a racing maneuever. That fact that his car is where it was had nothing to do with him making an error in decision or judgment.

The same cannot be said for Earnhardt. He messed up. He made the mistake. Nobody is saying he tried to wreck half the cars that had the best chance to win the race. Doesn't matter. That's what happened.

And he's going to have to take the heat for it.

His fans have already started making excuses for him and that's fine. That's what fans do. But this one is on Dale Jr.

The question now is what he and his team do about it. Daytona is over and the results are in. Now it's time to go to California and Las Vegas and the races beyond that and funnel the frustrations over what happened in the 500 into something productive.

People are going to argue about what happened in Daytona until there's another race for them to argue about. If Earnhardt starts winning, the error he made Sunday won't amount to much in the long run.

But for now, its THE topic. And for now, this one's on him.

First Keith Urban, then an online chat

2009-02-15T12:16:00.002-05:00

DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. -- It was raining when I finally got out of bed this morning in Daytona, but at the time that was the least of my problems.
I was supposed to be in the infield at the track at 8:45 a.m. at ESPN's pit studio to do a thing on "Outside the Lines." The show started at 9 and I was supposed to be on live at 9:09.
When I opened my eyes, the clock in my condo said 8:09. That could not be right. I had set my alarm for 6:30 a.m. but, being the genius I am, forgot to turn the actual alarm on. So the clock was not lying.
I took a drive-by shower and decided not to shave. I figured a little bit of stubble would be better than new nicks for those viewing in high-definition. I dressed, bolted for the car and fought my way into the track by 8:40. It was pure luck that I got there that fast. I made it to the studio just a couple of minutes late and did my little deal on the air.
Not the kind of stress you need on race morning in Daytona.
It was raining pretty good out on the beach when I left but here at the track it hasn't really rained a lot as of 12:20. There's rain all around us on the radar, and there's no telling if we'll get the race in on time without delays or anything. It just depends on how lucky we get. I am trying to stay optimistic.
The highlight of the morning has been Keith Urban's appearance in the media center. Instead of just doing a press conference, he came in and did two songs and took question. He sang the old America song "Sister Golden Hair," took some questions, and then sang "Sweet Thing," his own new song.
Unlike a lot of people who make a living in the music business these days, this guy can carry a tune and he plays the guitar well. It was actually cool and he seems like a nice guy. Nicole Kidman was in the room, too, and somebody asked Urban what his favorite racing movie is. Kidman, of course, was in "Days of Thunder" with her ex-husband, Tom Cruise, who also is here at the track today.
Urban was very clever with his answer. He paused for a minute and said, "Cars." Which, of course, is a very good racing movie.
On the subject of racing, I was honored to shake the hand of a true racing legend in the media center today. Mr. Raymond Parks, the car owner for 1949 NASCAR champion Red Byron, was here and I got a chance to tell him how he honors us with his presence.
We're still holding our breath here hoping the rain stays away enough for us to have a Daytona 500 today. I am scheduled for a live online chat at 1 p.m. on charlotteobserver.com, so come find us over there.
Happy race day, I hope.

Are you 'NASCAR smarter' than a 4-year-old?

2009-02-14T11:45:00.002-05:00

As the day finally arrives to begin the new Sprint Cup season with the Daytona 500, you’ve already heard the preseason predictions from just about every kind of “expert” you can think of.
Except, perhaps, from a 4-year-old.
So, just to leave no stone unturned, we present the 2009 NASCAR forecast from Jack, a 4-year-old from Denver, Colo., whose grandfather lives in Charlotte and whose parents contacted me this week to tell me how much their son loves racing.
Jack has been following NASCAR since he could walk. He’s got posters all over his room and he already knows how to get to racing sites on the Internet.
Before the season last year, he predicted which drivers would make the Chase and he got eight out of 12 right. I think I got nine last year.
This year, Jack believes that there will be three drivers in the Chase who were not there last year – Jamie McMurray, Ryan Newman and Kurt Busch.
He thinks Carl Edwards will not only win the Cup Series championship but will sweep his way to the Nationwide Series title as well. Jack has Ron Hornaday as the Truck Series champion.
Jack also predicts that Joey Logano will be the rookie of the year and that David Ragan will win his first race.
As for big surprises this year, Jack said he thinks Ryan Newman will have big-time success with his new team at Stewart-Haas racing, that Jamie McMurray will go to Hendrick Motorsports at the end of the season and that Jimmie Johnson will become a father.

Sad news from outside the Daytona bubble

2009-02-13T19:17:00.002-05:00

DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. -- Speedweeks at Daytona can become an exercise in total immersion if you let it.
This is the 13th year I've been coming down here and the 10th year that I've been married, and I learned long ago to make your Valentine's Day plans idiot-proof so you don't let them slide in the middle of all this mess.
One bad thing about the disconnect is that you can miss things you wish you hadn't, and if not for the kindness of people back home that's what would have happened to me about the passing of Frank Heafner.
Mr. Heafner, 86, died Thursday at the Cleveland Regional Medical Center.
"The impact that he had on early day racing was formidable," H.A. "Humpy" Wheeler said. "He gave Bobby Isaac his first winning ride and he was known for the great flathead Fords he built that won so many races at places like Greenville, Columbia, Cowpens, Gaffney, Robinwood and so on. He also built flatheads for Ralph Earnhardt before Ralph started building them himself."
Wheeler said that in the 1980s he located in Illinois the car in which Isaac first won. Wheeler took the car to Mr. Heafner in the Cherryville area and Mr. Heafner restored it in Isaac's honor. Bill Elliott drove that restored car on a makeshift dirt track Wheeler had made in the woods near Lowe's Motor Speedwqay for a story it Car & Driver magazine.
The funeral will be at 2 p.m. Sunday at Crouse United Methodist Church. Burial will be in City Memorial Cemetery, Cherryville.

Almirola, Kenseth, Gordon fastest in 2nd Cup session

2009-02-11T15:46:00.002-05:00

DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. -- Aric Almirola's lap at 191. 436 mph topped the speed chart in Wednesday's second Sprint Cup practice session at Daytona International Speedway.
Matt Kenseth was second best at 191.347 mph with Jeff Gordon third. Kyle Busch also topped 191 mph on a lap during his afternoon run.
Michael Waltrip got loose and slid across the track into Jamie McMurray's Ford during the session. Both cars were damaged but it was not immediately clear if either would have to go to backup cars. If they do, they would start at the rear of the field for today's Gatorade Duels.

Dodges fast in Cup practice

2009-02-11T12:05:00.002-05:00

DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. -- The fastest Dodge in Daytona 500 qualifying on Sunday was Reed Sorenson's No. 43, which was only 28th fastest. But things were looking up for the Dodge boys after drafting practice Wednesday morning.
Kasey Kahne was fastest at 190.944 mph in his No. 9 Dodge with Kurt Busch second in the No. 2 Dodge and Sam Hornish Jr. third best in the No. 77.
Casey Mears had the fastest Chevrolet, fourth best overall. Michael Waltrip had the fastest Toyota, fifth best overall, one spot ahead of rookie Joey Logano. Logano's crew, however, had to work on some cosmetic damage to the No. 20 Toyota after Logano brushed the wall.
Matt Kenseth was seventh fastest and best among the Fords. Jamie McMurray, Mark Martin and David Stremme rounded out the top 10.
Mike Skinner was fastest among the go-or-go-home cars in the No. 23 Chevrolet at 188.770 mph.
Ryan Newman apparently lost an engine in his Chevrolet during the session.
The first Truck Series practice of the season is about to begin on another sunny, warm day at Datyona.

Time for the rumble to return at Daytona

2009-02-10T18:04:00.001-05:00

DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. – The Speedweeks lull ends Wednesday with cars back on the track at Daytona International Speedway.
The garage was actually a busy place Tuesday with Nationwide and Truck series teams unpacking their haulers and getting their cars through the inspection process before they get on track.
The weather here has been spectacular since about midday Friday when it finally warmed up. It was sunny all day Tuesday with balmy breezes. As I write this, I am looking out the window and can see a gentleman chasing what looks like about an 18-month-old boy along the edge of the surf. They let cars drive up and down the beach here and there has been a steady stream of traffic out there much of the day.
I haven’t been down to the sand because I’ve been fighting (unsuccessfully, I might add) the Daytona Crud for the past few days. Going to the laundry when you feel good is an unpleasant chore. Going to laundry sick is, well, a suckfest.
I always look forward to Thursday during Speedweeks because the Gatorade Duels usually wind up being fascinating races.
The top two finishers among the go-or-go-home cars race their way into the Daytona 500 field, and then after that you go back to speeds to determine who else makes the show. It’s not being overly dramatic to say that there are at least eight to 10 teams here who want to try to run a full season here but know that if they don’t make the Daytona 500 field they’re just about dead in the water at that point.
One question I get asked all of the time is why a Martin Truex Jr. or a Mark Martin would even bother to run in the 150-mile races. They have front-row spots for the 500 assured, so they have nothing to gain and everything to lose. The answer is that these guys are racers, and every competition is a way to measure yourself. Yes, the Gatorade Duels wind up being a great test under racing conditions, but that’s only a small part of it. If there’s a race to be run, there’s a race to be won. If you don’t have that mentality you never get to this level to start with.
* * *
Sad news from the world of freestyle motocross racing this week as Jeremy Lusk, a 24-year-old California, died Tuesday from head injuries he suffered while trying to land a backflip in competition in Costa Rica.
Lusk, who won a gold medal at the 2008 X Games, was hurt Saturday when he failed to complete a rotation while attempting a backflip and slammed head-first into the dirt.
* * *
Atlanta Motor Speedway is playing “Racing Roulette” with the price of some tickets for its Kobalt Tools 500 on March 8.
Beginning at 9 a.m. Monday, fans can buy up to two tickets for the Atlanta race for the price of the winning car number in Sunday’s Daytona 500 until the first 1,000 are sold. After that, you can buy one ticket for the regular price and get the second for the 500 winner’s discount price. That offer is good until 1 p.m. Tuesday.
Last year Ryan Newman won the race in car No. 12 and AMS sold the 1,000 quickly. This year, the No. 1 car of Martin Truex Jr. is on the pole and the No. 5 of Mark Martin starts second, so there could be some real bargains. Should David Reutimann win in the No. 00, the first 1,000 would be free. But if Carl Edwards wins in the No. 99, the price won’t go up – the specially priced tickets will go for no more than $50 no matter who wins.
For more information or to purchase Racing Roulette tickets following the Daytona 500, fans can visit https://webmail.charlotteobserver.com/exchweb/bin/redir.asp?URL=http://www.atlantamotorspeedway.com/, call (877) 926-7849 or go through Ticketmaster.

The baffling calculus of Daytona 500 qualifying

2009-02-08T13:15:00.001-05:00

DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. – Qualifying for the Daytona 500 is beginning as I write this early Sunday afternoon, and with any luck I will be finished trying to explain how things work for this race.
I am going to REALLY over-explain this because it’s so convoluted. I’d ask you try to stay with me but I know that’s not possible. Not because you can’t but because there’s no good way to explain it.
The first thing to know is there are now 56 cars entered. James Hylton won’t attempt to qualify because he didn’t complete a lap during Saturday’s practice sessions. That means that each of Thursday’s Gatorade Duels will have 28 cars.
OK, as we start this remember that you have to separate things when it comes to 500 qualifying. You can’t worry about the starting positions in either the Gatorade Duels or the Daytona 500 until you first determine who’s going to be in those races.
In today’s qualifying, the two fastest cars – no matter which ones they are – will get the front-row starting spots for the Daytona 500. The fastest car will also start from the pole in the first Gatorade Duel. The second fastest car will be on the pole for the second of Thursday’s 150-mile qualifying races.
OK, now it starts getting tricky.
For the cars in last year’s top 35 in car owner points, their standing in those points determines which 150 they’ll be in. Cars in odd-numbered positions will be in the first Duel, cars in even-numbered positions in the second.
You should know, though, that Juan Pablo Montoya and Aric Almirola have effectively switched points from last year. Montoya now has the points earned by the No. 8 team last year and Almirola has the points from the No. 42. That means Montoya is 14th and Almirola is 25th.
Also, the No. 41 team is not around this year. No other team has its points. It was 33rd last year, so that means Robby Gordon moves up to 33rd, Scott Speed is 34th and Marcos Ambrose is 35th.
So that means the first 150 will include Jimmie Johnson; Greg Biffle, Carl Edwards, Jeff Gordon, Joey Logano, Matt Kenseth, David Ragan, Kasey Kahne, Jamie McMurray, Kurt Busch, Mark Martin, Paul Menard, Almirola, John Andretti, Michael Waltrip, Sam Hornish Jr., Robby Gordon and Ambrose. If one of those drivers is second fastest today, he moves to the second Duel.
The second Gatorade Duel will have Carl Edwards, Kevin Harvick, Jeff Burton, Denny Hamlin, Kyle Busch, Dale Earnhardt Jr., Montoya, Martin Truex Jr., David Stremme, Brian Vickers, Reed Sorenson, Elliott Sadler, David Reutimann, Bobby Labonte, Ryan Newman, Clint Bowyer and Speed. If one of those drivers wins the pole today, he moves to the first Duel.
Now comes the fun part.
If the two-front row spots are filled by top 35 cars, that will leave 18 cars in one race and 17 in the other. If that happens, the fastest go-or-go-home car would go into the second race to even things out. The remaining cars would then fill the next spots in each duel, alternating between them. The second-fastest go-or-go-home car would go in the first duel, the next fastest in the second and so on.
If the two front-row spots are filled with go-or-go-homers, you’d have the same thing but with 19 cars in one race and 18 in the other.
If a go-or-go-home car gets a front-row spot, that would leave 18 cars in each duel and the Duel fields would be filled by speeds with the next fastest go-or-go-homer in the first Duel, the next fastest in the second Duel and so on.
When all of that is done, you have 28 cars in each duel. At that point, the speeds of those 28 cars relative to each other determines how they’ll start each Duel.
From that point, it’s all about who makes the 500. But my head hurts already and there are cars on the track. We’ll save that part for another day.

