What began as a run-of-the-mill Atlanta 500 turned into a spectacle that left a number of wrecked racecars and also left a lesson in what happens when rivalry goes beyond the boundary of competition. For the second straight year Kurt Busch took home the Atlanta 500, and it came 30 years after his car owner, Roger Penske, fielded a car that finished second in this same race – ironically it finished second to a #2, the 2 of Rod Osterlund.

It was also a rare moment when the sport’s monolith, Hendrick Motorsports, hit a wall, as its cover boy won the pole and then largely disappeared and its other three cars struggled or wrecked. The recent dominance of Jimmie Johnson has earned comparison to Richard Petty’s dominance of yore, another irony as Richard’s #43 raced its way to a solid finish and two of AJ Allmendinger’s teammates came home just ahead of him.

But what will monopolize reaction will be the explosion of the feud between Brad Keselowski and Carl Edwards, an explosion that came in a shocking fashion. With the wreckage cleaned up, four issues jostled for attention -

1 – By now it is obvious that Brad Keselowski should be parked. It’s one thing to be a sparkling new talent in the sport, and Keselowski has proven that in a wild two seasons still highlighted by a debut victory that retains shock value. But the more he races the more clear his lethality can be. The Atlanta 500 illustrated his talent and also his lethality, as an early wreck happened because of him, and it has been an ongoing aspect of his still-young career.

Talent is a necessity for the sport, but never at the expense of sense and safety.

2 – And everything that applies to Keselowski also applies to Carl Edwards. Edwards has been in scrapes before, certainly not of the egregious caliber displayed by Keselowski in the past. What happened in the Atlanta 500, though, escalated the lethality of his racing enormously. While he may say he never intended for Keselowski to tumble, it doesn’t matter in the end. The hit that flipped over Keselowski was intentional – one need not review the high-def replay showing Edwards jerking the wheel right as he leaned on Keselowski’s bumper. When you’re 150-plus laps down you’re not supposed to be racing anyone.

3 – The wreck will raise the question seemingly no one wants to ask – at what point does a driver deserve to be suspended for a period of races? It is a question that needs to be asked as NASCAR has seen plenty of “aggressive” driving incidents before and responded with weak punishments that amounted to nothing substantial. It is worth asking given the brutality involved in this recent incident – what has to happen for NASCAR to suspend either Keselowski or Edwards?

4 – There is also the issue of the fact the cars are fast enough now to get airborne like this. Atlanta’s speed issue was a problem in the 1990s – enough that NASCAR tested a restrictor plate at least once there. It was an issue in Steve Grissom’s 1997 melee that ripped open a concrete wall; it was an issue in a series of serious driver injuries and at least one death in the late 1990s. Even as the asphalt wore out the speeds at Atlanta have been absurd for the size of the speedway. For Keselowski to flip over as he did should raise serious questions about why the speeds haven’t been restricted here.

When it all shook out it turned out to be a race with more than the usual to offer, and it leaves the sport looking somewhat different from what was expected before Daytona. But it also leaves the issues inherent when stupid gets deadly.

The California 500 weekend raced through despite some rain near the end of the Cal 500 and the first “regular” weekend of the NASCAR season thus saw the start of the process of determining the sport’s muscle. With the weekend came jostling by several of the sport’s issues -

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The biggest issue turned out to be the strange press conference Gillian Zucker called in the middle of the 500 (mentioned here) to discuss the track’s consistently mediocre attendances and rumors that one of its dates will be switched to Kansas Speedway. Zucker is using the economy as her argument about poor attendances and also claiming increased interest from “our Hispanic fan base” and alleged growth in the youth market, yet none of this seems believable. There simply is no evidence of any statistically relevant popularity for the sport in the southern California demographic (it is a mistake being repeated by the NFL with the building of a new LA-area stadium and the prospective move of the Jacksonville Jaguars, all despite zero evidence of local desire for a team there) and the mistake made in the sport’s investiture into Ontario Motor Speedway has been repeated – the sport maintaining a strong presence in a market that really doesn’t want it. Combined with the dubious financing of the Ontario track, it wound up ruining it and ending its competitive life after 1980.

Zucker insists she will fight to keep two dates at Fontana; I doubt she’d need to bother, for the track likely to be dropped of at least one date is Martinsville. It is a short track, and as such is outdated and possessing limited seating capacity. It also has a recent history of struggling to sell out its Winston Cup races, an indication that demographic is drying up the way those around Darlington and Rockingham either got smaller or dried up altogether. Moreover it makes scheduling sense for Kansas to get the spring date presently owned by Martinsville as opposed to either of Fontana’s dates.

The racing was okay in spots at Fontana but Zucker’s desire to bank it up retains viability here.

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The California 500 showed that Hendrick Motorsports is still on top, RCR is much stronger now than it was in 2009, and everyone else is just along for the ride.

Despite the front row start for Ganassi-Earnhardt’s Chevys, it was Jimmie Johnson and Kevin Harvick who controlled the race, even as the EGR cars and others such as Jeff Gordon fell back or fell out. Harvick’s bid for the win died when he whacked the wall out of Four after erasing a big gap, which made for the more interesting final laps the track has seen in awhile.

