Catchfence

LOUDON, NH – New Hampshire Motor Speedway showcased the Craftsman Trucks in mid-September and what followed showcased the best and worst of the series. What began as a race for the point lead between Johnny Benson and Ron Hornaday ended in minor point damage to Benson and a fifth win of the season for Hornaday. The win was doubly liberating for Hornaday after a week in which he acknowledged using testosterone and HGH, the kind of scandal usually reserved for Major League Baseball and the NFL but which apparantly won’t bring sanction from NASCAR.

The race was surprisingly good early on, as Benson fought Hornaday for the lead for the better part of ten laps, Hornaday clearly determined to keep Benson out of the lead else Benson would drive off and leave everyone else. But after securing the lead Hornaday was the one driving off and leaving everyone, until green flag stops put Travis Kvapil from a nearly-two second gap to a four-second lead – astonishing considering NASCAR pit speed limits but which graphically illustrates the myth that racing should be considered a “team sport” on the lines of football; while Kvapil’s pit crew was fast, it wasn’t that much faster than Hornaday’s; the gap was made up in pit entry and exit – i.e. the driver was the one who made up the distance more than the pit crew.

The race itself then turned on a later restart in which lapped Trucks knocked Kvapil aside just enough for Hornaday to storm ahead, and amid an epidemic of late crashes the race itself became anticlimatic as Hornaday was uncatchable. The epidemic of late wrecks – one of them brought on after an insane Kyle Busch pass up the middle between three cars racing four abreast entering Turn One – also brought out the hockey game that sometimes is postrace activity – a “Saracen Pig! Spartan Dog!” set-to between the crews of David Starr and Todd Bodine egged on by the PA system’s playing of an old Carl Douglas song about martial arts. If this is what NASCAR had in mind about “getting back to our roots,” the roots should be dug up and injected with pesticide, because the argument can be made until one is blue in the face, but fights are not what make racing great – the Hornaday-Benson battle for the lead is what makes racing great.

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The Camping World 200 also illustrated some of the weaknesses of the series and also that the series’ future contains considerable uncertainty. First there is the issue of series sponsorship, with acquiring a new sponsor for the series showing itself to be of disturbing difficulty. With all the hype about how popular NASCAR racing in general is and how the Truck Series has the best racing, one would think sponsors would be battling one another to sponsor the series. But one needs to remember how NASCAR has treated sponsors over the years, putting the arm on some sponsors to “volunteer” to back a contingency effort by the sanctioning body instead of raceteams. The acquistion of Nationwide for the former Busch Series was reportedly harder than NASCAR expected and it won’t get easier from here on.

Hornaday’s win was his fifth and the seventh in the season’s first 18 races for Chevrolet, but Hornaday’s and Kevin Harvick Racing’s heroics are almost a single-handed effort keeping Toyota from monopolizing the series. In the series’ last 93 races, Toyota has won 43 of them to Chevrolet’s 28, and one of the Chevy teams that contributed to that total – Billy Ballew Motorsports – is now with Toyota. Dodge and Ford’s presence in the series has become a joke – Ford has won 16 times in the last 93 races, not bad but hardly a sufficiently serious effort – and an ominous portent for the series comes with word that Dodge is quitting after this year. Having won just six times the last four seasons, one cannot express complete surprise and it does illustrate the larger problem of Dodge’s NASDCAR efforts, with the horrible mismanagement of Stuttgart and the lack of inter-team cooperation that was supposed to be a pillar for the program.

Toyota’s dominance has clearly come at a price the series can’t afford to pay, and the most graphic illustration of what the series is loisng showed in the starting field – a field with only 33 entries. It was the sixth time this season a Truck race didn’t get to a full field, and there is no sign that will improve for the time being. But given the resulting shrinkage of fields and rising of costs in other series Toyota had raced in (notably Indycars), to have expected anything less would have been foolishness.

It is a disturbing period for a series that began 14 seasons ago with the promise of huge stand-alone popularity. The first few seasons of the series was as a stand-alone series, racing at venues unsuitable for Winston Cup, with an implicit promise that the Trucks would become so popular as to allow some Winston Cup dates, presumably short track dates and dates at tracks like Rockingham, to be moved and replaced with stand-alone Truck Series races, thus “freeing up” Winston Cup for new markets. Indeed, at New Hamsaphire the Trucks were a stand-alone race in the track’s first four seasons hosting the series – when Hornaday won the inaugural Truck 200 at Loudon in 1996, it was run in early September while the Winston Cup series was in Richmond; Andy Houston’s memorable last-lap fight with Greg Biffle at Loudon in 1998 came the day AFTER the 1998 Brickyard 400 in Indianapolis.

But in 2000 the series that was supposed to be rising fast had slowed almost to a crawl, to where NASCAR added Truck dates at Daytona and other big tracks and moved Truck races away from stand-alone dates to becoming just another Winston Cup support series. The result was predictable – the series was treated poorly by the sanctioning body as other touring series have been mistreated; growth not only stopped but a level of retraction ensued; instead of commanding strong or even decent broadcast revenues, the series was pulled onto NASCAR’s in-house cable station, SPEED Television, for exclusive broadcast, a trick that got the NFL in some trouble in 2007 with live games moved to the NFL Network and not available for nationwide over-the-air broadcast but which curiously has not come under scrutiny with NASCAR – and which has done nothing to grow the series.

The 2008 Camping World 200 had some memorable moments, but one can’t help but wonder if the series will produce more of them in a few years.