Elliott backs it up in second practice

2009-02-07T15:11:00.002-05:00

DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. -- If anybody wondered whether Bill Elliott had drafting help or had something else going on when he led Saturday's first Daytona 500 practice session, Elliott answered that question in the second practice.
Elliott went out for one run in the final session and ran 187.950 mph to top the speed chart once again in the No. 21 Wood Brothers-owned Ford.
Does that make Elliott the favorite to win the pole Sunday afternoon?
"You can't tell about this business," Elliott said. "We got to not make any mistakes and see what tomorrow brings."
The Wood Brothers had a good car in practice last year, too, but failed to make the Daytona 500 field. The team believes it has learned something from that.
"I felt nearly this good a year ago standing here at this time." team co-owner Len Wood said. "But we managed to mess it up for qualifying. We burned up a gear. We have tried to go over it a number of times. We've talked about not beating ourselves this year because last year we beat ourselves."
Only the front-row starting spots for the Feb. 15 Daytona 500 are officially up for grabs today. Beyond that, however, the three fastest go-or-go-home cars will also ensure themselves of Daytona 500 spots with their speeds.
Martin Truex Jr. was second fastest in Saturday's late session with Dale Earnhardt Jr. third, Kyle Busch fourth and Ryan Newman fifth. Mark Martin, Bobby Labonte, David Reutimann, Aric Almirola and Tony Stewart rounded out the top 10.

Elliott, Labonte lead first Daytona 500 practice

2009-02-07T12:44:00.003-05:00

DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. -- The Wood Brothers didn't make the field for the Daytona 500, but if Saturday's first practice for this year's race is any indication that might not be a problem this year.
Bill Elliott ran a lap at 187.645 mph in the No. 21 Ford in the two-hour practice and wound up first on the speed chart as the session ended. Elliott has won the Daytona 500 pole four times in his career, the last time in 2001 in a Dodge.
The Wood Brothers have had the No. 1 starter in 11 races at Daytona International Speedway, including seven in a row in a span from 1969 through 1971 that included No. 1 starting spots for Daytona 500 qualifying races.
Bobby Labonte was second fastest in the opening 500 practice at 187.414 mph in the No. 96 Ford. Both of those cars are powered by Roush-Yates built engines.
Dale Earnhardt Jr., Martin Truex Jr. and Kyle Busch rounded out the top five in the session. Rookie Joey Logano had the sixth best time.
Sunday's qualifying will fill only the top two positions in the field for the Feb. 15 race. Beyond that, however, the three fastest cars among the go-or-go-home entrants will ensure themselves of being in the 500 once the field is set after Thursday's Gatorade Duels.
Elliott, Tony Stewart and Scott Riggs had the three fastest laps by go-or-go-home cars in the first practice.
Today's second practice is scheduled to begin at 1:30 p.m.

Daytona 500 quaifying order is out

2009-02-07T10:42:00.002-05:00

DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. -- Jeff Gordon's No. 24 Chevrolet is scheduled to be the first car on the track Sunday in qualifying for the Daytona 500.
The draw for qualifying order was held Saturday morning, with Gordon's team getting the first slot. Kasey Kahne, David Stremme and Bobby Labonte will be next. Jimmie Johnson is scheduled to go out ninth. Carl Edwards has the No. 17 spot and Dale Earnhardt Jr. is set to go out 30th.
Cars in the top 35 go first followed by the 22 go-or-go-home cars. Brad Keselowski goes out first among the cars that have to race their way into next Sunday's race. James Hylton is the last car scheduled to go out.
Practice for Daytona 500 has begun at the track. Fifteen minutes into the two-hour session we've had 25 cars make their first runs. Bill Elliott's Ford is at the top of the list at 10:50 am with Dale Earnhardt Jr. second.
Here's the qualifying order for tomorrow:
1. Jeff Gordon; 2. Kasey Kahne; 3. David Stremme; 4. Bobby Labonte; 5. Kurt Busch, 6; Brian Vickers; 7. John Andretti; 8. Mark Martin; 9. Jimmie Johnson; 10. Robby Gordon; 11. Juan Pablo Montoya; 12. Kevin Harvick; 13. Aric Almirola; 14. Greg Biffle; 15; Scott Speed; 16. Reed Sorenson; 17. Carl Edwards; 18. CaseyMears; 19. Michael Waltrip; 20. David Reutimann; 21. Jeff Burton; 22. Paul Menard; 23. Ryan Newman; 24. Jamie McMurray; 25. David Ragan; 26. Elliott Sadler; 27. Sam Hornish Jr.; 28. Martin Truex Jr.; 29. Martin Ambrose; 30. Dale Earnhardt Jr.; 31. Denny Hamlin; 32. Matt Kenseth; 33. Joey Logano; 34. Clint Bowyer; 35. Kyle Busch.
(go-or-go-home cars)
36. Brad Keselowski; 37. Jeremy Mayfield; 38. Mike Garvey; 39. Kirk Shelmerdine; 40. Mike Skinner; 41. Travis Kvapil; 42. Mike Wallace; 43. Tony Stewart; 44. Bill Elliott; 45. Geoff Bodine; 46. Kelly Bires; 47. Terry Labonte; 48. Boris Said; 49. Derrike Cope; 50. Regan Smith; 51. Joe Nemechek. 52. AJ Allmendinger; 53. Norm Benning; 54. Tony Raines; 55. Carl Long; 56. Scott Riggs; 57. James Hylton.

First practice over at Daytona

2009-02-06T16:52:00.002-05:00

DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. -- The first Budweiser Shootout practice is over at Daytona International Speedway.
There were no incidents, even though a cars did get a little wiggly a time or two during the 45-minute session. There was a caution near the very end of the session when a piece off David Reutimann's Toyota flew off.
Lap speeds are pretty much pointless in a restrictor-plate pracitce because it depends so much on who is where and who is pushing whom in the draft. But for the record, the fastest lap was turned by Kyle Busch at 191.453 mph in his No. 18 Toyota. Jimmie Johnson, Matt Kenseth, Reed Sorenson, AJ Allmendinger and Dale Jr. were next on the list.
There's another one-hour practice to come at 6:30 p.m.

Daytona entry list comes in at 57

2009-02-06T12:34:00.004-05:00

DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. -- Despite the tough economy, nobody ever really expected there to be a shortage of Sprint Cup cars for the Daytona 500. And there won't be one.
The final entry list for the Feb. 15 race came out Friday with 57 cars on it. That means 14 of them will not make the field for the 51st running of NASCAR's biggest event.
There will be 22 cars competing for eight open spots beyond the top 35. Time trials on Sunday will begin the process of determining who's in and who's out, but the lineup won't officially be set until after Thursday's Gatorade Duels.
Here's a list of the 22 go-or-go-home cars that are entered:
No. 08 Boris Said (Ford)
No. 09 Brad Keselowski (Chevrolet)
No. 14 Tony Stewart (Chevrolet) -- Stewart will be first in line for the former champion's provisional if needed.
No. 21 Bill Elliott (Ford)
No. 23 Mike Skinner (Chevrolet)
No. 27 Kirk Shelmerdine (Toyota)
No. 28 Travis Kvapil (Ford)
No. 36 Scott Riggs (Toyota)
No. 37 Tony Raines (Dodge)
No. 41 Jeremy Mayfield (Toyota)
No. 44 AJ Allmendinger (Dodge)
No. 46 Carl Long (Dodge)
No. 51 Kelly Bires (Dodge)
No. 57 Norm Benning (Chevrolet)
No. 60 James Hylton (Dodge)
No. 64 Geoff Bodine (Toyota)
No. 66 Terry Labonte (Toyota)
No. 71 Mike Wallace (Chevrolet)
No. 73 Mike Garvey (Dodge)
No. 75 Derrike Cope (Dodge)
No. 78 Regan Smith (Chevrolet)
No. 87 Joe Nemechek (Toyota)

For sale or not for sale? Point is it should be one or the other

2009-02-05T21:25:00.001-05:00

DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. – Here’s my complaint about all the points swapping that went on with Sprint Cup teams over the past few weeks.
Points should either be for sale or they should not be for sale. I don’t care which way you do it, but pick one or the other.
NASCAR decided to draw the line at allowing Phoenix Racing to “acquire” the points from the No. 41 team to give to Brad Keselowski this year. The plan was to run Keselowski, who’s not even in Cup full-time yet, in No. 09 Chevrolets as a fifth team under the Earnhardt-Ganassi Racing banner.
So James Finch, the owner of Phoenix Racing, would have been listed as the owner of a team that was owned last year by Chip Ganassi but would have been run this year by the merged Ganassi-Teresa Earnhardt team.
Keselowski, though, drives in the Nationwide Series for JR Motorsports and is in the pipeline to be a Cup driver at Hendrick Motorsports down the road. The fact of the matter is that any car Keselowski drives in a Cup race this year is going to be built by Hendrick Motorsports – no matter whose name is on the title.
All of that, apparently, was too much for even NASCAR to let slide.
Now NASCAR is perfectly OK with two other charades.
Bill Davis sold his racing operation to Mike Held and Marty Gaunt, who said they don’t plan to run the No. 22 in 2009. In a separate deal, Davis is now a minority partner in the No. 77 team in a deal called Penske Championship Racing. That means the points from the No. 22 go to Sam Hornish Jr.
So if the No. 77 team gets fined this year, Bill Davis is going to be the owner who’s fined. How much do you want to bet Roger Penske will write that check if that happens?
What’s even more ridiculous is that Clint Bowyer is in the top 35 with a new team because of a partnership between Richard Childress and Bobby Ginn.
Bobby Ginn? If Ginn had to buy into the team at RCR (like that happened), I sure hope Childress didn’t take a check.
It’s a joke. NASCAR tried to spin this as a way for people like Bill Davis to get some value out of what he put into racing. I have no problem with that. But if NASCAR is going to let a car owner treat owner points like an commodity for sale, then say that and let people make outright deals and be done with it.
Pick a side and stay on it. That’s all I ask.
* * *
NASCAR media day had a few interesting moments.
Carl Edwards told us that he went to an auction in central Missouri and wound up buying a 425-acre farm. “Somebody said, ‘Hey, there is this land being auctioned off, and I said, ‘Let’s go check it out.’ We get there, and I ended up buying it,” Edwards said. Edwards said he’ll probably have beans, or corn, planted on some of the land. Some of it he’ll use for hunting with his friends. Edwards said he’s not really much of a hunter, but “I like sitting there and looking.”
Tony Stewart said he’s has invited A.J. Foyt to come to this year’s Daytona 500. Stewart is using Foyt’s traditional number, 14, on the cars he’ll drive and own this year. There is a stipulation, however. “A.J. is not allowed near any laptops,” Stewart said. Foyt once famously destroyed a laptop computer on pit road at Indianapolis.
Jimmie Johnson said he got the stitches – five of them – out of the finger he cut while using a knife to try to put a hole in his fire suit during the Rolex 24. Johnson was trying to make a hole for a cooling hose. “I had the bright idea to flip it (the knife) over and then I should have realized, ‘You know you’re going to cut yourself why are you doing this but I didn’t and still tried to do it and it went through it,’” Johnson said.

Bristol adds celebrity/legends race

2009-02-05T11:40:00.000-05:00

Darrell Waltrip, David Pearson and Junior Johnson racing again at Bristol?
That’s going to happen on Saturday, March 21, at the first “Saturday Night Special” during Food City 500 weekend.
Legendary drivers will be paired with celebrities in the 50-lap race that will benefit charity and give fans a stroll back down memory lane.
Celebrities will start the race and run 15 laps. After a break, the racing legends will take over and run the final 35 laps. The legends will start in the same order their celebrity partners finish the first segment.
Drivers will be in late model stock cars. The winning team will have $25,000 donated to a charity of their choice. Second place is worth $10,000 for charity and the other entrants will each have $5,000 donated to their charities.
“We made a decision over the winter to make what we believe is the best fan experience in race even better,” Bristol track president and general manager Jeff Byrd said. “We believe having these celebrated drivers back on a track where they all have won in a stock car does that. These guys helped make Bristol.”
Saturday’s schedule will now include a 100-lap late model race, the Scotts Turf Builder 300 for the Nationwide Series and the celebrity/legends event.
“It has been a while,” said Johnson, who won one race as a driver and 20 as a car owner at Bristol. “But I think I can still turn some laps around this place. Darrell better buckle up.”
Harry Gant, Sterling Marlin, Jimmy Spencer and Phil Parsons are expected to compete. Invitations have also been sent to several others. “We fully expect more drivers to be added to this list,” Byrd said.

NASCAR, drivers should make time and place for autographs

2009-02-04T18:37:00.003-05:00

DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. – Athletes and/or celebrities should be glad to sign autographs anywhere and anytime because without the fans they would be nothing and wouldn’t have all their money and things that come with it.
That’s such an easy stand to take. It’s also gutless.
But coming up with realistic guidelines for when someone who’s famous should be expected to grant an autograph request is nearly impossible. That’s because there are an infinite number of circumstances that come up if you’re talking about every situation in which every famous person comes in contact with every person wanting an autograph.
It’s fair to say that fans ought to treat athletes and celebrities as human beings. Fans always should politely ask for (and not demand) an autograph in a context that respects a celebrity’s space and privacy. Celebrities should understand that fans don’t know if they’ll ever get an opportunity to see a famous person again, and therefore should have a little extra tolerance if a fan comes off as a bit too eager.
I think that it’s OK for an athlete or celebrity to say no to an autograph request if he’s in an airport or a restaurant or somewhere with his friends and family if that’s what he chooses to do. He doesn’t need to be a jerk about it, but if you’re willing to risk losing a fan by saying “no,” in that situation I think that’s fine.
This subject comes up as a result of a little kerfuffle that cropped up in racing during the run-up to the 2009 NASCAR season.
On the NASCAR Sprint Media Tour hosted by Lowe’s Motor Speedway, officials from the Speedway Motorsports Inc. tracks talked about how they hope drivers will do more to help tracks and the sport weather a rough economy this year by being more accessible. NASCAR president Mike Helton and driver Dale Earnhardt Jr. both responded by saying that the drivers are already as accessible as or more accessible than their counterparts in other endeavors.
In the big picture, it’s true that drivers should do as much as they can to help sell their sport. They have a big stake in NASCAR’s success and the time and effort they invest in meeting fans and helping sell tickets will only pay off for them down the road.
But the legitimate issue the drivers have, I think, is this far-reaching expectation that they must make themselves available at all times in all circumstances to pose for pictures with or sign an autograph for anybody who wants one.
Think about it. Let’s say you see a driver in Wal-Mart in the Charlotte area on a Tuesday night with his wife and kids. Is he on the clock? Is he not allowed to go to Wal-Mart and not have it turn into an appearance because somebody recognizes him and the next thing you know he’s drawn a crowd? The same thing is true at the track. If you’re a fan and you’re in the garage during a practice session, you’re in the race teams’ work place. That’s neither the time nor the place for an autograph session.
One problem is that some tracks will “upsell” tickets to fans that promise them “access” to the drivers. That might mean the garage area or something like the FanZone here at Daytona. If a fan pays $75 for that access, he’s going to expect something out of that. The track may not come right out and say “here’s where you can meet and talk to you favorite driver,” but that’s the implication.
The way to fix a lot of this, I think, is to provide a structure – to provide that time and that place where the driver and the fan know that autographs are the purpose. It’s something that would be relatively easy to do.
Every day there is qualifying for a NASCAR Sprint Cup race, each driver knows that 30 minutes after the last car runs he has to present himself at some designated place inside the track for an autograph session. The session lasts two hours. Drivers know not to schedule sponsor appearances or fan club gatherings in that window. If you miss the autograph session, unless there’s a specific exemption granted you forfeit all practice for your team the rest of that weekend.
Tracks sell tickets to qualifying as they do now. Admission to each autograph session is $10. Half the money from that goes to the NASCAR Foundation. The other half goes to a local charity designated by each track.
As fans enter, they can request a wristband for any driver’s autograph line. Each driver has a maximum of 100 wristbands. If your favorite guy’s wristbands are gone, you can pay your $10 and get somebody else or you can leave without paying. If a driver has nobody in line and you want to get him without a wristband, that’s fine, too.
But understand that when the two hours are up the drivers are free to go and be with their families and friends. And from that point on, for the rest of the weekend, drivers are told not to sign autographs in the garage or on pit road – no matter what. NASCAR policy.