Yet for all of Hendrick’s continuing success, the pet project of making Dale Junior a winner blew up yet again, this time when he broke an axle out of a late pitstop. As with his runner-up in the 2009 Winston 500, momentum has not come about for him.

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And yet more coverage came to a rookie driver who started in the bottom 13 of the Busch/Nationwide 300-miler at Fontana and stayed there all race. The more Danica Patrick races, the more clueless she proves herself to be. Clueless rookies are not the exception in racing but Patrick has displayed a lack of grasp of fundamentals to a degree that is frankly surprising. She continues to get cut slack in the media and the Danica myth of bringing in more fans and more sponsorships to the sport is holding up despite all evidence to the contrary.

What is being displayed in stock cars is the reality of a soft-porn model who decided to become a racecar driver, who used the fact of her gender and her soft-porn displays to get where she is in racing, and who has received opportunities rare in racing yet does less with more on a consistent basis.

The sooner this farce ends and NASCAR is rid of Danica Patrick, the better.

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The bottom line is thus that Fontana proved to be just another unmemorable weekend. With Fontana’s wrap the series hits Vegas next week. If the form chart of this week holds up then the Brian France Redemption Tour will have hit some potholes worse than what was filled in at Daytona.

With Speedweeks 2010 has come quite a bit of wreckage and more questions as to whether some of the sport’s most-hyped stars are capable to delivering on the publicity. And amid the hype machinery the path to victory lane hit a pothole for a lot of people – none more so than Daytona’s beleaguered track workers needing two red flags to repair the obstreperous aperture in Turn Two – while a racer lost to the hype machine has wound up living up to what others were supposed to deliver.

Certainly the hype surrounding Danica Patrick got off to as dubious a start in stock cars as it did in IRL cars; the Race-Stream Media congratulated Patrick over her sixth-place in the ARCA 200, prefering not to notice the weakness of the field in which she raced. With her ARCA debut she decided to enter the DRIVE4COPD 300 at Daytona and then the reality check got cashed – she basically made zero progress from the back of the field, lost a lap, then after getting a Lucky Dog she wrecked. True, she can’t be blamed for the wreck – as opposed to her IRL wreck in 2005 at Homestead where she charged blindly into a wreck scene – but the result did nothing to validate what little success she has enjoyed in major-league racing so far. Indeed Danica Patrick’s February resembled Peyton Manning’s – both were deified by the media and both choked under pressure against real competition in keeping with their competitive histories. Making it more damning to Danica is her continued inability to do more with more; few drivers have gotten better opportunity and done less with more than Danica Patrick.

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JR Motorsports wound up having a terrible Speedweeks other than the ARCA race – Patrick wrecked after basically not passing a single car all week, then Junior – who actually can race and has the hardware to show for it – got swept up by Carl Edwards’ imitation of Ernie Irvan on Daytona’s backstretch, and the result left more than a few wondering if there was any momentum Junior could carry into the Daytona 500, all the while leaving Tony Stewart to race to a surprisingly easy Daytona 300 win.

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But Speedweeks doesn’t day die until the 500’s flag is waved. After the Trucks went at it and the first big upset of the weekend transpired, the 500 arrived and wound up doing a good imitation of the 24 Hour race thanks to the pothole in Two that illustrates the long-overdue need to repave the speedway. It wound up aiding the competition, as the changeover to night added grip to cars looking a little out of whack handling-wise all week; it translated what had been a good race into something even better.

And the next thing we knew after over six hours of hurry up and lead combined with hurry up and wait, a team that once dominated restrictor plate racing combined with a team whose debut race came in the most infamous 500 in the last 30 years produced an upset no less stunning than the one that happened twenty years earlier. With this 500 more minds will be changed about Jamie McMurray than has happened in the last three seasons. A driver looking like a drafting bust after failing to follow up his shocking 2002 upset began to change a few minds with a terrific side-draft fight to the finish in 2007; it took another two years but he pulled off another upset at Talladega, and now we have McMurray, Teresa Earnhardt, and Chip Ganassi as one of the oddest Odd Couples to ever get the Harley Earl Trophy.

And adding more to the oddity was the driver who wound up chasing McMurray home. It was easy to write off Junior after flipping over in the Busch/Nationwide 300 because he’d produced nothing to hang his hat on all week. Of course he chased home Brad Keselowski last April and it did nothing to ignite his season, but to get this far after so bad a week leaves one wondering if there’s life in Junior’s competition career yet.

McMurray’s win came in the most competitive 500 since 1983 – the first 500 to break 50 lead changes since then and the highest number of leaders in the event’s history. Chris Economaki has long noted the difference between driving and racing – McMurray continues to illustrate that difference.

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The number of potential winners is always bantied about before a 500 but this was one where the “anyone can win” cliche actually had meat. Certainly the two Richards – Petty and Childress – had fleets as strong as anyone has ever seen this Speedweeks while the Roush fleet also led a lot, but when it raged to the finish we had something the sport can use – the validation of a team that had been a shell of its former selves entering Speedweeks and now can hold the Harley Earl Trophy.

