Catchfence

The 2009 Fiercracker 400 proved anew the race’s status as one of the toughest, hardest-fought, and most frustrating races in NASCAR. And when it was over it may qualify as one of the more popular finishes in recent NASCAR memory. Certainly the sight of Kyle Busch hammered head-on into the wall in the eastern short chute of Daytona roughly a hundred yards from the win earned applause from the attendees at the speedway impossible to ignore. The spectacle of the finish will certainly be remembered the rest of the season and is likely to give the sport a boost, the kind it needs in search of the popularity it once held.

To his credit Tony Stewart made clear he didn’t like how the race ended. That’s a huge improvement in attitude from Stewart, a driver over the years who earned a reputation for dirty driving that, for awhile, made him disliked by the fanbase and even helped earn him a probationary period from the sanctioning body – not that it stopped him; he won his first title under probation in 2002. Even after a huge wreck at Chicago in 2004 set off a pit brawl between his guys and Kasey Kahne’s crew he wasn’t stopped.

The cliche being used for this wreck is that restrictor plate racing plus blocking equals hard wrecks. Actually, though, Kyle Busch held his line substantially better than did Carl Edwards in the last-lap fracas at Talladega. Busch had the race won and got drilled in the back by Stewart. Some will blame it on restrictor plate racing much as was written in April, and the argument will still be false; some will blame blocking, but what I saw was Kyle Busch holding his line.

Ultimately what it does is renew discussion about when hard racing crosses the line into dirty driving. This Firecracker 400 came a week after another hard last-lap melee came in a plate race – this one the Modified NH 100, a race won by Donny Lia after Ted Christopher and Todd Szegedy hammered the wall off Four out of the lead on the final lap. The comments made after this one were uncharacteristic for Mod Tour racers after a Loudon event – in the years I’ve seen them race there they’ve shaken off crashes like that as “just racing.” This time, though, there was an undercurrent of extra anger, both at Ted Christopher and at the way drivers are racing in general.

“They always reward people (in racing) for doing the wrong thing,” Ed Flemke Jr. said after the New Hampshire race. “If you race someone clean, whatever. If you do the wrong thing, you get the trophy. It shouldn’t be that way.”

Donny Lia, the New Hampshire race winner, went after how drivers race nowadays, noting, “It used to be you set up a guy to pass, now you just dive-bomb (people). I got dive-bombed all day, then I decided to keep it in there at the end. It isn’t racing. We’re using the roll bars (like weapons). Maybe we should think about taking a roll bar or more off (the Modifieds) so we can’t use them like this.”

Rhetoric like this is familiar to the Winston Cup level, and we’ve heard before about how the cars are used as weapons and should be somehow “de-armored” so they can’t be used as weapons. The problem with the general direction of such commentary is that hard racing is competitive racing, far and away more so than what we see in most forms of racing, and the ancient cliche that NASCAR surrounds the drivers with armor and lets the crashes fall where they may isn’t entirely inaccurate – hard racing comes from confidence behind the wheel and that comes from racecars that feel like armor.

Yet there is still the line that periodically gets crossed that at least some in the sport need to relearn. It may not be cut-and-dried about being rewarded for doing the wrong thing, but there should also be reward for doing the right thing. Most racers race each other clean and should do so. When a racer does the wrong thing there does need to be a price he needs to pay.

Relearning the line between hard racing and dirty driving isn’t something to dread, nor is it necessarily something easy to relearn. Yet it’s there for a reason and relearning it is for a reason – because in the end, rubbing ISN’T racing.