Dateline: Daytona Beach (And so it begins)

2009-02-03T19:40:00.002-05:00

DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. – If I hadn’t let it get dark before I sat down to write this blog Tuesday night, I could have honestly told you I was looking at the ocean beyond the sands of Daytona Beach out the window of where I’ll be staying the next two weeks.
Even though it’s way too chilly to frolic – even if I were one predisposed to frolic – it was nice to be able to see the water when I got here today. A lot of the days during Speedweeks begin before the sun is up and end well after it’s down, so I won’t be spending much time gazing out that window at the ocean.
But at least I know it’s there.
* * *
Jeremy Mayfield has announced plans to run a full Sprint Cup season as the driver and co-owner of Mayfield Motorsports.
His Toyotas will carry the No. 41, but the car will not have the owner points amassed by Reed Sorenson with that number at Chip Ganassi Racing last year.
Mayfield said the suspension of testing and the car of tomorrow helped him get into position to field a team along with co-owner Gary Smith. Smith is chairman and chief executive officer of Big Red Inc., and that company’s All Sport brand of energy drink will serve as the team’s sponsor.
“Team ownership is something I’ve always wanted to pursue,” said Mayfield, who has five career Cup Series victories. “Things have really fallen into place this year with the NASCAR rule changes and with All Sport coming on board as a partner.”
Tony Furr is the crew chief and Triad Racing Technologies will supply the engines and chassis to support his racing efforts.
“We’re here for the long haul,” said Mayfield. “This isn’t something I’m going into with short term aspirations. Together with All Sport, we’re going to compete this year with the goal to build a solid team for many years to come.”
* * *
Darlington Raceway wants fans to choose the most memorable moment in the track’s 60-year history. Voting has begun at darlingtonraceway.com.
The nominated moments are the inaugural Southern 500 in 1950, Ned Jarrett’s record 14-lap victory margin in the 1965 Southern 500, Richard Petty moving past his father, Lee, to first on the sport’s all-time victory list with Richard’s 55th career win in 1967, first Darlington wins in 1968 for South Carolina natives David Pearson and Cale Yarborough, Darrell Waltrip’s dramatic win over Petty, Pearson and Bobby Allison for Waltrip’s first superspeedway win in 1977, Pearson’s 105th and final career win in 1980, Dale Earnhardt’s first Darlington win in 1982, Bill Elliott’s 1985 Southern 500 victory that earned Elliott the Winston Million bonus, Jeff Gordon’s first Darlington win in 1995, Jeff Burton’s win in the 50th Southern 500 in 1999, the dramatic fender-banging finish to Ricky Craven’s 2003 win over Kurt Busch and back-to-back wins in 2005 and 2006 by Greg Biffle.
Frankly, I am not sure about some of those nominees. Darlington has a lot of great history. But the choice for me comes down to Elliott’s 1985 win and the Craven-Kurt Busch battle in 2003. The 2003 race was epic, no doubt, but Elliott’s win in 1985 to earn $1 million from R.J. Reynolds was a big, big moment for the sport.
* * *
Briefly: Sherry Clifton, who was the race promoter of Hickory Motor Speedway for more than a decade, is the new director for the NASCAR Whelen Southern Modified Tour Director. Clifton has racing in her blood. Her father, Hal, is the brother of short-track legend Tommy Houston. …Golden Corral restaurants will sponsor Travis Kvapil’s car in the Daytona 500. …The third annual Speed Performance Awards show will air for the first time Thursday at 10:30 p.m. The show will also repeat several times after that – 7 p.m. on Feb. 11; 2 a.m. on Feb. 12; 3 p.m. on Feb. 13 and 2 p.m. on Feb. 17.

Points gymnastics will make you flip out

2009-02-02T18:30:00.001-05:00

I’ve been a supporter of NASCAR’s top 35 rule since its inception. I think it’s a fair way to make it more likely the teams that commit to running a full schedule are protected from missing races because of the vagaries of qualifying.
That’s not a very popular position among some fans, who’re under the incorrect impression that putting only the fastest 43 cars each week is the best way to run the NASCAR railroad. It has never been done that way in this sport, not for any significant period of time, and it never should be in my mind.
Btu the top-35 rule is hard to defend when NASCAR allows the kind of gymnastics that seems to be going on with owner points this offseason.
It’s reasonable for there to be an orderly way for teams to transfer points when it changes drivers. It’s fine with me if Yates Racing wants to take the points earned by David Gilliland and Travis Kvapil last year and give them to Bobby Labonte and Paul Menard – as long as Yates Racing has the same number of top 35 spots for this year as it earned last year.
If Richard Childress Racing wants to start a fourth team, that’s fine. But RCR had three teams in the top 35 last year and that’s how many should start this year in it. If Childress wants to put Casey Mears with the No. 07 team and have Clint Bowyer go to the new team, that’s fine. But Bowyer needs to go hard in the first five races to get into this year’s top 35 and not get an exemption through some kind of elaborate deal.
It doesn’t look as if we’re going to have a Daytona 500 entry list until Friday, and according to Bob Pockrass of SceneDaily.com a lot of stuff will be going on up until the last minute. Nobody knows more about this points tomfoolery than Pockrass.
Pockrass says that somehow Phoenix Racing has secured a top-35 spot for Brad Keselowski in the No. 09 Chevrolet. Apparently that’s comes from one of the total of six slots that Dale Earnhardt Inc. (four) and Chip Ganassi Racing with Felix Sabates (two) had at the end of last year and now control as the merged Earnhardt-Ganassi team.
Teams aren’t supposed to be allowed to have a financial interest in more than four teams. You can field a fifth car for someone who plans to run as a rookie the following year, but the plan supposedly was for Keselowski to run seven races – the maximum allowed for such a prospect – in a fifth Hendrick Motorsports car. Then came word Keselowski was going to run 10 more for Phoenix. So he’s a rookie in training for two teams? And he’s going to run Daytona with an “affiliation” with Earnhardt-Ganassi, supposedly, even though we all know he’s in the Hendrick pipeline?
Pockrass also says that teams are sniffing around trying to “buy” the points earned by the now-defunct No. 22 team at Bill Davis Racing. The assets of that team were bought by people who’re keeping the engine-building part of the company going, but they’re not racing the 22. That should be that. If points aren’t for sale, then don’t let them be sold.
If Earnhardt-Ganassi Racing wants to run John Andretti in a fourth car with the points from the 15 car last year, that’s OK. Earnhardt-Ganassi should have four spots because they had six and four is the maximum for one team.
That means the points from the 22, the 01 and 41 from last year should be out of the picture, period. That would put Marcos Ambrose in the 47 (with Michael McDowell’s points), AJ Allmendinger in the No. 44 (with the No. 10’s points) and Sam Hornish Jr. in the No. 77 in the top 35 to start the season. And that should absolutely be that.
* * *
Briefly: Rockingham Speedway has added another event to its schedule, the Cherry Bomb 200 on July 4. The doubleheader will have the Frank Kimmel Street Stock cars, which raced in the Polar Bear 150 on Jan. 1, running 100 laps beginning at 10 a.m. That will be followed by 100 laps for the American Speed Association’s late model series. …Sports Business Journal reports that Fox Sports’ projections for NASCAR advertising sales are about 25 percent off of last year’s pace. Three of the top five advertisers on NASCAR telecasts last year were Ford, Toyota and General Motors at a total of about $44 million. All expect to spend less this year. …Robert Auton, the father of Truck Series director Wayne Auton and Sprint Cup official Buster Auton, died Sunday at age 75. Known as “Hoot” by most in the NASCAR community, the elder Auton was a long-time NASCAR official himself. The funeral will be held on Wednesday at 2:30 p.m. at Springs Road Baptist Church in Hickory.

It's your turn to direct NASCAR on TV

2009-02-02T10:59:00.000-05:00

I watched the Super Bowl telecast Sunday with a different perspective than a lot of folks because I am sort of related to somebody who was in the NBC production truck.
Drew Esocoff, the unbelievably talented director of "Sunday Night Football," was directing the show Sunday and I thought he did another remarkable job. Drew is married to my wife's cousin Katrina, so maybe I am a hair prejudiced. But this is the guy who also did the swimming at this summer's Olympics in Beijing. This guy does not play around.
The cool thing about Sunday's broadcast, I thought, was that NBC had all of the critical replays from all of the angles necessary for the officials -- and America -- to see that most of those crucial calls wound up being made properly.
That sparked a discussion on Sirius NASCAR Radio this morning about what kind of innovations you see in other sports on television that you would like to see done for NASCAR broadcasts. Two suggestions really sounded good to me.
The first stems from the 360-degree technology that's now being used on football telecasts. During a play, the action can be stopped and the viewer can see what's happening from every angle around the player or point on the field that's involved. A caller pointed out just how cool that would be to show during or in the immediate aftermath of a crash during a stock-car race. I agree with that.
The second suggestion involved pit stops. Television will do a three-shot of three different cars making pit stops at various points on pit road. But since one car gets to pit road before the others, it's hard to compare how the pit stops stack up head to head. The caller on the radio show today said he would like to see pit stops replayed in sync -- from the moment each car stops in its pit stall -- and replayed side-by-side so he can see which crew gets around the car first or does the best job getting to the car when the pit stop begins. I also think that's a good idea.
What different things would you like to see? Now don't say no commercials, because that won't happen in the real world. But is there something you've seen you'd like to see more of, or something you've seen that you'd like to see less of?

Offseason? What offseason?

2009-01-30T22:41:00.003-05:00

I leave Tuesday to go to Daytona Speedweeks, starting my 13th season covering NASCAR in specific and motorsports in general. That’ll be the first official trip for work I’ve made since the 2008 Sprint Cup finale at Homestead-Miami Speedway.
Several of my friends who regularly read this blog will undoubtedly tell me how little they care about what I did this “offseason.” But I don’t mind. It’s nice to know they’re reading.
Anyway, when I started thinking about what I’ve done just over the past few weeks, I have to laugh at all of those folks who think all I do is “watch cars go around in circles.”
Charlotte and the surrounding area certainly is an interesting place to cover motorsports.
Right after the holidays, for instance, I went to Concord and visited the headquarters of DIRT Motorsports. These are the folks who run the World of Outlaws sprint car and late model racing series, which means they put on as many races in as many different places each year as just about anybody.
One of the guys who works there is named Josh Wells. A couple of weeks later, I talked to Josh’s wife, Amber, who works for NASCAR. The reason I wound up talking to Amber is that she was one of the people on the US Airways flight that landed in the Hudson River. A couple of days after she told me her incredible story over the phone I got to meet her in person at the NASCAR research and development center during the Sprint NASCAR Media Tour hosted by Lowe’s Motor Speedway. Seeing Amber there, high and dry, was one of the highlights of that week.
At that same stop on the media tour I also got to meet the young men and women who’re in the 2009 Drive for Diversity class. One of them is a young woman from Texas named Kristin Bumbera, and I walked up to tell her a story.
I was at All-American Speedway in Roseville, Calif., last summer for twin late model features because another Drive for Diversity driver, Paulie Harraka, is a friend of our radio show on Sirius NASCAR Radio. In the first feature, Bumbera and Harraka raced each other bumper to bumper for 20 or 30 laps and both of them had smoke boiling out of the rear ends of their cars because they were running so hard.
I told her that story and about how I gave Harraka grief for losing that battle in the first feature – Paulie won the second. Bumbera’s eyes flashed over and she started telling me about how her car didn’t last in the second feature or things might have turned out different. I went and found Bobby Hamilton Jr., for whose team Bumbera will race this year, and told him I think he’s got a winner.
The day after the media tour ended my wife and I piled in the car and went to Kentucky to see Wessa Miller and her parents, Booker and Juanita. A year ago on the weekend before I left for Daytona, I decided to try to find the family of the girl who in 1998 gave Dale Earnhardt the lucky penny that he had in his car when he finally won the Daytona 500. Wessa was that girl – she was 6 then – and the story I wound up doing is one of my all-time favorites.
The Millers live in Phyllis, Ky., a little town in the very eastern edge of the Bluegrass State. We spent two afternoons with the family, with whom we’ve become friends. People who read about Wessa and her family wanted to help and they’ve contributed a lot of money to penniesforwessa.org, which the Millers have used to keep their van running and fix up their house to help make Wessa a little more comfortable. All they want me to do is make sure everybody knows how grateful they are to all those who helped. Juanita saved every envelope that came with a donation and she worries every day that she hasn’t yet had time to send each of them a thank you note. Rest assured that eventually, she will.
We got back Monday and I went to the N.C. Motorsports Association’s awards banquet, where you couldn’t help but be impressed by the breadth and scope of how far the motorsports industry reaches into my home state.
Tuesday I went to see Ray Evernham’s new museum and shop in Mooresville, where I met the men who’ll help him run East Lincoln Speedway this summer and also talked to my old friend Doug Herbert, who with help from people like Evernham is planning to challenge land-speed records on the Bonneville Salt Flats later this year.
Wednesday I went to Hendrick Motorsports and watched a bunch of people who are all WAY smarter than I am shake a car like it was a can of paint at Lowe’s (hey, it was the 48 car) on a seven-post machine. My aim was to learn as much as I could about how one of those things works, and if I went there every day for six months I might figure out where the off-on switch is.
I was also trying to find time this week to go up to Denver, N.C., to see the shop where the winning car in this year’s Rolex 24 at Daytona was built. Michael Colucci’s JMC Racing, which fields the Porsche-powered cars for the Brumos team out of Jacksonville, Fla., is working out of the Max Crawford shop until Colucci’s new shop there is finished in the next week or so. Because the move is imminent, though, I had to settle for talking to Colucci while he was driving around in a rainstorm in South Florida.
Speaking of Florida, coming up I’ve got another story about something that David Reutimann has bought and donated to a children’s hospital in St. Petersburg that was built in somebody’s garage in Mooresville. It might be the coolest thing I’ve seen since the end of the 2008 NASCAR season.
OK, that’s enough for now.
Besides, I need to pack a suitcase.