So the 150s have been run and they proved to have some nastiness and a pair of stunning finishes, and with that the field for the 500 has been set. A quick and dirty team-by-team look at the field:

HENDRICK MOTORSPORTS – They’ve had to use a lot of backup cars this week even as Jimmie Johnson raced to the first win. Despite that win, the Hendrick fleet does not look particularly stout; they’ve drafted okay but the muscle to take the lead and hold it seems off this time around. I expect the Hendrick Horses to run in the top-15 all race long other than Dale Junior, whose plate prowess now seems as distant as Derrike Cope’s win 20 years ago.

PETTY-GILLETT – So far so good with the alliance with Roush. Kasey Kahne won the second duel, Elliott Sadler acquitted himself well, and AJ Allmendinger rallied from overshooting his pit to fight to seventh in the first Twin. Paul Menard as expected didn’t produce. I expect a wildcard victory bid by the Petty-Gillett fleet.

RCR – Kevin Harvick picked up where he left off in the Shootout by coming up inches short of the win in the first Twin. Teammate Clint Bowyer raced strongly to a top-five finish while Jeff Burton saw a blown tire. Suddenly RCR looks a lot better than it’s looked in awhile.

STEWART-HAAS RACING – If he keeps embarassing the Hendrick cars like this Tony Stewart may rue the day he agreed to let Hendrick supply his equipment. Ryan Newman showed some muscle as well but Stewart is clearly the one to go for the win here, though cheapshotting Brian Vickers should have gotten him a penalty.

JOE GIBBS RACING – Denny Hamlin is cruising for a fight the way he keeps cheapshotting other cars and it’s not helping his racing; that he hasn’t been parked by NASCAR is surprising since this goes beyond the meaningless “bump-drafting” cliche. Kyle Busch rallied to a strong Twin while Joey Logano has been quiet but also putting together some good efforts this week. Hamlin and Busch will make noise in the 500.

EARNHARDT-GANASSI RACING – Juan Montoya improved from the Shootout while Jamie McMurray lost some steam. He didn’t lose a lot of it, though, and the EGR cars look for real for the 500.

PENSKE SOUTH – Kurt Busch came to life, Brad Keselowski finished out back, and Sam Hornish is one step closer to the end of his NASCAR career. Busch will need some help and Keselowski will need a quantum increase in competitive savagery come Sunday.

FURNITURE ROW RACING – The sleeper of Speedweeks. Regan Smith brought back some reminder of the race NASCAR stole from him.

MICHAEL WALTRIP RACING – Longshots, strictly longshots. There is not enough fight or horsepower in this outfit to take the win.

ROUSH-FENWAY RACING – Speaking of the parent fleet being embarassed by customer cars, Roush’s boys dropped dramatically in the muscle order and that muscle displayed in the Shootout curiously wasn’t in evidence in a mediocre effort in the Twins.

MATESCHITZ RACING – Scott Speed somehow made it into the 500. That’s the best he can expect this week. Brian Vickers is the one to watch as he’s been a fighter all week.

THE REST – It’s expecting too much to hope that Bill Elliott, John Andetti, Bobby Labonte, Travis Kvapil, or Robby Gordon to make a wildcard victory bid. Boris Said made the field more because those he beat out were worse than he is competitively. The most noteworthy of those who didn’t make the 500 were Reed Sorenson, Casey Mears, and David Gilliland. Chances are we won’t see them in a race for awhile.

So the field has been set, and the Sunday green flag awaits.

The 2010 season is underway and it kicked off with a bang, not to mention a few other cliches – Jeff Gordon wiping out a bunch of cars, Juan Montoya wiping out at least one car, and Denny Hamlin wiping out a bunch of cars. With all that the Bud Shootout proved itself to be a terrific race, the battle for the lead a sidedraft battle as good as anything the sport has seen in the last decade. In the end Kevin Harvick was a somewhat surprising winner.

Looking at the event’s participants the following emerged -

HARVICK SALVAGED A MEDIOCRE NIGHT FOR RCR - Harvick raced hard and won, while teammate Jeff Burton didn’t seem to race anyone and had to come back from a spin. Burton never looked up to the speed Harvick was.

CARL EDWARDS MAY BE THE FASTEST CAR OF SPEEDWEEKS - Edwards looked to be the strongest car during the race; he was challenged repeatedly yet was able to hold the lead until the entire field finally ganged up on him and he got blown to the back; the rule is when you know who the fastest car is you gang up on him and trap him out back – the field did that to a T.

THE REST OF THE ROUSH FLEET LOOKED GOOD – Except Greg Biffle cannot finish a plate race well to save his bacon. They ran the old Ford engines for this race while using the new powerplant for 500 pole runs; the race engines next Sunday are expected to be the old ones, to date more reliable than the still-new FR9.

LET’S SEE WHAT THE REST OF PETTY-GILLETT CAN DO NOW - Kasey Kahne displayed muscle all race; it bodes well for teammate A.J. Allmendinger, last year’s Speedweeks darkhorse, at the very least.

