Catchfence

Ed Hinton continues to prove why he is among the more audacious and more annoying writers in racing with a recent piece that asks “Is NASCAR Dangerous Enough?” Mike Mulhern authored a good response but Hinton’s article requires some broader analysis.

Hinton, in the pieces I’ve read of his, has shown a habit of putting himself into the story, and he does so again in his “Dangerous?” piece by noting how he’d done a litany of pieces on basilar skull fractures and so forth, and how Dale Earnhardt’s death led to the revolution in safety measures in the sport today. “No journalist was more vocal than I on behalf of the HANS, soft walls, safer seats, moving the driver more toward the center of the car, and energy-dissipating materials in the cars.”

In his list of changes he displays the sport’s safety overkill and its concurrent safety myopia; nowhere in his list of advocated changes did he mention the one change that for almost all tracks would have actually done more for safety – taking over 20 MPH out of the speed of the cars. That drastically slowing the cars down was never an option is indefensible, because the safety crisis the sport was going through at the time was centered almost exclusively on tracks where the speeds were over 20 MPH beyond what those tracks could safety or competitively handle.

I’ve never been sold on the restrictive HANS (it doesn’t allow the driver to look around as much and thus takes away needed peripheral vision) as a safety measure, especially after Sterling Marlin’s near-fatal spinal injury (he injured the same part of his neck that paralyzed Christopher Reeve seven years earlier) in September 2002 – chances are people don’t remember that because he never suffered even minor paralysis, instead the damage in one of his vertebrae being caught early enough to take him out of the car for the final quarter of 2002 to heal. Nor was I ever sold on moving the seat inward, energy dissipating materials in the cars, etc because the cars had been keeping drivers safe superbly for decades without any of that. The SAFER is something that could be seen right away to be safer, and even that isn’t foolproof.

Where NASCAR failed was in taking on and stopping the escalation of speeds away from the plate tracks. Certainly taking 20-plus MPH out of the speed of the cars on tracks like Charlotte isn’t foolproof as far as safety goes, but the notion that it wouldn’t be safer is manifest foolishness. The sport has NEVER needed 180 MPH speeds at Charlotte, etc. By attacking symptoms instead of the disease, NASCAR still hasn’t gotten safety correct.

Hinton also ignores that in the name of safety – actual and mythical – NASCAR has seized ever-more control of the racing from the racers and put it in hands with no business having that power – the inspection line and the officiating tower. The safety arguments for freezing the field and banning passing below the yellow line at certain tracks have been bogus from Jump Street and Martinsville’s recent last-lap incident continues to illustrate this reality.

After going through this litany, Hinton examines whether the sport has lost appeal because of the reduction in risk. He repeats Dale Earnhardt’s nonsensical “Put a kerosene rag around your ankles” comment and asks, “I wonder if that isn’t what you miss most about him….” Hinton is assuming that the reader misses Dale Earnhardt – as one reader I can say to him and all that I do not miss him – I do not miss his bullying, his nonsensical commentaries, the overrated aspect of a career that certainly was Hall of Fame worthy but far down on that list given his dependance on bullying, the overblown “Dominator” marketing of his career (he never won the most races in a season more than twice, far below Petty, Pearson, Cale, and Waltrip), and the fact his career spiked when – as best examined by Chris Economaki in his must-read autobiography – the car overtook the driver in importance to winning.

Earnhardt’s comment was also nonsensical because he never offered a rational argument for “his way” of doing things. Nothing is more annoying than the myth that persists in some fan circles that “When Earnhardt spoke, NASCAR listened,” yet no one has ever defined a single policy battle with NASCAR that Earnhardt ever won – winning policy battles is a sure sign that the sanctioning body is listening.

Hinton also delves into how “boring” the sport has become. “NASCAR publicists bombard me constantly with computer-acquired ‘loop data’ meant to prove, mathematically, that there’s more passing, closer racing, fewer runaway wins than ever before.” Here Hinton inadvertantly hits on the true reason for growing antipathy toward racing – it isn’t decreased danger, it’s decreased competitive ferocity and depth. NASCAR wants to prove with deceptive computer stats that racing is more competitive than ever before, but their data can’t refute the real world. Their scoring loops can’t show over 50 lead changes – actual ones as well as official ones – in any race other than Talladega; a few years ago NASCAR tried to use loop data to prove that Texas saw 55 lead changes, but it didn’t wash. The use of such data is a by-product of the Moneyball philosophy of pro sports that holds computer data and arcane statistics say more about a player or a game than the real world. And in racing it never works – if it’s not showing up on the eye test, it isn’t there.

Hinton “can’t see how the COT has hurt the racing,” as if the manifest increase in aeropush brought about by the car somehow escapes him. The car’s unsoundness of design was proven in 2005-6 testing and nowhere in actual races has the design made anything better. Gripes about “cookie cutter cars” ignore the competitive reality of form following function and miss the overall point entirely.

Hinton has thus missed it. Danger is not what sells racing – lead changes do that; new winners do that; comeback winners do that. Racing is about passing and repassing; sidedrafting and pushdrafting; established winning teams having to fight newcomers and long-struggling darkhorses suddenly whipping into the fray. The sport would be suffering less backlash and chances are would not have lost any rating points or sellouts if the decade past had seen the monopolies of Hendrick and Roush and to a lesser extent Joe Gibbs overtaken by continuous surges from Yates Racing, Petty, Andy Petree, Morgan-McClure, Cal Wells, Bill Davis, Earnhardt and Ganassi, Reed Morton and Nelson Bowers, Robby Gordon, Jimmy Smith, and so forth. The sport would not have lost much if any of its popularity if the ferocity of Talladega’s racing had been replicated at Daytona far more often, at Fontana, at Atlanta, at Texas, at Charlotte, at Pocono, at Michigan, at Chicagoland, at Indianapolis, and so forth.

No, what people would be arguing about would be whether such-and-such driver was too reckless in passing seven-abreast to first at Pocono, whether this other driver waited too long to try for the lead at Michigan, whether this other driver can sustain the kind of determination that saw him pass two top-ten rows of cars up high then slice down low to pass two more rows at Fontana – and so forth.

In short, between-race chatter would center around film breakdown of passing and repassing at the front of the field – just as NFL talk centers almost entirely on breakdown of plays, especially redzone plays. This ultimately is what people miss in racing, not the risk of mutilating people. That risk is still there.