Some interesting ideas in new Truck rules

2009-01-29T21:06:00.002-05:00

The NASCAR Camping World Truck Series has been making a considerable amount of noise over the past few days as the series and its teams scramble to get ready for a new season.
The big news, of course, comes in the form of new rules aimed at helping teams manage costs. NASCAR will limit teams to 12 active crew members for each race, a total that includes driver, crew chief and spotter, and will allow only five men over the wall on any pit stop. Teams can no longer change tires and add fuel on the same stop. And beginning after Daytona, they can’t go more than three straight races without using an engine that has been used in a previous event.
Those rules make sense, at least at first glance. I have for a long time wondered why the Sprint Cup Series doesn’t take a cue from the Nationwide and Truck series and set limits on things like how many sets of tires a team can use in a race weekend.
I am not sure an “active crew” limit works in Cup since multicar teams could play all kinds of games with such limits. But I am in favor of just about any idea that takes the racing off pit road and puts it back on the race track
We also now know where Mike Skinner will drive in 2009.
Skinner was with Bill Davis Racing, but when that team was basically sold out of business a few weeks ago Skinner was cut loose on the market.
He has wound up in the No. 46 for Randy Moss Motorsports. That team announced earlier this week it’s switching to Toyotas. Tayler Malsam, who is 19, will drive the No. 81 truck as Skinner’s teammate.
“Being able to bring Toyota over there is the biggest thing to me,” Skinner said. "I've had a great relationship with Toyota and the Tundra brand and support from them since the Truck Series started with Toyota in 2004. To be able to keep that marriage alive and keep Toyota as our partners, that means a lot. That's what I bleed, that's what is in my veins.”
Another veteran driver, Stacy Compton, will race with Wyler Racing in the No. 60 Toyotas this year. Shane Sieg will drive the No. 15 for Billy Ballew Motorsports in the first four races as the team looks for more backing to keep going beyond that. Richie Wauters will work as crew chief with that team while Doug George will work with the No. 51 that Kyle Busch will drive in selected races.
* * *
The No. 96 Fords at Hall of Fame Racing has picked up sponsorship for five more races from Academy Sports & Outdoors. The company will be on the car at Bristol, Darlington, Daytona (July), Atlanta and Talladega. This deal supplements Ask.com’s sponsorship of the team.

Motorsports group salutes Childress, and he salutes the fans

2009-01-28T13:27:00.001-05:00

The primary purpose of the North Carolina Motorsports Association's annual banquet Monday night was to honor Tribute Award winner Richard Childress and the winners of the group's other annual awards. But that wasn’t the whole story.

It was also a reunion of people who don't see each other as much as they'd like and a pep rally for an industry that has taken some economic body blows in the past few months.

"It's hard to argue that North Carolina isn't as critical to motorsports as any other state out there," NASCAR president Mike Helton told several hundred people at the Concord Convention Hall at the Embassy Suites hotel for the program. "Being with this group reminds you that what we do has a home."

Richard Petty, who won the Tribute Award last year, helped present it to Childress this time around. Childress, who marked his 40th year as a Cup Series team owner in 2008, was recognized for his six Cup championships and other on-track accomplishments as well as his other business and philanthropic efforts.

"I remember the gas crisis back in the early '70s and the credit crunch in the early '80s," Childress said.

"We were racing then and we're still racing now. We persevered through those challenging economic times and 9-11.

"There is a lot of strength in this industry and in this great nation, and we'll continue to be strong. And, we should always remember to thank our fans, whose dedication is the reason we've been able to prosper all these years."

Ten other awards were given during the evening:

- Two-year education program, Central Piedmont Community College.

- Four-year education program, Belmont Abbey College.

- Workforce diversity, Winston-Salem State University.

- Regional marketing, Food Lion Auto Fair.

- National marketing, NASCAR's Home Track Campaign.

- Event facilities, Z-Max Dragway.

- Economic development, Mooresville – South Iredell.

- Safety innovation, Be Responsible and Keep Everyone Safe program.

- Small company, SRI.

- Large company, CV Products.

Joe Gibbs -- Racing menace?

2009-01-27T16:26:00.001-05:00

It's a good thing for Joe Gibbs that Arena Racing is not under NASCAR jurisdiction, for there's no doubt that Gibbs might be on double secret indefinite probation and owe a hefty fine after the way he drove this weekend in Hampton, Va.
OK, that's a slight bit of overstatement, but what happened when Gibbs raced Interstate Batteries major domo Norm Miller is pretty darn funny.
The plan was for Gibbs and Miller, two long-time buddies, to compete in a 10-lap match race in the half-scale Cup cars used in Arena Racing. The cars race indoors on a one-tenth mile aluminum track.
What possibly could go wrong?
Miller's company provided Gibbs' racing team with its first major sponsorship deal and the two are long-time friends. They'd raced each other on personal watercraft before, but not in front of people and television cameras.
So the race starts with Miller in a green No. 18 car, of course, and Gibbs driving a black No. 20. Miller started from the pole and Gibbs was chasing him.
After five laps, Gibbs goes into turns 1-2 a little too hard and slaps the outside wall. His car wiggles but he gathers it in and tries to go low into Turn 3.
That's when the fun started. Gibbs got in a little too deep -- ala Joey Logano in the Toyota Showdown the same night -- and the nose of his car hit the left-rear of Millers'.
Now before the race, Gibbs' wife, Pat, had implored her husband to be careful. "Whatever you do don't wreck Norm," she said. "She sponsors your race car."
Well, so much for that advice.
When Gibbs' car hit Miller's, the No. 18 tumbled side over side in a complete roll and slammed into the outside wall. To his credit, Gibbs stopped immediately to make sure Miller was OK. He was OK, but somehow Gibbs was declared the winner.
"I was out of control," Gibbs said, showing another sign he's new at this driving buisness. Drivers rarely acknowledge anything like that. "I had been thinking that I needed to get into the corner deeper."
Miller, remarkably jovial about the whole thing, had a retort for that.
"He got in deeper," Miller said. "He got in behind me and on top of me and underneath me, too."
Here's a link to the video: http://www.wvec.com/video/sportsvid-index.html?nvid=325040

-30-

NASCAR made a call, so it must be 'what-if' time

2009-01-25T13:45:00.001-05:00

If you saw the end of the Toyota All-Star Showdown for Camping World East and West series cars Saturday night, chances are you've decided whether NASCAR made the right call or not.

Me, I am just interested to see that NASCAR did make a call.

You need to check out video replays of the finish on TV or the Internet to get a true appreciation of what happened. But in brief summary, Peyton Sellers had emerged from a three-way battle with the lead with Joey Logano and Matt Kobyluck chasing him over the final laps.

On the last lap, Logano was second entering Turn 3 and dove way low on the track, hoping to pass Sellers. As they came through Turn 4, Logano's car slid up the track and into Sellers' car on the outside. The move took Sellers into the outside wall, crashing him.

Logano righted himself in time to get across the finish line first just ahead of Kobyluck, who had eased back enough to miss the Sellers-Logano incident that he saw developing.

After the race, though, Kobyluck was declared the winner. Logano was penalized and moved to last place for his move.

There are a lot of ways you can go with this one. You could point out, for instance, that Logano's move wasn't particularly different from the much-celebrated move Carl Edwards tried on Jimmie Johnson on the final lap of last season's Cup race at Kansas.

The result, however, was quite different. Edwards went up the track and hit the wall, but he didn't hit Johnson. Johnson went on to win and Edwards finished second.

You could argue, I guess, that if Edwards' move was OK then Logano's should have been, too. But the result does matter. Edwards wound up not doing anything that damaged the chances anybody else had to win. Logano did. It's like in basketball, when you have a "no harm, no foul" concept, and that's perfectly reasonable.

Some people seem to be taking great pleasure in the fact that NASCAR took the win away from Logano because it was Logano. Because he's 18 and already has a Cup ride in the No. 20 Toyotas this year, some fans feel Logano is getting too much, too fast. Some fans go further, saying Logano is NASCAR's newest "chosen one," and find glee that he would be on the wrong side of a NASCAR call.

On the other hand, some fans might see that Logano went all-out to win in what was a non-points event where winning is supposed to be what matters and will find a new appreciation for him.

What I wonder is whether in the same circumstances NASCAR would change the winner of the Sprint All-Star Race at Lowe's Motor Speedway. Given the same circumstances and the same results, the call should be the same. But I doubt it would be.

One last point: The driver who was disadvantaged by what Logano did at the finish Saturday night at Irwindale Speedway was Peyton Sellers. He's the guy who had the lead with just a few yards to go, but he wound up 14th as the last car on the lead lap.

Even in taking the win away from Logano, there was nothing it could have done to make things right for Sellers. So was there any justice, ultimately, in what took place?

Picking is easy, but just on part of first hall class

2009-01-24T18:11:00.002-05:00

Let's review your feedback about who should be in the first class of the NASCAR Hall of Fame when it opens next year.

It comes as no surprise to me that there was a pretty solid agreement that Bill France Sr., Dale Earnhardt, Richard Petty and David Pearson should be in the first class. I think those four are absolute slam-dunks and always have.

It also makes sense that the decision on a fifth inductee is split. Junior Johnson, who would be my fifth pick unless somebody makes a strong case I can't imagine, had only a slight advantage over Lee Petty, the patriarch of the Petty family.

I had Lee Petty and Bill France Jr. in my second year's class, mainly because I think putting a member of each of those families in the hall in the each of the first two years strongly emphasizes their contributions while still touching all the bases.

From that point on, there was a wide range of support. Fireball Roberts, Tim Flock, Smokey Yunick, Cale Yarborough, Bobby Allison and the Wood Brothers were in the next tier. It actually did surprise me a little that Allison and Darrell Waltrip didn't get more support than they did.

Some fans think more than five a year should be inducted. I like that number for two reasons.

First, it ought to be hard to get into the NASCAR Hall of Fame. We'll be seven or eight classes into this and people will still not have made the cut that most everybody agrees deserve recognition.

The second reason is the induction ceremony itself. If you're going to have 10 people going in at once, if you give each inductee his due, then the ceremony is going to last four or five hours. Nobody needs that.

A couple of people complained that I didn't put Bill Elliott on my list of candidates. That's because Elliott is still driving. I did list Terry Labonte, though, and he might do some racing this year. Just to be clear, Bill Elliott will be in the hall as soon as he is eligible.

That got me to thinking about guys who might be in the same category. Which active drivers have already done enough to make them certain hall of famers?

Jeff Gordon, of course, is first on that list. He'll have at least four championships and perhaps somewhere around 90 to 100 wins, if not more, before he's done. That's a no-brainer.

There's Elliott, as I said. I would add Mark Martin, Tony Stewart and Jimmie Johnson to the list. Bobby Labonte is close.

I didn't have Ray Evernham on my list because I still consider him active, too. But he's an automatic. Like him or not, Chad Knaus will be there some day.

Motor Racing Network anchor Barney Hall was on my list and he's still active, but I think Barney is The Man and I couldn't make the list without him.

Maybe Ken Squier, Chris Economaki and Hal Hamrick should have made the list, too, but it's hard for somebody in the media to be objective about the media.

Feel free to keep offering your feedback here, and don't forget that after the list of the first 25 nominees comes out in June fans will get the chance to actually vote on the first five and have those votes count. The fan ballot will count as one of the 48 votes that decide the first group of inductees.

Now this would be a bad sign ...

2009-01-24T11:08:00.001-05:00

There was much talk this week during the NASCAR media tour about the issue of driver accessibility in NASCAR.

Some track owners expect drivers to do more with and for fans to make the ticket-buyer's experience more fruitful. Some drivers have volunteered to do anything they can (within reason, of course) to help in that regard, and NASCAR president Mike Helton said he's proud of the way the drivers make themselves available given the demands on their time.

Still, if you're Dale Earnhardt Jr. or Carl Edwards or Jimmie Johnson, you're never going to satisfy everybody. If you sign 500 autographs, the first person told it's too late to get in line is going to get mad.

But there's another perspective, too. It was offered by National Hot Rod Association Top Fuel champion Tony Schumacher. He was discussing how the NHRA lets fans into what amounts to a team's pit stall as cars are being worked on between rounds. Most drivers stand there and sign autographs during those times, and Schumacher has no problem with that.

The problem, he said, is when you don't have a line of people wanting you to sign.

“When I see a driver with no line, I think, ‘There's your option,'” Schumacher said. “You could suck.”

But, really, what did you expect them to say?

2009-01-22T21:34:00.001-05:00

I could make some of this blog's loyal NASCAR haters happy this evening and rip Brian France and his top lieutenants for their presentation Thursday afternoon on the final stop of this year's NASCAR Sprint Media Tour hosted by Lowe's Motor Speedway.

You know what I mean. I could write something like this:

CONCORD, N.C. - To the great surprise of several hundred of people who've lost their racing-related jobs in the past three months, NASCAR chairman and chief executive officer Brian France said Thursday that everything is just peachy in the sport right now.

That's not what France said. But NASCAR officials declined to dwell on the economic issues facing the sport at Thursday's stop. Video screens at the NASCAR reasearch and development center greeted reporters with the words "NASCAR: Strong Through The Turns" and France and the other officials who spoke tried to keep things upbeat without sounding naive.