JAMIE MCMURRAY LOOKS BETTER THAN EXPECTED - McMurray displayed a fight the Earnhardt-Ganassi Chevy #1 has never really had; indeed, he looked to displace his loose cannon of a teammate as top dog at the EGR outfit.

BRIAN VICKERS WANTS TO WIN BADLY - Vickers appeared to be the most aggressive at push-drafting and fighting to win; that he didn’t get a better finish than he did was surprising, as he was clearly the best of the Toyotas in this race.

JGR LOOKS DECIDEDLY MEDIOCRE - Denny Hamlin made a run to the front but never looked strong enough to sustain it, while Kyle Busch finished fourth, far better than he actually ran all night. Joey Logano was quiet all night but showed some muscle.

HENDRICK MOTORSPORTS DIDN’T HAVE THAT HOT A NIGHT – Satellite driver Tony Stewart fought for the lead all night, but the rest of the Hendrick fleet didn’t look as strong as expected. Martin, Johnson, and Gordon reached the top five but never looked stout enough to stay there.

JUNIOR IS HOPELESS - I didn’t count a single car Junior passed all night and the car never looked able to do anything. A bad combination looks to be getting worse, not better.

ANDRETTI AND LABONTE GOT SOMETHING OUT OF THEIR CARS - John Andretti and Bobby Labonte don’t have stout racecars anymore but they got something out of what they had. I’m still amazed they’re not with Petty’s group anymore; they’d be a better fit than Sadler and Menard.

PENSKE RACING MAY HAVE TO DEPEND ON BRAD KESELOWSKI FOR THE 500 - Kurt Busch didn’t display as much muscle as one would expect, and despite Mark Martin’s apology it appeared Busch chopped into Martin and spun himself out.

The end result was a memorable race and a stout start to Speedweeks 2010.

With the inevitable reduction in race purses at the Winston Cup level, it was also inevitable that someone would cry that track promoters were somehow using the sport’s recent economic struggles to line their own pockets. It’s a hoary perennial in pro sports, the accusation that competitors somehow get shafted of their rightful earnings while owners line their pockets at the expense of their team. It’s a charge being made by Jonathan Ingram now.

In so many words Ingram accuses track promoters – primarily ISC and SMI being the largest two track promoters in the sport – of soaking race teams and lining their own pockets. To buttress his case, Ingram claims that at least one team “managed to be competitive all season long and hover around the Top 35 with only ten full-time crew members and a crew chief.”

Right away he loses me, because the notion that a team could cut to that bare a set of bones and “manage to be competitive all season long….with ten full-time crew members and a crew chief” is nowhere close to plausible; this is start-and-park territory.

Ingram further suffers when he cites financial statements for Charlotte Motor Speedway from the latter 1980s – when the sport’s economics were far more restrained than today – showing hefty profits for the track. His point is that the TV deal from 2001 onward so infused the sport with money that it basically has allowed tracks to print money.

I’ve heard this argument with regard to team owners such as the Red Sox ownership – that they print money. The problem is there’s no such thing as printing money for team owners, and the amounts that must be spent to maintain speedways and other large sporting venues – a key factor in the coming meltdown between the NFL and its players because teams are building bigger stadiums that allow greater revenue streaming and the costs involved have eaten into team owners’ budgets – is enormous. And one must factor in what tracks pay for insurance, for taxes, etc. and the end result is exhorbitant.

The reality is tracks spend a great deal of money just to be able to make money and put on races, and the reality of the need for additional sources of revenue is out in force with Kansas Speedway’s casino project. The notion that tracks deliberately skimp on purses in order to pocket what they can makes zero economic sense, as the reality of the competitive market dictates exactly the opposite – if they don’t pay competitive purses they’re cutting their own throat.

What Ingram is doing is letting race teams off the hook, and he’s wrong. He notes how some teams made do with less, yet it doesn’t seem to occur to him that perhaps team spending is a major factor in the sport’s recent economic troubles. It comes down to a simple – perhaps simplistic – question; would the sport’s present money troubles be as egregious if the most a team like Hendrick was spending was less than $30 million per year?

What the recent reduction in purses says loudest is the need for a spending cap on raceteams. Team spending across the sport has to come down and be kept down. There’s no other way around this. The sport’s salient failing is that it has spent decades dancing around the reality of rising team spending and recent efforts at cutting costs do nothing remotely serious about this goal. Limiting the number of crewmen who can be brought to a racetrack is a minor step; directly limiting how much money a team spends per season is something long overdue for the sport’s long-term well-being.

Perhaps Jonathan Ingram would do better to start questioning why the sanctioning body doesn’t have a spending cap on raceteams rather than question how much money promoters make.

The annual media tour for NASCAR’s Winston Cup teams has begun and with it have come the inevitable queries about what the season will bring. Seventeen items in particular stand out and they are presented below with possible answers -

CAN ANYONE DEFEAT HENDRICK MOTORSPORTS IN THE CHAMPIONSHIP? – Until we actually see otherwise, the answer remains No. Certainly Joe Gibbs Racing and Roush-Fenway are strong enough to do it, but right now they are basically the only ones.

