Catchfence

To say Kyle Busch was angry after being sent to the back at Phoenix is stating the obvious.  Busch might have been the car to dethrone Mark Martin’s surprising rout of the field at Phoenix as he came out of the final pitstop second, then was sent to the back when NASCAR said he was speeding on pit road coming out.  Busch was not the only one caught speeding on pit road, and his crew chief Steve Addington made a point of noting Busch was nose to nose with Tony Stewart on the fateful race to the pit line.

The return of Mark Martin to victory has overshadowed the pit penalty to Busch, and while Martin’s win is a shot in the arm of the sport, the pit penalty to Busch and others brings reminder to those who follow the sport that a major problem with the sanctioning body is a continuing one and one that curiously never gets due attention.  It is the problem of bad rules that get in the way of good competition.

Pit speeding penalties have been a way of NASCAR life since April 1991 and it remains puzzling that the premise behind this rule never seems to be questioned.  NASCAR first imposed a pit speed limit after groping through the first six races of 1991 with rules designed to lessen mass pitting and thus improve pit safety.  Yet with pit speed limits one is hard pressed to see where pit safety has really been improved, considering pit crashes that have occured the years such as at Texas and Homestead in 2001 and at Talladega in September 2003; there have certainly been other such incidents and near-incidents since then.

Pit crowding has long been an issue – for twenty years now, in fact, and the genesis of this present problem remains a rule that never gets questioned by the Race-Stream Media – closing pit road when the yellow comes out.  With the passage of time it isn’t difficult to forget that pit road safety was nowhere close to the issue it has been since NASCAR mandated closing pit road in March 1989, this following a pace car/scoring issue involving Rusty Wallace and Darrell Waltrip at Atlanta that month.  Before this rule leaders would periodically dive into the pits before taking the yellow, and pit crowding was less frequent.  It was after this rule was implemented that pit safety suddenly became a major problem that ultimately led to pit speed limits.

It would seem that pit speed limits would not be necessary if NASCAR were to revoke the rule closing pit road – keep pit road open at all times beyond catastrophic blockage; let the leaders dive into the pits before taking the yellow or after, and let them pit without an artificial speed limit.   Given generally better pit safety before the pit closure rule, it seems highly unlikely that pit safety would be harmed.

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The pit closure and speed limit rules are two examples of bad rules hurting good racing, and NASCAR’s semi-annual Talladega stops always seem to bring out bad rules and/or bad officiating to a more graphic extent than elsewhere.  Talladega this decade has seen by far the best racing in NASCAR, averaging 44 lead changes in the last eighteen races; only IRL’s races at Texas, Chicago, Kansas, and Kentucky have matched Talladega for sustained nose-to-nose combat up front.

But Talladega has also seen a plethora of bad rules and bad officiating stemming from them.   Last October was among the more egregious examples of both Talladega’s superior level of racing and NASCAR’s inferior level of rulesmaking and officiating.  Regan Smith beat Tony Stewart to the checkered flag, but was penalized out of the top 10 because he passed on the apron of the trioval.  The uproar over the penalty made NASCAR officials look worse than they might otherwise look when the discrepency was pointed out in what Jim Hunter and others were saying about NASCAR’s absurd yellow line rule and what Ramsey Poston had said the season before.

Surprisingly lost was the opportunity for the Race-Stream Media to seriously question whether NASCAR really has any business policing racing below the yellow line to begin with, never mind the gross favoritism periodically shown in the rule’s enforcement, favoritism that would penalize Tony Stewart for passing below the line on a straightaway but lamely excuse Dale Earnhardt Jr. for passing on the bottom of the apron of Turn Three.   The safety argument for a yellow line rule has never come across as credible, and this lack of credibility exploded at this year’s Daytona 500 when Junior’s wreck with Brian Vickers should have left the Race-Stream Media asking what NASCAR thinks it was preventing with this rule.

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More egregious is the rule that put the wrong winner into Talladega’s victory lane at least three times this decade – freezing the field.  Jeff Gordon (2004), Dale Jarrett (2005), and Kasey Kahne (2006) won at Talladega because NASCAR did not allow racing to the flag; even Ward Burton in 2003 was denied a possible win when he took the lead but the pass was nullified on Elliott Sadler’s crash well behind the field.  NASCAR stopped allowing cars to race to the flag because of a Dale Jarrett crash at New Hampshire in 2003 where the leaders slowed but Michael Waltrip did not.  Instead of punishing the responsible driver, NASCAR changed the rules, and living up to the Constitution as manufactured in George Orwell’s novel “Animal Farm,” all are equal but some are more equal than others.  The field was frozen in the above-mentioned races, but in the 2004 Firecracker 250, the 2007 Daytona 500, and the 2008 Talladega 250 for Trucks, crashes occured behind the leaders and no yellow was flown, so the leaders raced to the stripe and the right winner went to victory lane as a result.

What NASCAR thinks it is preventing with freezing the field is worth discussing, and the absurdity of the rule requires open discussion by the Race-Stream Media because it is a bad rule that has graphically hurt good racing.

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It of course takes good racers to produce good racing and Talladega is the track where all the impediments to good racing that come from aeropush, track position, etc. are irrelevant to the draft and to going for the lead.  The usual suspects abound in the Hendrick Motorsports Chevys, the Joe Gibbs Toyotas, and the Roush Fords (except for Greg Biffle, never a top-ten finisher in his Talladega career).  RCR’s Chevys have been consistent all season but their horsepower disadvanatge compared to the Big Three has become more evident this season and there appears no sign it will be better.

Regan Smith’s confiscated win brought back a taste of Talladega’s distant past as the track with the highest incidence of darkhorse winners.  Entering 2009′s Talladega season several candidates stand out for this category -

A.J. Allmendinger and Reed Sorensen - Allmendinger hasn’t had a good Talladega history, having qualified for just one race, but his fit with Petty-Gillett’s #44 has been better than anyone could have expected and his outstanding Speedweeks should mean supreme confidence, while his Petty teammate rallied from midpack to finish 12th at Phoenix and of late has begun to run stronger, plus he usually runs well at the plate tracks.

Brian Vickers - the 2006 Talladega winner, Vickers continues clawing for success with Dietrich Mateschitz’ Toyota.

Regan Smith - People forget that the Furniture Row team he drives for won Talladega’s pole last season and can draft well.

Michael Waltirp Racing - Distasteful as it is for me to say it, MWR can actually pull off an upset here.  Waltrip nearly pulled the upset last year and his primary driver David Reutimann is overachieving.

Talladega’s list of potential winners remains a bigger such list than most tracks can claim – as long as bad rules stay out of the way for a change.