I guess some people who think Brian France is an idiot or Satan or whatever would have preferred seeing the chairman wearing sackcloth and ashes or weeping and rending his clothing in some sort of public display of dismay over how things have been going and how they're going to go in the future.

Sorry, didn't happen.

"It has been an interesting and challenging offseason for everyone," France said. "The Daytona 500 is just around the corner, and fans will once again start debating the on track topics rather than the off track topics."

If you hate France, that's called trying to bury your head in the sand. But if you're realistic about it, you have to ask what else there is that he could have really said?

It would do nobody any good for NASCAR officials to sit down with 200 reporters and talk about how bad things are. How would that help anybody?

"Despite the fact that there are no major changes," France said, "the NASCAR management team has been extremely busy this winter working with teams and tracks to face the challenges of the economy and keep our sport moving in the right direction."

That's as close as we got to an outright statement that things have been pretty bleak for a while, but as I wrote before the media tour began the thing NASCAR needs to do right now is begin turning attention away from all that and back to the track.

Good racing and good stories might not help NASCAR's economy turn around, but it sure won't hurt, either.

I am not giving France and the NASCAR brass a pass on their performance. One thing France said particularly didn't sit right with me.

"You know, you're seeing the economy has spotlighted teams that were struggling mostly in performance on the track, and now that sponsorship is even more difficult to come by," he said. "It will spotlight those teams that in the last few years for one reason or another, maybe no fault of their own, circumstances, bad luck or whatever, just simply haven't performed at the level that they need to, and that economic model is under a lot of pressure with sponsorship that is contracting."

Here's that, in English: Some teams haven't been winning might not be worth saving. That's a little Darwinian for me.

Good vibrations and more from the tour stops

2009-01-22T06:24:00.000-05:00

Just a few observations about the NASCAR Sprint Media Tour hosted by Lowe's Motor Speedway:

I don't know that we'll go anywhere this week where the vibe will be better than it was at Wednesday's stop at Stewart-Haas Racing.

Optimism abounds on the media tour, even during these troubled economic times. Everybody expects to have a great season and that's how it should be. What made Stewart-Haas Racing different was that it seems everybody there figures they've wound up in a situation that's much better than they otherwise might have.

Stewart and teammate Ryan Newman both expect to be competitive this year. Whether or not that's what happens is one of this season's great questions.

But there's no doubt that Stewart, Newman and their teammates are embracing the challenge that's before them. Someone there told me a cool story. The new signs for the outside of the shop just went up the other day, and as he was leaving there after dark one day this week somebody saw Stewart pull over, get out of his car and go over and just look at the illuminated sign.

* * *

It just seems so impossible for anybody to come into NASCAR as a new team owner these days and compete with the sport's multicar super teams, but you have to remember that when they started, Jack Roush, Rick Hendrick, Richard Childress and Joe Gibbs all started with single teams.

Gibbs has won championships with Bobby Labonte and Tony Stewart and still has two drivers in Kyle Busch and Denny Hamlin who have to be considered likely candidates to make this year's Chase.

"I think it can be done," Gibbs said when asked if he thinks a new owner could make it today. "But it is different.

"You have people who come to you saying they’d like to be in the business and the difference is when we started we had 17 people, total. Today it would be 50 or 60 anyway. The size of everything makes it tough. You need a partner when you start. But the more healthy teams and the more sponsors it is for the sport."

* * *

I do not know why Mark Dyer left his job as president of Motorsports Authentics abruptly on Wednesday, but I do know it would be a very bad thing for NASCAR if he doesn't find some place else to go in the industry.

Dyer is one of those guys race fans don't know a whole lot about but who does a lot of good things for the sport. Dyer was one of those who helped devise the Chase for the Sprint Cup format and he also helped pushed the idea of having an official NASCAR Hall of Fame. He played a big role in picking Charlotte as the place where that museum is being built.

* * *

Hendrick Motorsports team owner Rick Hendrick got a special gift from his employees at a gathering this week where the team prepared for its 25th anniversary season. The very first chassis built by the team was located and brought back to the shop in Harrisburg, where team members restored it without Hendrick knowing about it.

They painted the body all silver in honor of the silver anniversary season and presented it to their boss.

TV blackouts? Not practical and not very likely

2009-01-21T06:50:00.000-05:00

Take it easy folks. There won't be any local blackouts of NASCAR telecasts. At least not for a while.

Bruton Smith was asked a question Tuesday. Actually, it started when somebody asked him if race tracks maybe got a little too aggressive in adding seats when times were booming in stock-car racing. Smith said he didn't think so, which should come as no surprise because he's built more seats than anybody in the last 15 years or so.

In saying that, Smith said, "Maybe television has become too good." He meant that the quality of racing coverage on NASCAR makes it harder for people like him to convince people to get up out of their recliners and put up the money and energy it takes to actually come to the track.

That question was then followed up by one about whether NASCAR should consider mirroring the NFL policy of blacking out games in a team's home market if the seats aren't all sold.

"That's exactly what should happen," Smith said.

Well, no, it's not.

When you do something, there needs to be a good reason. About the only reason to go back to the practice of local TV blackouts for races is to help the race track sell tickets to people who live nearby. Given all the drawbacks to the overall picture such blackouts would bring, that's not a good enough reason.

It's no surprise that fans would hate that idea. The reason fans hate it is the reason Smith thinks it makes sense. Fans want the option of not going to the race closest to where they live and still being able to see it.

Fans, in fact, feel like they have a God-given right to see it for free on television at their homes. Fans, in fact, think they ought to be able to see it for free with no commercials.

They don't care if that makes no economic sense. They don't have to. They're fans.

Why blackouts won't work these days is that the television networks won't stand for it. First off, two races a year would be blacked out in the Los Angeles market because California Speedway isn't about to start selling out its races. Texas has so many tickets it's not going to have many sellouts, either, and Dallas-Fort Worth is another huge market that Fox, TNT and ESPN/ABC don't want to lose from their ratings.

The money television pays into the sport now is so important to NASCAR's financial structure the sport isn't going to do anything television would hate that bad.

It'd also be hard to come up with a policy on blackouts. The term "sold out" is rarely applicable for races. Grandstand seats can all be sold, but aside from short tracks that have limited or no infield tickets available, tracks will keep selling infield tickets as long as people are willing to buy them, just about.

What constitutes a sellout for the purposes of determining a blackout? It's just too messy.

Blackouts weren't that rare before NASCAR got its first comprehensive television deal in 2001. Charlotte race blackouts were almost always threatened up until the last minute to lure the last few ticket-buyers out of their homes, and some blackouts were never lifted. Indianapolis race fans hardly ever get to see a race live because the speedway there thinks blackouts work the same way Smith thinks they would.

This whole thing is one of those little "media tour moments" that will cause a ripple and quickly go away. Don't lose any sleep over it.

Speedway execs lighten up, but aren't sure drivers should

2009-01-19T21:43:00.004-05:00

I never had been among those who believe that race car drivers need to have fist fights to make NASCAR popular, but then again I don't have hundreds of thousands of tickets to sell each year, either.

A group of men who do have that task gathered Monday afternoon at the NASCAR Sprint Media Tour hosted by Lowe's Motor Speedway to talk about the state of the racing economy and they did have a funny exchange on that very topic.

The men are all the presidents and general managers of the respective Speedway Motorsports Inc. tracks around the country. Eddie Gossage of Texas Motor Speedway, Steve Page of Infineon Raceway, Ed Clark of Atlanta Motor Speedway, Marcus Smith of Lowe's Motor Speedway, Jerry Gappens of New Hampshire International Speedway, Chris Powell of Las Vegas Motor and Jeff Byrd of Bristol Motor Speedway joined their boss, SMI chairman Bruton Smith, on the dais.

Gossage talked about the $20 tickets his track is selling for some of the backstretch seats for its Cup races, saying he knows it would be infinitely harder to get fans to come back once they decide they can't come any more than it would be to give them a ticket they can afford and keep them "from losing touch with the sport."

It's hard to argue that, but it's also true that the business of cutting ticket prices when sales are "soft" right before a race is a tricky proposition. If I paid $100 for my seat last year and then renewed it for this year at that same rate, I don't want to hear that the guy sitting next to me waited until two weeks ago and got his seat for $50.

Sometimes you have to do what you have to do, of course, but that can make it harder to keep those renewal rates up in the 90 percent range that Byrd said he has with his non-corporate clients at Bristol.

Burton Smith said it's really simple to know what to do when times are tough.

"I don't care what you're doing, if you're selling hot dogs on the corner. What you do is work harder," he said, "You sell, sell, sell."

All tracks are doing that, of course. Byrd and members of his staff have literally been going to Food City grocery stores in Tennessee and Virginia and selling tickets to fans in those stores - "one-at-a-timing," as they called it in the movie "O Brother Where Art Thou."

But that doesn't mean the tracks couldn't use a little help, and the ones the folks on Monday's program said they could use some help from are the ones fans really come to see - the race car drivers.

"This idea of running and hiding and not signing autographs, I don't like that," Smith said. "I think we have to overcome that."

Byrd and Gossage said, and their colleagues nodded in assent, that drivers seem more willing to help out with the season coming up than they have been in a long time.

That's when the day's best exchange happened.

"You take Jimmie Johnson," Smith said, speaking of the three-time defending Cup champion. "He's my neighbor and he's a great guy. I like him, I like his wife.

"But one thing that would help would be for Jimmie to get out of the race car and just go slap somebody sometime. He could slap me."

Gossage said he believes the sport is beginning to pay a price for becoming "corporatized" over the course of the past several years.

"These guys are a colorful bunch, but not publicly," Gossage said of today's drivers. "It's nothing that can't be fixed pretty quickly.

"Jimmie could punch somebody. He could hit me, but it would be better if he'd hit another driver. If he wants to hit me, he can hit me."

Smith said it was good of Gossage to volunteer. "Can I hit you?" Smith asked.

As the laughter died down, Gossage said he'd be OK with taking one from the boss.

"I would like to own some car dealerships," Gossage said. Smith owns hundreds of them.

Smith said he doubted that would happen. "I have more lawyers," Smith said.

Gossage thought about that and said, "I think maybe you have hit me a time or two."

Unfortunately, Smith still has a good memory.

"Well," Smith said, "you set me on fire one time."

That's true. When Lowe's Motor Speedway first turned on its lights, Gossage was working for at the track and had arranged to have Smith throw a ceremonial switch that was rigged with some pyrotechnics. A spark from that actually set Smith's hair on fire briefly.

That, pretty much, was the end of discussion.

Who do you love? Name your hall of famers

2009-01-17T22:32:00.002-05:00

NASCAR will induct five people each year into its Hall of Fame in Charlotte, N.C., beginning with the inaugural class in 2010.

We're giving you a list of some of the people who'll be among those considered. We'd like for you tell us who you think should be put into the hall in its first three years.

Add your picks, five for each year, to the comments section of this blog. We'll compile your results and post them next week.

Some of the candidates

Bobby Allison - The 1983 champion won 84 (some historians say 85) races in NASCAR's top series.

Davey Allison - Bobby's son won 19 races in just 191 starts in a career cut short by his tragic death in a helicopter crash in 1993.

Sam Ard - Ard won the 1983 and '84 championships in what is now NASCAR's Nationwide Series before injuries cut his career short. He won 22 times in just 92 starts.

Buck Baker - Won the 1956 and 1957 championships in what is now the Cup series and scored 46 career victories.

Buddy Baker - Known for his prowess on the sport's fastest tracks, Baker won 19 races and recorded the first official closed-course lap topping 200 mph in a stock car.

Geoffrey Bodine - Won 18 races in the Cup series and helped develop several revolutionary changes to the basic NASCAR race car. Also won 55 modified races in one year (1978).

Neil Bonnett - This winner of 18 races was one of the sport's most popular drivers who went on to a career as a television analyst before being killed in a racing crash.

Harold Brasington - Brasington, against conventional wisdom of the day, built NASCAR's first superspeedway in Darlington, S.C.

Red Byron - Won the first championship in what is now the Cup series in 1949 with a leg that had to bolted to the clutch after he suffered injuries as a tail-gunner in World War II.

Jerry Cook - A six-time champion in NASCAR's modified series, he won 342 races in a career that spanned three decades. He still works with NASCAR in an administrative role.

Clay Earles - Legendary owner of Martinsville Speedway, the only track still on the Cup schedule that was part of the first season of that series in 1949.

Dale Earnhardt - A seven-time champion who won 76 races and the hearts of millions of fans who still consider him the greatest NASCAR competitor of all time.

Richie Evans - No driver won more NASCAR championships than Evans, who won nine of them in the modified series - eight of them in a row from 1978-1985.

Tim Flock - Won two championships and 39 races in 187 career starts, giving him the second-best winning percentage (20.9 percent) of all time in the Cup series.

Raymond Fox Sr. - One of the great car and engine builders in NASCAR history, he was a crew chief for such drivers as Fireball Roberts, Junior Johnson, Buck Baker, Buddy Baker and Bobby Allison.

Bill France Sr. - "Big Bill" was the man who brought organization to stock car racing with the founding of NASCAR. He served as its iron-handed and iron-willed president for more than 20 years.

Bill France Jr. - Followed in his father's footsteps and led the sport from 1972 until he turned over the reins to his son, Brian, three decades later. Saw the sport through a period of explosive growth.

Barney Hall - The voice of NASCAR on Motor Racing Network, he has been bringing racing to listeners for nearly as long as NASCAR has existed.

John Holman-Ralph Moody - Owners of the Ford factory-backed team that dominated NASCAR in the 1960s. Their cars won 96 Cup races and two championships with David Pearson.

Harry Hyde - One of the sport's legendary crew chiefs, he worked with Bobby Isaac and Tim Richmond and won 56 Cup races. Hyde also played a major role in helping Rick Hendrick get his NASCAR start.

Jack Ingram - A five-time champion in the NASCAR late model and Busch series, Ingram won 31 races in the latter and was its all-time leading winner when he retired.

Dale Inman - Won eight championships as a crew chief, including seven with Richard Petty. His other time came with driver Terry Labonte.

Bobby Isaac - Won 37 Cup races, including 17 in 1969 and 11 the next year when won the Cup Series championship.