WILL STEWART-HAAS RACING WIN THE CHAMPIONSHIP? – No. Being a satellite team of Hendrick Motorsports, their equipment is at the mercy of the supplier, and Hendrick has no history of letting customer cars defeat his primary guys on any consistent basis – it cost Bob Whitcomb his raceteam in the early 1990s, it ultimately cost Darrell Waltrip his team, and Joe Gibbs saw the handwriting on the wall early enough to get out while the getting was good. It even wound up ruining Morton-Bowers Racing, who won twice in the early 2000 decade and nothing else. Chevrolet made SHR by basically buying out Gene Haas to put Tony Stewart back in a Chevy; one would hope Chevy is smart enough to let SHR develop its own engine shop to build its own engines.

WILL DALE JUNIOR REBOUND? – No. What people seem to be coming to grips with now is that Dale Junior simply is not as talented or driven as he was advertised. People remember his spectacular Talladega success but have forgotten that it came because of underside aerodynamic work by DEI after Louis Duncan joined the team; once teams figured out what DEI was doing the advantage disappeared. Junior’s fiascos with multiple crew chiefs is now well-known, to where it has become impossible to see any scenario where he clicks with anyone and rebounds to success.

WILL FORD WIN MORE NOW THAT IT IT FIELDING MORE TEAMS? – Yes. The follow-up, though, is tougher – how much more will Ford win? Roush has basically taken over the Yates and Petty-Gillett teams, and what he did to the Yates team was criminal – Roush basically milked it for what he could and left a shiny corpse. His team benefitted from the alliance it had with Yates and it bled Yates dry. Petty-Gillett made the move to Ford because they had been shortchanged by Dodge throughout the past decade; they should win now but Roush’s history of alliances isn’t encouraging.

WILL RICHARD CHILDRESS RACING REBOUND IN 2010? – No. Chevy has basically left RCR out to dry. RCR was quietly allowed to drop down the Chevy totem pole to where RCR brought in engine people from Ilmor Engineering to boost his engine shop – if Chevy was serious about RCR they’d have supplied the effort to boost his engine shop themselves. RCR had a weak season in 2009 and it has not spurred Chevy to start spending money to boost this team back up the ladder.

WHAT WILL HAPPEN TO DODGE? – Dodge appears to have one foot out the NASCAR door now. It has reduced to one team (Penske) with no evidence of effort to bring in more teams and depth. The program was mismanaged as soon as Stuttgart took over from Lou Patane in 2001 and this is evidence of continuing mismanagement.

HOW ABOUT TOYOTA? – Curiously, Toyota doesn’t appear to be working to boost its competitive depth. It has the success of Joe Gibbs Racing, plus Michael Waltrip and Dietrich Mateschitz bagged their first win apiece in 2009, but Toyota does not look to be boosting the muscle of its other teams alongside JGR, nor did it make an effort to get teams defecting from other brands such as Petty-Gillett. Right now Toyota looks too satisfied with what it has.

WILL THE CAR OF TOMORROW RACE BETTER WITH A SPOILER INSTEAD OF WING? – Yes, but as above the follow-up is tougher – how much better will the racing be? Early testing showed no balance issues and the term bantied about was “looser,” but I’m not yet sold that a spoiler only four inches high (even though it appears to be substantially wider than the old-car spoiler) can deliver. The real test will come in a draft, for the salient failing of the COT has been worsened aeropush and we’ve yet to see a change that made dirty air the ally of passing instead of passing’s impediment. The design has raced well on the plate tracks but needed some serious work by the teams to make the design stable, and to date the plate tracks have been the only venues where the COT has been successful; everywhere else the car is a flat failure – short tracks, intermediates, there isn’t a track outside of the plate tracks where the COT has been successful.

WILL NASCAR DROP BUMP-DRAFTING AND YELLOW-LINE RULES FOR THE PLATE TRACKS? – Yes. No-bump rules are now officially gone while the yellow-line remains in place “for the time being,” according to Robin Pemberton. It remains impossible, though, to feel the yellow-line rule has any future. Both rules have been failures and the graphic nature of their failure is too embarassing for the sanctioning body to justify their continuation.

HOW WILL DRIVERS REACT TO RESTRICTOR PLATE RACING IN 2010? – This is a rebuttal to ATHLON SPORTS in their 2010 NASCAR Preview magazine, where the question is asked if drivers will now fight harder to bring an end to plate racing after what happened in 2009. ATHLON SPORTS seems to take seriously that drivers could form a drivers union on this issue, and they also take seriously the myth that the 2009 Autumn 500 constituted some kind of wildcat drivers strike against NASCAR and against restrictor plate racing. After two straight melees at Watkins Glen (2008 and 2009), multicar melees at several venues (notably Pocono) during the 2009 season, and Joey Logano’s Dover tumble, the notion of drivers now uniting against plate racing loses all punch.

