Catchfence

For a midsummer bye week, this recent one turned out to be a headache for a lot of people involved in racing, between the Jeremy Mayfield brouhaha, an earthquake-caliber shakeup at Indianapolis, and the never-ending story of sponsor searches and work by teams to try and salvage something amid the success of Hendrick Motorsports, Roush, and Joe Gibbs Racing – and even one of the teams in this Dominant Trio now has some sponsorship issues with word that DeWalt Tools will not return to Roush Fenway in 2010. Though Winston Cup didn’t race, the Trucks and BGN did, yet it says something about their decline as racing series that neither series got that much attention for themselves – not even yet another cheating fine to a NASCAR crew chief (this time Rick Ren of Ron Hornaday’s team) garnered much online or literal ink – amid all the off-track issues boiling over.

Yet they also served as reminder that there is still a racing season to go, and the Brickyard 400 opens the stretch run first to the NASCAR playoff format and then to that ten-race stretch of NASCAR’s magnificent Twelve. Of the twelve presently dueling for the playoffs, the only locks for a title chase appear to be Tony Stewart and the other Hendrick Chevys, and Stewart has shown the most muscle of them all – that he’s still showing muscle at the expense of his engine and racecar supplier’s cars is surprising but is inevitably on the way to an end in the same fashion as the engine and support deals Hendrick has had with teams such as Bob Whitcomb Racing, Joe Gibbs Racing, and Darrell Waltrip Motorsports.

The only real surprises are that Juan Montoya is in the top ten and while two JGR Toyotas are in neither look up to a title chase. Denny Hamlin is steady, but lacks the fight to take the title, while Kyle Busch’s season has crashed, literally as well as figuratively.

Some ink has been utilized on the fact that Greg Biffle and David Reutimann are less than 100 points out of the Chase, but by now 100 points might as well be 500. Reutimann has faded rather quickly since Pocono and hasn’t led a lap since Dover, while Biffle remains the odd man out of luck at Roush with nothing in the way of a decent finish since the ill-fated Michigan 400.

No one else is closer than 120 points out of the cut-off, so for the rest of the field whatever points gains can be made are strictly for the sake of salvaging something out of the season – right now it’s strictly Hendrick/Stewart, Roush, and Gibbs, and what amounts to one-car Chase cameos by Richard Petty and Chip Ganassi.

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The big story entering the Brickyard is tires, with Goodyear insisting they’ve solved the issues that plagued them last year. One wants to believe this to be true, especially after 13,000 miles of testing there, yet with Goodyear’s record of inconsistency over the years it’s impossible to take assurances at face value. And even if the tires hold up as advertised, there remains that angle of the issue that has plagued the sport more than any other – dearth of hard fighting for first.

Two-abreast restarts make their debut at the Brickyard, and the noticably increased aggression shown in restarts at Chicagoland is a promising sign that this change will get an actual fight for the win out of a race that, aside from 1994′s surprising Gordon-Irvan showdown and a few other spurts of lead changes over the years, has never lived up to its hype.

The tire issue inevitably leads to the dirt under the asphalt that is what NASCAR has long resisted but which has remained a necessity – tire competition. Tire war is a dirty word in some circles, yet credible argument for the present monopoly is impossible to make, and amid everything else NASCAR’s present administration has going against it, not having tire competition is one issue that ought never go away – after all, the most competitive Brickyard 400 was the tire war running of 1994.

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And it isn’t all after that. Watkins Glen, Michigan, etc. also beckon, and with that the sport still has opportunity to present a competitive product that will actually compete, that will actually swing the discussion away from off-track brouhahas and back toward the audacity of a racer’s passes, another racer’s determination, a stunning ferocity of racing, and hopefully a sudden surge of new and darkhorse winners.

After this bye week, the sport needs that even more.