Ned Jarrett - Winner of 50 Cup races and championships in that series in 1961 and 1965. He ran only seven full seasons before retiring as a driver and going on to a long career as a broadcaster.

Dale Jarrett - Won the championship in 1999 and retired with 32 career victories, including Daytona 500 wins in 1993, 1996 and 2000.

Junior Johnson - The winner of 50 races as a driver, he went on to a long career as a team owner and crew chief, winning three championships with Cale Yarborough and three more with Darrell Waltrip.

Carl Kiekhaefer - Although he was a NASCAR team owner for just two years, he was among the first to have a multicar team. His cars won 52 of the 101 races held in 1955-56.

Terry Labonte - The winner of 22 races, Labonte won his first Cup title in 1984 at the age of 27 and then his second in 1996 when he was 39.

Fred Lorenzen - One of the first great stars in NASCAR's superspeedway era, Lorenzen won 26 races in his career highlighted by his tenure with the Holman-Moody Ford factory team.

Banjo Matthews - An accomplished modified driver in his own right, Matthews made his NASCAR name as the builder of race cars. From 1974 through 1985, his cars won 262 of the 362 Cup races held.

Bud Moore - Moore was the car owner for Joe Weatherly's 1962 and 1963 championships. His teams won 63 races in nearly 40 years of competition.

Raymond Parks - The champion car owner in Cup's first season in 1949 and a true racing pioneer. His cars dominated Lakewood Speedway near Atlanta, one of America's first truly great racing ovals.

Benny Parsons - One of the sport's finest gentlemen, Parsons won 21 races and the 1973 championship. He then had a long career as a broadcaster, spreading his passion for racing to fans watching at home.

Jim Paschal - Counted two World 600 (now Coca-Cola 600) victories among his career total of 25 wins. Paschal was among the competitors in Darlington's first Southern 500 in 1950.

David Pearson - "The Silver Fox" won 105 races, second on the all-time list, and three championships. He also won 64 superspeedway poles, first on the all-time list.

Lee Petty - The man who started the Petty dynasty won 54 races and three championships in what is now the Cup series. He never finished lower than sixth in the championship standings.

Maurice Petty - The chief engine builder for the Petty family's team for more than 20 years, he was named mechanic of the year seven times in a career that saw him help his brother, Richard, win five championships.

Richard Petty - "The King." He won 200 races, a record, and seven championships, which is tied for the record. In 1967, he won 27 races, including 10 straight at one point. Yes, those are records, too.

Tim Richmond - One of the sport's most flamboyant personalities, he emerged as a star in 1986 when he got seven of his 13 career wins. He missed the first part of 1987 with an illness, though, and died in 1989 from AIDS.

Fireball Roberts - Known as the sport's first true star attraction, he won 32 races in a 15-year career that ended when he was severely burned in the 1964 World 600, wounds that eventually took his life.

T. Wayne Robertson - In 13 years as president of sports marketing for R.J. Reynolds Tobacco, Robertson led Winston Cup into its modern era of popularity. He helped bring about the sport's all-star event at Charlotte, which will run for the 25th time this year.

Paul Sawyer - Sawyer began promoting races at the state fairgrounds in Richmond in 1955 and guided that track through more than 40 years of great competition and explosive growth.

Wendell Scott - The only black man to ever win a race in NASCAR's top series, Scott won 128 features on short tracks in his native Virginia while racing in an era when his every success came against a strong headwind of racism.

Ralph Seagraves - Seagraves helped bring R.J. Reynolds into NASCAR in 1971, marking the beginning of what is considered the sport's "modern era." RJR's backing of the sport was critical to its survival and eventual growth.

Bruton Smith - Promoted races for two decades before, along with Curtis Turner, building what is now Lowe's Motor Speedway. That track, now marking its 50th season, was the cornerstone for what is now a far-flung racing empire called Speedway Motorsports.

Herb Thomas - The first driver to win two championships (1951 and 1953) also was a three-time winner of the Southern 500 at Darlington. He won 48 races in his career.

Curtis Turner - He won 17 races in his career, but is often said that he never lost a party. One of the most colorful drivers in NASCAR history, many feel he had as much natural talent of any driver who ever lived.

Red Vogt - One of the greatest auto mechanics of all time, he used his talent to make cars go fast when carrying "moonshine" through the Georgia hills and other cars to go fast when they raced in the Atlanta area.

Rusty Wallace - Ranks eighth all-time with 55 career Cup victories. Wallace won the championship in 1988 and also won a total of 18 races in 1993 and '94.

Darrell Waltrip - A three-time champion who won 84 races and never saw a microphone he didn't like, Waltrip has made his name known to a new generation of race fans as a television analyst.

Joe Weatherly - The 1962-63 champion in NASCAR's top series, Weatherly had 25 career wins in that series. He also won three motorcycle racing titles and a modified title before coming to stock cars.

Humpy Wheeler - NASCAR's version of P.T. Barnum, Wheeler has been around the sport since his childhood. He began promoting races at small tracks near where he grew up in North Carolina and went on to help shape Lowe's Motor Speedway into one of NASCAR's most exciting tracks.

Rex White - The 1960 champion of NASCAR's top series ended his career with 28 race victories, leaving him among the top-25 race winners of all time.

Wood Brothers (Leonard and Glen) - Seventeen of the drivers named to NASCAR's list of the 50 greatest of all time have driven cars owned and prepared by the Woods, who were among the first to emphasize speed on pit stops.

Cale Yarborough - Three-time champion and the winner of 83 races in his career, Yarborough was the embodiment of determination in a race car. He won the Southern 500 five times and the Daytona 500 four times.

Robert Yates - A championship-winning engine builder with roots in the Holman-Moody operation, Yates became a team owner and began working with Davey Allison. Eleven years later he won a championship with Dale Jarrett. His other drivers, including Ricky Rudd and Ernie Irvan, top many who's-who lists.

Smokey Yunick - Perhaps the most famous - or infamous - racing mechanic of all time. He worked with Herb Thomas and Fireball Roberts and worked against - and often with great success - the people who wrote NASCAR's rules.

NASCAR changes Shootout again, suffers more foot wounds

2009-01-16T22:43:00.002-05:00

Bless NASCAR's heart, it's trying to fix something that is broken beyond repair and it just keeps digging the hole a little deeper.

The new format it came up with for the Budweiser Shootout at Daytona was never the best idea NASCAR's ever had. It had to come up with something since the old way of qualifying for the event - winning a pole for a Cup race - is now part of a sponsorship deal for a beer company (Coors) that's a direct competitor for Budweiser.

You're not going to have a Budweiser-sponsored event featuring Coors Light Pole Award winners. It's just not going to happen.

So NASCAR decided to let the Shootout "emphasize" the manufacturers by making the top-six Fords, Chevrolets, Dodges and Toyotas in each year's owner points make the field for the next year's Shootout.

The timing of that, of course, turned out awful since manufacturers' involvement in the sport is not actually something some of them want to call attention to right now, but NASCAR wasn't in position to know that last summer when the change was made.

It's sort of a flawed concept anyway, though. Martin Truex Jr.'s team finished 16th in points last season and he's not in the Shootout. But the No. 10 car that finished 37th last year and isn't planning to run a full schedule in 2009 is. Justifying that is a stretch.

Then came Friday's addition of "wild card" teams for each manufacturer, expanding the Shootout field from 24 to 28. NASCAR added stipulations that got Tony Stewart, who drove last year in a Toyota but will start '09 in a Chevrolet for a team he's never turned a lap for, into the Shootout.

You can argue that Stewart's inclusion is sort of righting a wrong, since he's a former winner of the event and under the old format that would have had him qualified.

But what Robby Gordon is going to be allowed to do makes no sense. Gordon would have been in the sixth car eligible among Dodge teams. But he's not driving a Dodge any more. He's switching to Toyotas. Only, he's still got a Dodge left that he's going to drive in the Shootout. And NASCAR is OK with that.

Now Juan Pablo Montoya finished nine spots ahead of Gordon in the 2008 owner points and would have been eligible in the No. 42 Dodge. But Montoya is switching to Chevrolets and his team apparently doesn't want to run a Dodge one more time. I guess you could argue that it's the driver's and team's call, but it's still a mess.

NASCAR keeps talking about how much it loves the fans. If you can't come up with something better for the Shootout format, why not just let the fans vote on who should race in the Shootout? Give the fans 10 picks, by vote. Fill 10 more spots with the drivers highest in the previous year's standings who aren't voted in and run the race.

That's not the best idea in the world, but given the mess NASCAR has on its hands now it clearly isn't the worst.

Worth noting - The USAR Pro Cup Series, which lost Hooters as its title sponsor after last season, has been sold to a group "representing interests closely associated with the Series as well as established organizations within the motorsports marketing community." The series is still looking for a title sponsor, but plans are for the series to be back on the track in 2009. ... Anybody who has bought a ticket to May’s Coca-Cola 600 or who comes to the track and buys one on Wednesday can get a voucher for a ride-along in a Jeff Gordon Racing School car that day from 4 to 8 p.m., while supplies last. The offer is valid for only one ride per ticket account. ...Mike Ashley Racing bought the Matco Tools Top Fuel dragster team from 3B Racing. Antron Brown will remain as the driver of that National Hot Rod Association team's car.

Siegel is right pick, but it will take support

2009-01-15T07:08:00.002-05:00

NASCAR hit a ringing double on Wednesday, making a deal that puts Max Siegel in charge of managing the Drive for Diversity program.

In hiring Siegel, stock-car racing's leadership took a big step toward bringing a level of credibility to its diversity initiative. But as much as I thnk of Siegel, I will tell you right now that his name and his efforts alone can not turn the hire into the home run that NASCAR needs in this important at bat.

Siegel left Dale Earnhardt Inc., where he was president of global operations, to go back to Baker & Daniels, an Indianapolis legal firm where he'd worked from 1992 through 1994. That firm, with Siegel leading the effort, will take over management of the Drive for Diversity program.

In no way do I mean this to be criticism leveled at Access Marketing, which managed the diversity program in its first five years. The folks who ran the program with that company did about as much as they could have given the level of financial commitment the program has received. You can only do so much with what you get.

I hope Siegel's appointment means that NASCAR is going to get serious about diversity. If that's not what happens, I don't think Siegel will stay on the job very long. I don't think he's going to put up with being a show pony for a program if has no real backing.

I've said it before and I still believe that NASCAR needs to put a lot money behind the whole function of driver development, and diversity is a big piece of that process. Developing drivers of all colors and genders is an investment in this sport's future, and especially in these tough times NASCAR needs to put its money where its future is.

NASCAR officials will tell you that they don't think it's proper for the sanctioning body to pick out drivers to support financially over others. But that's the whole reason the Drive for Diversity program was set up to be run by an outside agency like Access Marketing and now Baker & Daniels in the first place. NASCAR supports the program and then the program picks the drivers and administers the financial support.

That structure works just fine, or at least it could. But NASCAR's level of support could be - and absolutely should be - ramped up.

I think 5 percent of every deal NASCAR has or makes with an "official" sponsor should be earmarked for driver development. If it costs a company $2 million a year to be the "official" tofu of NASCAR, then $100,000 of that should go toward driver development.

That sounds like a pittance, but the 5 percent rule should apply to every deal NASCAR makes - including the title sponsorship deal with Sprint and the television contract. Sprint's deal is supposedly right at $70 million a year. That's $3.5 million for development. The television contract averages about $500 million a year. That's $25 million. (All of that shouldn't come out of NASCAR's share of the TV money - the 2 percent should come off first before the drivers and owners (through race purses) and the tracks get their share. Everybody should be contributing to this.)

According to a list on NASCAR.com, there are about 50 "official" sponsorship deals in place. At $100,000 a pop (and that's just a wild guess), that's another $5 million for development. So we're at $33.5 million. Even if that's 10 percent off, we're still looking at $30 million a year that could be used to help develop young drivers.

I think if NASCAR gave Siegel that kind of nest egg and set him loose, the return on that investment would be huge down the road.

Anybody who compares where DEI is today to where it was when Siegel came on board and hangs that on Siegel doesn't even begin to know the whole story. That boat was already taking on water and Siegel bailed as hard as he could. The fact that there was enough of DEI left to merge with Chip Ganassi Racing had a lot to do with what Siegel did there.

Siegel quickly built a lot of respect in this sport, and it's good for NASCAR that he's staying in racing. No industry needs to lose people with Siegel's talent and character, and NASCAR certainly would have missed having a black man like Siegel working with it on one of the most important issues this sport faces.

I have no doubt that Siegel will go to work addressing those issues. If he gets the backing he should get, I have no doubt he will help make a real difference.

Playing the what-if game with NASCAR

2009-01-12T18:20:00.001-05:00

I know that the "what if" game can be one of the most pointless things in the world, but NASCAR developments in the past month or so make it hard not to think about how different things might be if just a couple of things had gone a different way.

** If Adam Petty had not been killed in a practice session at New Hampshire International Speedway in 2000, how much easier would it have been for Petty Enterprises to maintain its racing identity in a way that's profoundly different from what form it will take as part of a merger with Gillett Evernham Motorsports?

If Adam had demonstrated any aptitude at all in a Sprint Cup car, I think he would have be a rival for Dale Earnhardt Jr. in terms of popularity. Popular drivers at that level have a leg up when it comes to landing and keeping sponsors, and with solid sponsorship comes the kind of resources a team needs to run competitively.

** How different would things be, also, had Teresa Earnhardt gone for a deal that would have given Dale Earnhardt Jr. ownership of the team his father started?

It sounded like a far-fetched deal at the time. Why would Teresa Earnhardt give her stepson more than half of a team without Eanhardt Jr. paying for it? But, little more than a year later, that's precisely what happened when Tony Stewart got majority ownership of Haas-CNC Racing. Stewart's connection with the team increased its value to the point where everybody in the deal came out to the good, at least in theory.

It'd be hard to argue that the same thing wouldn't have happened at DEI, wouldn't it? Would DEI be better off than it is now? It certainly seems that way, at least.

** Hindsight is 20-20, of course, but boy, did I back the wrong horse Saturday night.

Originally I wanted to go to the Speedway Club at Lowe's Motor Speedway for the Carolina Clash Super Late Model Series banquet for the 2008 season, but I was brought into the mix for covering the Carolina Panthers' NFL playoff game instead.

As it turned out, it looked like several of the Panthers had other engagements and didn't show up against the Arizona Cardinals. But that's another topic for another blog.