WHAT WILL HAPPEN WITH START-AND-PARK TEAMS? – By all accounts it will get worse. The absorption of more teams and sponsorships into “alliances” with established multicar factories can do nothing except worsen the economic landscape for other teams. Start-and-parkers are doing what they have to do to survive; the economic structure of the sport won’t let them do anything else.

SO WHERE CAN THE SPORT GET ADDITIONAL SOURCES OF REVENUE? – NASCAR is going to have to accept a new tire war, for starters. Firestone and Hoosier can provide more teams with revenue and engineering help and also help make new winners in the sport – it happened both times Hoosier was in, back in 1988 and in 1994. Goodyear’s monopoly has failed in safety and reliability and has shut off revenue streams the sport now needs more than ever.

Bringing in more manufacturers – or getting existing ones to boost their efforts – is another area. I’m surprised Honda hasn’t yet gotten in to battle Toyota.

But ultimately there are only so many streams one can find; cutting spending across the board remains a necessity, and this will inevitably mean NASCAR has to alter the independent contractor model and start dictating to teams how much money they can spend – spending caps are a proven success in all sports in which they exist. It also means NASCAR is going to have to start forcing contraction of multicar teams.

TO BRING IN MORE MANUFACTURERS, WILL NASCAR ADOPT FUEL INJECTION? – No. The talk has been out there, but the reality is fuel injection is not better than carburation in any way – it is not less expensive, it is not simpler, nor is it easier to police. It is impossible to find any racing series using fuel injection that sees any kind of benefit from it.

We again go to ATHLON SPORTS to rebut a myth they push in their season preview – they argue that racing brought about technological improvements to cars in the 1960s, ‘70, and ’80s, except the reality by 1986, as noted at the time by the likes of Brock Yates, was that racing had become worthless as a test bed because costs and ridiculous performance levels had led to the banning of a host of technological items, notably Wankel engines.

Fuel injection is not needed and sticking with carburation has not stopped Toyota from racing NASCAR and seeing marketing benefit from it. If Honda comes in, carburation won’t stop them. People need to face that old school works.

WHAT IS TO BE MADE OF THE CHANGES IN RACE DISTANCES AT PHOENIX AND FONTANA? – This one is a puzzle. Phoenix raised its April race to 375 miles while Fontana’s October race was cut to 400 miles. Fontana gets bashed for being boring, yet cutting the distance won’t make the racing better – the myth that shorter races are better always seems to pop up even with the complete lack of evidence of any improvement in competitive depth or ferocity anywhere from shorter distances. The longer distance at Phoenix will likely make for more passing; I’m doubting that strategy will come more into play because yellows will fly that wipe out strategy.

Fontana should have stayed at 500 miles, a superior test of machinery and racer over shorter distances.

WILL MORE OPEN WHEEL DRIVERS COME TO NASCAR? – Of course they will, because they are the drivers who can work with all the engineers the COT requires. It will take a massive sport-wide change to ever see the day when short trackers can come from a place like Stafford Speedway, go down South, and reach any kind of competitive level in major NASCAR touring series.

WILL DANICA ACCOMPLISH ANYTHING IN NASCAR? – No. She is a fraud.

WHAT WILL HAPPEN WITH KENTUCKY AND KANSAS AND NASCAR DATES? – Atlanta has failed to live up to having two dates, so Kentucky will be handed over one of those races, while Martinsville has outlived its worth as a Winston Cup track and will be dropped to make room for Kansas’ second date. The short track partisans will howl but it needs to happen.

And so it goes as Speedweeks 2010 approaches.

With a new decade has come – believe it or not – sign that NASCAR may finally be starting to get it. A story is circulating that NASCAR may drop its out-of-bounds and no-bump-zone rules for Daytona and Talladega. Driver reaction is said to be “mixed,” but there has never been any credible argument for either rule and it is long past time these rules be aborted once and for all.

The yellow line rule dates to April 2001; following the Alabama 300 for BGN cars at Talladega, Jimmy Spencer was livid in several postrace interviews about drivers passing him below the yellow line. The next day, NASCAR told drivers they could not pass below the yellow line. The rule became a huge controversy in its next race, the infamous 2001 Firecracker 400; Tony Stewart blew past several cars under the line on the eastern short chute and was blackflagged out of contention.

The rule became an even bigger controversy – and illustrated the jostling issues of rules favoritism and rule sagacity – in the 2003 Alabama 500; Dale Junior blew past Matt Kenseth on the apron of Turn Three at Talladega with five laps to go – and was not blackflagged. Instead, NASCAR issued a convoluted explanation that he had “completed” the pass before going below the line. This argument failed on two fronts – Junior was nowhere close to clearing anyone – and thus nowhere close to completing the pass – when he hit the apron; plus this was not the start-finish line, it was Turn Three. Scoring loops are not where such matters are supposed to be decided.

The explanation was classic CYA by NASCAR. It was the sanctioning body making a decision based on favoritism instead of using competitive objectivity, and trying to cover itself in the aftermath. It was one of numerous cases in the most recent decade where bad rules and bad officiating got in the way of superior competition.

The next egregious example came in the 2008 Autumn 500 – Regan Smith passed Tony Stewart on the apron of the trioval to win; the win was taken away by NASCAR on the basis of the yellow-line rule, even though NASCAR’s Ramsey Poston had stated months earlier that the rule did not apply on the final lap.

A defense of the yellow line rule is that it was preventing wrecks – a defense than made no sense to start with given the inability of anyone to cite one example of a wreck that happened specifically because of racing below the yellow line. It made even less sense in the infamous 2009 Daytona 500 when Dale Junior hooked Brian Vickers under the yellow line and spun him into traffic. The rule was also cited in several wrecks that had happened earlier in Speedweeks, notably a Truck 250 melee involving Todd Bodine.

Then there is the fact the rule was never implemented for any other track, as NASCAR in typical fashion dithered on whether to extend the rule to other tracks, even as cars raced on the trioval apron at Fontana and Michigan and Kansas.

The reality is the yellow line rule took away a legitimate passing lane, and that NASCAR may drop the rule indicates – ten years late – that it now understands this fact.

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The no-bump zone rule is the more recent egregious rules mistake the sanctioning body may now be acknowledging. No-bump zones debuted at Daytona in 2006 – and went unenforced. No one was flagged off the track for pushing another car through the corners. The rule was forgotten at Talladega, but came back last November at Talladega. The impetus was lobbying by Jeff Gordon and at least one other driver about the Winston 500 that April – in that race there were two occasions when two cars literally locked together and were able to break the draft; the first happened early in the race’s final third, and the pack lined up and ran down the two-car breakaway; later in the race’s GWC finish, two pairs of cars locked together and broke the draft – Brad Keselowski then went after a swerving Carl Edwards and the result was Edwards blasted into the fencing, Ryan Newman ramming through Edwards’ nose, and Mike Helton going to the drivers meeting on November 1 to issue a bluff – that NASCAR “would have a problem” if drivers pushed each other through the corners.

Of course the day before the Trucks ran 250 miles with the kind of pushing that had happened in April, and there was no breakaway. Plus there was the matter of the unenforced no-bump zones of 2006. So drivers saw the bluff for what it was and raced accordingly – they gave the “rule” lip-service, pushed each other through the corners (it was humorous hearing the MRN call dramatically citing “now they back off each other entering the corner” even though most of the time they were racing as they’d done in April) and also lined up to stop any two-car group from breaking the draft.

The race was derided as boring, but this was a case of taking a bluff seriously as well as letting three periods define a race that don’t. The reality remains that push-drafting is a legitimate tactic. The overused term bump-drafting is a gross misnomer because they’re not bumping, they’re physically speeding up the car in front of them to pass people. Bumping is gratuitous contact common of course to short tracks and which tends to cause fights in the pit area (making nonsense of the “rubbing is racing” cliche); pushing in this context is making something positive happen.

Push-drafting thus has every place in racing, and is more common than people think from the sport’s “back in the day” period to recent times, having directly witnessed it at Pocono on restarts this past season and before, such as Jeff Gordon and Jeff Burton push-drafting from over ten seconds back to catch Ward Burton at Pocono in 1997. There is of course such imagery as Richard Petty blasting Bobby Allison, Buddy Baker, or Bobby Isaac past AJ Foyt at Ontario Motor Speedway in the early 1970s.

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These two rules are examples of the officiating tower given more control of the racing than it has any right to have, and taking that control from the tower need not stop here. There are other cases – pit closure and pit speed limits discussed in an earlier piece – where the officiating tower needs to have control of the racing taken out and given back to the racers. The tower’s sole legitimate concerns need to be enforced and the extra nonsense needs to be seized away.

If and when NASCAR drops no-bump zones and yellow-line rules, then the first important steps will have been taken.

With the passing of the first decade of this millenium has come the expected retrospectives on the ten seasons past and listings of mosts and leasts. One such list involves the most emotional finishes of the decade and it warrants a dissent. The list is woefully dry on surprises – it includes DEI wins at Daytona and Rockingham in 2001, Kevin Harvick’s win in 2001, and several Hendrick Motorsports wins, notably Jimmie Johnson’s Martinsville win in 2004 – and woefully dry on true emotional punch. That some of these races ran parallel with tragedies in the sport is true enough, but it is worth noting the controversial nature of some of the personalities involves, a nature that detracts from some of the sympathy needed to engage emotion.

The following is a list of the true most emotional finishes in the sport in the 2000-9 period.

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2001 SOUTHEASTERN 500 – Bristol races are usually among the least competitive in the sport, and this one didn’t produce much combat up front. It was noteworthy, however, for producing one of the comparatively rare surprises in the decade. The Wood Brothers Ford, driven by Elliott Sadler, emerged with the lead late in the going, and was pursued by John Andretti, in Richard Petty’s Dodge. Given the historic excellence of both teams involved, the finish, while not particularly contested, was compelling. Andretti slapped the wall a few times trying to chase down Sadler but had to settle for second. The 1-2 by the Woods and Petty was a return for the sport to its competitive history, a return the sport needed far more than histrionics by its newest rock star driver.