Ricky Weeks picked up $12,500 for winning his fifth straight Clash series title, nipping Dennis "Rambo" Franklin for the title.

Weeks won five races and had 14 top-five finishes. Three of his wins came in the season's six-race championshp series. Franklin had three wins and 13 top fives in his first Carolina Clash series season.

** The American Speed Association's Southeast Asphalt Tour has announced that it will wrap up its 2009 season at the seventh annual North South Shootout Nov. 5-7 at Concord Motorsport Park.

The race will become part of a weekend that already features one of the season's most anticipated races for open-wheel modifieds from up and down the East Coast.

Some big pieces still missing in preseason puzzle

2009-01-10T21:39:00.005-05:00

Now that everything seems to be settled with the merger of Gillett Evernham Motorsports and the race team formerly known as Petty Enterprises, the biggest question still hanging out there is what the merged Earnhardt Ganassi Racing is going to wind up looking like on the race track.

We know that Martin Truex Jr. will drive the No. 1 Chevrolets with Bass Pro Shops as the sponsor. Beyond that, though, everything else is just about a guess.

Juan Pablo Montoya will drive for the team, too. He told us on Sirius NASCAR Radio this week that he'll be in the No. 42 car, as he was last year when it was a Dodge. Earnhardt Ganassi Racing will use Chevrolets.

My guess is that Montoya is going to wind up with Target as his primary sponsor. Target was on the No. 41 car last year and that car has loomed as the major open seat in the sport for the entire off-season. With drivers looking for jobs you would think that if something wasn't going on a driver would have been plugged into that slot by now.

I don't know if the 18-race deal Montoya had with Wrigley's might be combined somehow with the Target deal or if the Wrigley's money might be used on another of the merged team's cars. That's one we'll have to wait on.

When Bobby Labonte announced he had parted ways with Petty Enterprises and the No. 43 Dodges the logical move for him was Earnhardt Ganassi and that "open" 41 seat. Again, if it had been that simple it stands to reason he'd be there already.

What I've heard in the past 24 hours - but have not yet got confirmed from anybody connected well enough with the team for me to swear it's what is going to happen - is that Labonte will wind up in the No. 8 Chevrolets.

Don't know the sponsor, but I've also heard he'll be reunited with one of his former crew chiefs, Doug Randolph, in that deal.

Where does that leave Aric Almirola? Well, sort of in the same boat AJ Allmendinger is in, I reckon. I think Earnhardt Ganassi is trying to put together at least a part-time deal for the No. 41 that they hope could grow into something full time down the road for Almirola. That's what Allmendinger will wind up with if he agrees to go into the "fourth" Gillett-Petty car.

The other thing that's going to be interesting with Earnhardt Ganassi Racing is to find out where the people who had the various leadership positions at Chip Ganassi Racing withi Felix Sabates and Dale Earnhardt Inc. will wind up in the new structure.

Every question you ask about the situation seems to wind up being referred to Ganassi, so you wonder the people from DEI like Max Siegel and John Story fit into the new structure. Or, at least I do.

Team exec: 'It's all settled' with Sadler; Allmendinger deal pending

2009-01-09T10:19:00.002-05:00

Elliott Sadler will remain in the No. 19 Dodges, Reed Sorenson will drive the No. 43 and the team resulting from the merger of Gillett Evernham Motorsports and Petty Holdings is working with AJ Allemdinger on at least a partial schedule in a fourth car for 2009.

Tom Reddin, chief executive officer of GEM, confirmed all of that Friday morning in an interview on "The Morning Drive" on Sirius NASCAR Radio.

"We have been busy," Reddin said. "We're at the goal line now. We're done as far as all the loose parts."

After weeks of rumors, speculation and reports about what might be happening, Reddin detailed much of what will happen as part of the merger.

The surprising development in the story within the past 48 hours has been that Sadler will not be supplanted by Allmendinger in the No. 19. Last week, Sadler's attorney indicated the driver was willing to take legal action alleging breach of contract if that took place.

"Let me put it like this," Reddin said. "I know that in my family every now and then we have our differences. But we get those settled and resolved and we move on. We had some differences with Elliott, but we're a family and we have everything resolved. ... It's all settled and we're moving forward, full bore."

Reddin said the team was impressed with Allmendinger when he drove the No. 10 Dodges for GEM in the final five Cup races of 2008.

"We are working on a deal with him," Reddin said. "We have always wanted to add a fourth car and we have at least and eight-race package for that for 2009. We have sponsors for four cars for Daytona, and we were very impressed with AJ. On the competitive side he just jelled with us and he's a great guy. We hope we can work it out and get four cars on the track at least part of the time (in 2009)."

Reddin said the team has sponsorship sold for "a majority" of the races for the No. 43 that Sorenson will drive. The number for the possible fourth car has not been determined.

Reddin said the name of the merged team is still being determined, but that the Petty name will most likely be part of it.

"Richard (Petty) was up at the shop yesterday with Dale (Inman) and Robbie (Loomis) and we're really excited to have them coming on board," Reddin said. "I think having them will bring a certain level of magic in terms of working with our drivers on the mental side of the game. The difference between being a good driver and being a winner is the kind of thing that Richard can help us with. ... When he walks around the shop people just stop in awe."

Reddin said he believes Chrysler will live up to its racing commitments in 2009.

"Dodge has told us they're 100 percent behind us for 2009," Reddin said. "Looking beyond that, we'll take on a day-by-day basis. There is a lot going on with all the manufacturers.

"But we're a Dodge team for 2009. ... We're counting on that. I think that's a big question for the whole industry."

Arena Racing taking the season off in Charlotte

2009-01-08T14:53:00.000-05:00

There won't be any Arena Racing in Charlotte this season.

Ricky Dennis, the founder and chief executive officer of Arena Racing USA, said that Charlotte remains "an important city" for the indoor racing league, but that he's still looking for the right person or group to own and operate the local franchise.

The league is competing in the Hampton Roads area of Virginia and in Grand Rapids, Mich., this season. The start of the 2008-09 schedule in Charlotte was originally set for November, but was then pushed back until after the first of the year at least before the call finally came to remain dark this season.

"I've always heard it said that if you like the way you're doing things, then keep doing them the same way," Dennis said. "We're talking to a couple of people and we talked to some of our teams down there, and they agreed it would be better to take our time and get the right people in place."

Dennis said part of the evolution has been the realization that what is learned by other minor-league sports franchises applies to the concept of indoor racing, too.

A weekly racing series track, he said, schedules races for a particular night each week and hopes the weather cooperates so people will come out on that given night and buy a ticket. Minor-league baseball and hockey franchises, on the other hand, put greater efforts into season tickets or other ticket packages as well as group sales to even out the weekly ups and downs of attendance.

"We want to reopen down there in the fall of 2009," Dennis said of Charlotte. "So now is the time to get started. It is our desire to discuss right away this auto racing/entertainment business opportunity to anyone interested in a ground-floor opportunity."

If you want to learn more about Arena Racing USA, visit the website at www.ArenaRacingUSA.com.

JR Motorsports secures sponsorship in 2nd series

2009-01-08T06:35:00.000-05:00

The JR Motorsports team picked up some sponsorship in the Nationwide Series on Wednesday when GoDaddy.com expanded its involvement.

GoDaddy.com will be the primary sponsor on 20 Nationwide Series races for JR Motorsports and seven Sprint Cup races with Hendrick Motorsports. It also will be an associate sponsor on Mark Martin’s No. 5 Sprint Cup Chevrolets.

GoDaddy.com will sponsor Earnhardt Jr. in two Nationwide Series races in the No. 5 Chevrolets. It will be on Brad Keselowski's No. 88 Chevrolets for 18 Nationwide races and seven Sprint Cup races in the No. 25 Chevrolet. Lance McGrew will be crew chief for that Cup effort.

Keselowski's Nationwide car now has sponsorship for the full season. Unilever is on the car for 11 races and Delphi Corp. is on for six.

Cars and stars

Darrell Waltrip and Dierks Bentley are among the latest additions to the lineup for the Sprint Sound & Speed festival this weekend in Nashville.

The event begins Friday at the Sommet Center with a concert featuring Montgomery Gentry, Rodney Atkins and Julianne Hough. Saturday includes an entire day of autograph sessions, live auctions and show-car and sponsor displays at the Municipal Auditorium in downtown Nashville.

Dale Earnhardt Jr., Kyle Petty, Michael Waltrip, Ray Evernham and David Stremme will be joined by Waltrip, Ernie Irvan, Denny Hamlin, Aric Almirola, Bobby Hamilton Jr., Brad Keselowski, Burney Lamar, Wayne Taylor, Max Angelelli, Brian Frisselle and Doug Herbert. Bentley is part of the list of country music celebrities now scheduled to attend.

Tickets are available through www.ticketmaster.com or at www.soundandspeed.org. Proceeds go to Victory Junction Gang Camp and the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum.

Briefly

Darlington and Talladega have announced ticket price reductions for upcoming events. Darlington has lowered prices to $35 for nearly 9,000 seats for the Southern 500 in May. Talladega has cut prices on 20,000 tickets in the Gadsden and Lincoln grandstands to $40 for the AMP Energy 500 on April 26.

... General Motors has renewed its sponsorship of Daytona International Speedway and the Daytona 500 on a year-by-year basis but at a significantly reduced rate, the Detroit News reports.

... Scenedaily.com reports that Dover has torn down its inside wall on the frontstretch and replace it with one that includes SAFER barriers. The track will also slightly widen its pit road and add a 43rd stall to it. In the past the 42nd and 43rd cars in the starting lineup had to share a pit stall because there were only 42 spots on pit lane.

... Another National Hot Rod Association Top Fuel team announced it was shutting down Wednesday as David Powers Motorsports and Caterpillar announced they had agreed to end Caterpillar’s sponsorship of the team for driver Rod Fuller. Team owner David Powers said he is selling the Top Fuel and show car program assets.

"During these difficult times, I need to focus on homebuilding," Powers said. "During my 26 years in the homebuilding industry, these are the most challenging times I've been through." Fuller finished sixth in the 2008 standings.

JR Motorsports picks up sponsorship

2009-01-07T21:42:00.002-05:00

The JR Motorsports team picked up some sponsorship in the Nationwide Series on Wednesday when GoDaddy.com expanded its involvement.

GoDaddy.com will be the primary sponsor on 20 Nationwide Series races for JR Motorsports and seven Sprint Cup races with Hendrick Motorsports. It also will be an associate sponsor on Mark Martin’s No. 5 Sprint Cup Chevrolets.

GoDaddy.com will sponsor Earnhardt Jr. in two Nationwide Series races in the No. 5 Chevrolets. It will be on Brad Keselowski’s No. 88 Chevrolets for 18 Nationwide races and seven Sprint Cup races in the No. 25 Chevrolet. Lance McGrew will be crew chief for that Cup effort.

Keselowski’s Nationwide car now has sponsorship for the full season. Unilever is on the car for 11 races and Delphi Corp is on for six.

* * *

Darrell Waltrip and Dierks Bentley are among the latest additions to the lineup for the Sprint Sound & Speed festival this weekend in Nashville.

The event begins Friday at the Sommet Center with a concert featuring Montgomery Gentry, Rodney Atkins and Julianne Hough. Saturday includes an entire day of autograph sessions, live auctions and show-car and sponsor displays at the Municipal Auditorium in downtown Nashville.

Dale Earnhardt Jr., Kyle Petty, Michael Waltrip, Ray Evernham and David Stremme will be joined by Waltrip, Ernie Irvan, Denny Hamlin, Aric Almirola, Bobby Hamilton Jr., Brad Keselowski, Burney Lamar, Wayne Taylor, Max Angelelli, Brian Frisselle and Doug Herbert. Bentley is part of the list of country music celebrities now scheduled to attend.

Tickets are available through www.ticketmaster.com or at www.soundandspeed.org. Proceeds go to Victory Junction Gang Camp and the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum.

* * *

Briefly: Darlington and Talladega have announced ticket price reductions for upcoming events. Darlington has lowered prices to $35 for nearly 9,000 seats for the Southern 500 in May. Talladega has cut prices on 20,000 tickets in the Gadsden and Lincoln grandstands to $40 for the AMP Energy 500 on April 26. … General Motors has renewed its sponsorship of Daytona International Speedway and the Daytona 500 on a year-by-year basis but at a significantly reduced rate, the Detroit News reports. … Scenedaily.com reports that Dover has torn down its inside wall on the frontstretch and replace it with one that includes SAFER barriers. The track will also slightly widen its pit road and add a 43rd stall to it. In the past the 42nd and 43rd cars in the starting lineup had to share a pit stall because there were only 42 spots on pit lane. … Another National Hot Rod Association Top Fuel team announced it was shutting down Wednesday as David Powers Motorsports and Caterpillar announced they had agreed to end Caterpillar’s sponsorship of the team for driver Rod Fuller. Team owner David Powers said he is selling the Top Fuel and show car program assets. “During these difficult times, I need to focus on homebuilding,” Powers said. “During my 26 years in the homebuilding industry, these are the most challenging times I’ve been through.” Fuller finished sixth in the 2008 standings.

Tommy Baldwin plans to roll out new Cup team

2009-01-06T15:53:00.001-05:00

Veteran NASCAR crew chief Tommy Baldwin believes he sees an opportunity in the sport’s current economic climate, so he announced Tuesday that he is starting a new Sprint Cup team in 2009.

The team will be based in Mooresville, N.C., and operate under the Tommy Baldwin Racing banner. Baldwin said the team plans to run full-time in the Cup Series using Toyota cars and engines from Arrington Manufacturing.

"With tough economic times upon us, the timing for starting this team is right," Baldwin said. "Our overhead is low and we have a great group of talented mechanics and specialists to choose from. We can offer sponsors the chance to get into NASCAR Sprint Cup racing at a fraction of the costs, without compromising on-track performance, due to our low overhead."

Baldwin, 41, did not name a driver or a sponsor.

"We will do everything we can to support NASCAR and its fans," Baldwin said.

"We are thankful for the opportunity NASCAR offers as we are able to prepare our own car to compete in one of the nation's top sporting events.

"That's what makes NASCAR so different from the other major sports. It's still attainable to be an owner, if you are willing to put the work in, and I'm no stranger to hard work."

Don't expect 'racy' in newest NASCAR 'reality' show

Before NASCAR debuts a new racing season, a new racing-themed reality series will make its debut Jan. 24 on the TLC cable network.

"NASCAR Wives" will feature four women - DeLana Harvick, Kelley Elledge, Angie Skinner and Shana Mayfield - in one of those behind-the-scenes shows aimed at giving viewers a peek into their "real" lives.

A story in the Hollywood Reporter said that the concept of the show "mixes racing with the 'wives genre' peppering cable primetime, such as Bravo's 'The Real Housewives of Orange County.' But since the show is being produced by NASCAR Media Group, I don't expect it to be quite that - and you'll pardon the pun - racy.

DeLana Harvick, of course, is married to Cup driver Kevin Harvick. Kelley Elledge is the sister and key business adviser to her brother, Dale Earnhardt Jr., and was married to NASCAR crew chief Jimmy Elledge. Angie Skinner is Truck Series driver Mike Skinner's wife. Shana Mayfield is married to Jeremy Mayfield.

The first show will air on the same night at TLC carries the Miss America pageant. The balance of the season will air beginning sometime this spring.

Massaro's role expanding with ESPN

Mike Massaro is coming off pit road, for the most part, and taking on a larger role in ESPN's “NASCAR Now” program.

Massaro will still work as a pit reporter for some Nationwide Series races, but his new main role will be as one of the hosts of the "NASCAR Now" program. He and Nicole Manske will share the primary host role on a rotating basis with Allen Bestwick continuing to lead "NASCAR Now's" Monday roundtable discussion shows.

Vince Welch will become one of ESPN's four primary pit reporters, joining Dave Burns, Jamie Little and Shannon Spake.

ESPN also announced that Marty Reid, lead announcer for ESPN's coverage of the IndyCar Series the past three years, will be the play-by-play announcer for Nationwide Series events for much of the second half of the season, after ESPN begins its 17-race coverage of the Sprint Cup Series.

Jerry Punch will continue as play-by-play announcer for the Sprint Cup coverage and for the Nationwide Series in the first half of the season. The rest of the network's cast of analysts and prerace show commentators will return.

Briefly

Clint Bowyer, the 2008 Nationwide Series champion, will join Jeff Burton and Stephen Liecht in sharing the No 29 Nationwide Series car for Richard Childress Racing in 2009. Crew chief Dan Deeringhoff will move from the No. 2 team that Bowyer drove with last season to take over the No. 29. ... Tickets for Labor Day weekend activities at Atlanta Motor Speedway will go on sale at 9 a.m. Wednesday at atlantamotorspeedway.com. ... Kalitta Motorsports says it will have only one full-time National Hot Rod Association team in 2009, the Funny Car driven by Jeff Arend, unless it finds more sponsors. Doug Kalitta's Top Fuel car will run on a race-by-race basis as the search for backing continues. Top Fuel cars driven by Hillary Will and Dave Grubnic also will not run unless and until sponsorship is found.

Sam McQuagg dies at 73

2009-01-03T18:14:00.001-05:00

Sam McQuagg, the 1965 rookie of the year in what was then NASCAR’s Grand National Series (now Sprint Cup), died Saturday morning. He was 73.

McQuagg competed in 62 races in NASCAR’s top series, getting a victory in the 1966 Firecracker 400 at Daytona in a Dodge owned by Ray Nichels.

He won more than 250 feature races at local tracks, highlighted by his 1963 season at Thunderbowl Speedway in Valdosta, Ga. That year, McQuagg won 35 of 37 features and caught the eye of a woman named Betty Lilly of Valdosta. She gave McQuagg $25,000 and he used that to finance his rookie NASCAR campaign in 1965, when he had five top-10 finishes.

McQuagg was leading the Southern 500 during his rookie year when Cale Yarborough tried to pass him. Yarborough wrecked, flying over the guardrail and rolling several times before ending up in the parking lot. Yarborough was not injured.

McQuagg got a shot with the Dodge factory-backed team in 1966 and then drove for car owner Cotton Owens the following year. At Darlington in 1967, McQuagg wrecked in his own car, rolling several times and going over the guardrail. He scaled back to more local track racing after that and made his final Cup start in the 1974 World 600 at Charlotte..

McQuagg worked as a commercial pilot after retiring as a racer. He was a member of the Jacksonville Speedway and the Georgia Automobile Racing halls of fame.

Patrick, Howard together again in endurance race

Danica Patrick will race in the Rolex 24 for the second straight year, joining the lineup for a car co-owned by NASCAR team owner Richard Childress.

Patrick will compete along with Casey Mears, a former Rolex 24 winner, as well as Rob Finlay and three-time winner Andy Wallace in the Childress-Howard Motorsports No. 2 Pontiac Crawford.

Three days of testing for the Jan. 24-25 event began Saturday at Daytona International Speedway. Three-time defending Sprint Cup champion Jimmie Johnson is among the other drivers participating this year, as are Kurt Busch, Scott Pruett and Juan Pablo Montoya.

Robby and the rally update

The Dakar Rally began its 16-day journey scheduled to cover more than 6,000 miles on Saturday.

NASCAR’s Robby Gordon completed the stage in 2 hours 50 minutes 40 seconds, leaving him 17th in the overall standings, 14 minutes 25 seconds behind the leader. The stage went from the start in Buenos Aires to Santa Rosa de la Pampa in Argentina.

Gillett-Petty merger apparently complete

2008-12-31T12:39:00.001-05:00

While no official announcement has been made, all signs point to the fact that the merger between Gillett Evernham Motorsports and Petty Enterprises is done.

Sources close to the Petty team said Wednesday that all of its employees who were not let go in a round of layoffs earlier this month have been told this is their final official week of employment with that company.

It appears that seven-time Cup Series champion Richard Petty will have an ownership piece along with George Gillett in a company to most likely will be called Richard Petty Motorsports.

That company will field the No. 43 Dodges, likely out of the GEM shops in Statesville and likely with Reed Sorenson as its driver. In effect, what was the No. 10 team at Gillett-Evernham Motorsports will become the No. 43 team.

Boston Ventures, the company that bought majority ownership of the Petty team earlier in 2008, will keep the Richard Petty Driving Experience.

When the Petty team announced that Bobby Labonte was being let out of his driver contract, it said it was in exclusive merger talks with GEM. Spokesman for both the GEM and Petty teams continued Wednesday to decline comment about the status of those negotiations.

Some will see such a merger as the end of the Petty family’s era in NASCAR – an era that goes all the way back to the first race in 1949 in what is now the Sprint Cup Series. But the Petty family technically hasn’t owned a NASCAR team since the deal was cut with Boston Ventures.

GEM has Budweiser as a full-season sponsor for Kasey Kahne in the No. 9 Dodge. It had Best Buy and Stanley Tools as primary sponsors for the No. 19 Dodges that Elliott Sadler drove in 2008. While no official word has come down on this, either, it appears that AJ Allmendinger will replace Sadler in that car for 2009.

Sorenson, who drove for Chip Ganassi Racing with Felix Sabates in 2008, signed to drive for GEM in 2009. It was believed he would go into the No. 10, in which Patrick Carpentier began and Allmendinger finished the ’08 season. That car had sponsorship announced for only a handful of races, however. The No. 43 car from the Petty team lacked full sponsorship for 2009 as well.

Rockingham readies for the Polar Bear 150

2008-12-30T19:18:00.001-05:00

It was a cool, misty morning at Martinsville Speedway. I was walking along, heading into the media center I think, when I ran across Andy Hillenburg.
We started talking about how things were going at Rockingham Speedway, the track Hillenburg bought in late 2007 and brought back to racing life this year. He had built a smaller track out behind the 1-mile oval that people were calling “Little Rock.” It’s almost a copy of Martinsville and it was already getting used by some Cup teams for testing.
Hillenburg and I had been talking for about 45 seconds when somebody from a race team and asked him about the Polar Bear 150. A few minutes later somebody else stopped and asked about that. Before I left, another three or four people had stopped to talk about Rockingham and the race that will be run there Thursday.
I knew the race was scheduled, but it wasn’t until that day that I got an appreciation for just how many people in NASCAR had their eye on the race for street stock cars. In the weeks since, I’ve heard all kind of tales about guys in the sport building cars and getting ready to go to Rockingham for what could be a fun afternoon.
Things actually get started Wednesday with a pair of afternoon practice sessions. There will be a New Year’s Eve party in the garage area beginning at 7:30 p.m., and then the race is scheduled for 1 p.m. Thursday.
The idea, as crazy as it sounds, is to start as many as 99 cars. Three wide. At Rockingham. I’ve heard that about 85 cars were supposed to be there as of early this week, but who knows what the actual number will wind up being. If it’s anywhere close to even 75, I am going to bet you that first set of turns is going to be a doozy.
A lot of people with NASCAR ties are going to be there, either racing or helping a friend race. Hillenburg wants you, the race fans, to come, too.
Tickets are $20 on race day and kids get in free with a paying adult. If you want more information, call the speedway at (910) 205-8800 or visit www.rockinghamracewaypark.com .

Evernham still wants a role in NASCAR

2008-12-30T11:48:00.003-05:00

Ray Evernham called "The Morning Drive" on Sirius NASCAR Radio this morning after his name came up Monday while we were talking about the reports that Elliott Sadler will be replaced by AJ Allmendinger in the No. 19 Dodges next season at Gillett Evernham Motorsports.

Evernham no longer has a major day-to-day role in the team he ran after leaving Hendrick Motorsports as Jeff Gordon's crew chief to help Dodge come back to big-time NASCAR competition. He sold most of his interest into the team to George Gillett and his family and has scaled back more and more over the past couple of years.

Two seasons ago, on the final weekend of the 2007 Cup season at Homestead, I talked to Evernham in the garage and he spoke about his plans to cut back. On that day, he said he reckoned that he was "burned out."

So in talking about what has happened at GEM in recent days, I mentioned that term "burned out" and Evernham wanted to make sure it was clear that he's not down on NASCAR or racing.

Evernham wants to be involved in racing. But as a team owner, he discovered that was a job he wasn't going to be able to do at a level he could feel good about.

"I guess you can say that some of my biggest strengths are also my weaknesses," he admitted. And that's exactly what I was talking about when I said what I said Monday.

Evernham doesn't have a "good enough" switch. You're talking about a guy whose work as Gordon's crew chief help redefined the way Cup teams compete. Evernham and his "Rainbow Warriors" changed the game, helping bring specialization and a level of attention to detail the sport had never seen before. By the time they were done, Evernham and Gordon had three championships together and Evernham had established himself as one of the sport's greatest all-time crew chiefs.

Evernham said Tuesday that "it will probably always haunt me" that he didn't win a championship as a team owner, but he's proud of what he helped build at GEM. He's not sure he agrees with everything that's being done there now, but he also said that it's no longer his call.

As for the situation with Sadler and Allmendinger, there wasn't much he could say. That's pretty much what has been going on with that story since it first surfaced over the weekend. Sadler signed a contract extension in May and my hunch is that as lots of people wearing suits and carrying briefcases are discussing all of that everybody involved has been told to remain quiet until everybody's as happy as they're going to be.

If I wanted to hype something Evernham said, I could use this quote: "When I left as a crew chief I said the only way I would come back in that job is to be Jeff Gordon's crew chief again." But that's not Evernham angling for Steve Letarte's job. It just means that Evernham isn't going to be a crew chief again just for the sake of having that title.

I've suspected all along that one day -- maybe three or four years down the road -- Evernham will find another driver who he thinks has what it takes to be special and he'll help that driver get to the sport's top level. He sort of said that's what he expects, too. "That doesn't mean that one day I won't go to Rick Hendrick or Jeff Gordon and say, 'Hey, I've got a guy that maybe we could do something with.'"

For right now, Evernham is working on getting East Lincoln Speedway -- the short track he recently bought -- ready for a new season. He even got denim overalls, which is apparently the official working uniform of that track, for the job.

Pearce goes the extra mile for charity

2008-12-26T23:25:00.002-05:00

Al Pearce gets around.

He's as good as anybody I've met in my years as a motorsports reporter at finding the most economically efficient -- and often adventursome -- way of getting from one place to the next.

He's also one of those guys who gets an idea in his head and can't get it out until he's done what he's set out to do. That marries nicely with his knack for travel when it comes to what he's been doing for the past few years.

Pearce is now a NASCAR correspondent for Autoweek. He wrote for the paper in Newport News, Va., and has been around the track for nearly 40 years now. Over all of those years he's developed a lot of friends and a lot of contacts.

He was one of the first guys to sign on when Kyle Petty started doing charity motorcycle rides across the country and he decided right from the get-go that Victory Junction Gang Camp was something he not only appreciated, but something he wanted to support. So he got the idea of having one helmet signed by race car drivers who have something in common.

He's done Daytona 500 winners and NASCAR Cup champions. He did Indianapolis 500 winners. Once he gets the signatures of everyone who's still around, he sells the helmet and gives the money to Victory Junction and to Petty's chairty ride. Tony Stewart, for instance, gave Pearce $10,000 for the Indy 500 winners' helmet.

Last year, Pearce decided to go global. His 2008 project was a helmet signed by every living driver who'd won a Formula 1 world driving championship.

He got Phil Hill in late 2007 before Hill passed away. There were 18 other names to get -- then 19 after Lewis Hamilton won his first title in 2008.

So Pearce went to eight countries. He made five trips to Europe. He went to Brazil. He took a ferry across the English Channel. He rode trains, buses and subways. He covered, a friend estimated, about 67,000 miles.

And he got every signature he needed, closing the deal by going to London late in the year to get Hamilton and then going down to Brazil to get Nelson Piquet.

I asked Al the other day if it wouldn't have been cheaper for him to forget about getting the signatures and just give all the money he spent trying to get them to the camp. That depends, he said, on how much he can get for the helmet. But he reckons that through his careful planning and economic travels -- "You'd be surprised at how many places you can find a McDonald's or a Burger King to eat at," he said -- he spent only around $5,000 to complete the project.

Pearce doesn't know yet how he'll sell the F1. He might give it to the camp and let them see what they can get, or he might put in an online auction himself. It seems to me that he could find a bunch of potential customers at the Rolex 24 at Daytona next month. If somebody comes up with an offer that feels like a home run, Pearce might just sell it on the spot.

All Pearce wants to do is get as much money as he can for the helmet, and he doesn't keep a dime.

How much is one single helmet with autographs of 20 world driving champions on it worth? Well, I don't have a clue. But you have to wonder if there's another item of any kind like it anywhere in the world. It's hard to do better than one-of-a-kind.