2001 ALABAMA 500 – He first emerged as a comer in the sport in the 1980s working with Leo and Richard Jackson, who had an unofficial alliance with the race team of Hal Needham and Travis Carter. By 2001 Andy Petree was now owner of the former Skoal #33, and to that team he added the #55 in 1999. In 2001 Bobby Hamilton took over the car, and at Talladega Hamilton drafted in the pack. The race itself had been subject of a vicious rumor campaign alleging a mass-parkout by drivers, but nothing happened – quite literally; the yellow never flew once and despite 36 lead changes among a record-tying 26 drivers the racing was stunningly restrained. The finish, though, was classic – Hamilton drafted from mid-pack and surged to the lead at the white flag, taking the win for the first time since 1998 and giving Petree his first win as a car owner. It also extended a surge of new and comeback winning drivers and teams that was the theme of the 2001-2 period.

2002 NATIONAL 500 – A 13-car crash brought out the surpeme hypocrite in Richard Childress deploring the driving of Todd Bodine – and conveniently forgetting the history of the driver whose number Childress refused to release for someone else’s use. Once the nonsense was settled a rookie making his second career start had Chip Ganassi’s Dodge in the lead, and Jamie McMurray easily beat Bobby Labonte to the win. The win was one of the fastest paths to a first win in NASCAR history and some felt it was the emergence of a new superstar – except it was nothing of the kind, but would nonetheless be remembered five years later.

2004 WINSTON 500 – There were 53 lead changes, but the real emotion of this thriller was that the sport – from the drivers to the sanctioning body – got what they deserved from an enraged fanbase. NASCAR refused to restart the race after a late caution and fans bombarded the track with debris, showering Jeff Gordon. Gordon’s unpopularity as a champion was on graphic display and it shamed NASCAR into implementing green-white-checker finishes.

2004 KANSAS 400 – He became Front Row Joe when he parlayed a talent for qualifying into several poles. It took over six years before he won a Winston Cup race but win he finally did, and by 2004 he’d done so three times in total. Joe Nemecheck’s last win came in the first of NASCAR’s misbegotten Chases, and it turned the sport away from points for once as Nemechek whipped Reed Morton and Nelson Bowers’ Chevrolet to the stripe at Kansas Speedway. Thus the sport got what it needed – a dark horse taking down the establishment.

2005 DIE HARD 500 – His crew chief from the 1990s returned, and with Todd Parrott back Dale Jarrett, winless since February 2003 stayed in contention in another ferocious Talladega thriller. After 49 lead changes, a two-lap shootout transpired and Tony Stewart went for the lead, but Jarrett ripped up three abreast up high to steal it. NASCAR’s new rule banning racing to the stripe marred the finish, but the win was yet another dark horse and comeback win the sport needed.

2006 DIE HARD 500 – Talladega was repaved, and the new pavement made a great race even better. There were 63 lead changes among 23 drivers, the first time 60 lead changes had been breeched since 1984. In the final ten laps Dale Junior and Jimmie Johnson led the pack, and on the final lap Johnson tried Junior low – but he got hooked by teammate Brian Vickers and the top two cars spun into the infield. Kasey Kahne passed Vickers but NASCAR ruled him the leader. It was the first win for Vickers and also a rare win for Rick Hendrick’s neglected stepchild of a raceteam – the #25, long ignored on Hendrick and Chevrolet’s depth chart since Tim Richmond died.

2007 DAYTONA 500 – The wildest finish of all. The first 150 laps were a dismal ennui monopolized by Tony Stewart and Kurt Busch; both crashed out, and a genuine fight ensued for 40 laps. A two-lap sprint led by Mark Martin ensued, but Kevin Harvick emerged from seventh and sidedrafted to the front as Kyle Busch tried for the lead; with the field up to five-abreast behind him Harvick blasted forth and squeezed ahead of an out-of-shape Martin while Busch lost it and the field plowed into the blockage while Harvick beat Martin to the stripe and cars punched the concrete in the trioval while Harvick’s teammate Clint Bowyer slid on his roof to the trioval grass. Seeing so many cars wiped out was chaotic, but also poetic given the percentage of Hendrick and Roush equipment wasted, while the finish was Daytona’s closest since 1959.

2007 FIRECRACKER 400 – Jamie McMurray failed to win after 2002 and in 2007 was with Roush Racing, with the cars Kurt Busch had won a title with. He had failed with this team as well, but in the Firecracker he stormed to the lead with some seven to go and Kyle Busch challenged him. It turned into a stunning sidedrafting war involving over a dozen cars, the lead seesawing by inches back and forth. Busch appeared to have a run in the final stretch, but McMurray’s superior sidedrafting got him to the stripe first, and only the second win of his career.

2008 DIE HARD 500 – The best race of the decade. There were 64 lead changes and a new record for leaders at 28. The emotion lay in the winner who was taken away from the win by a NASCAR rule. Regan Smith edged Tony Stewart at the stripe but was disqualified from the win by NASCAR’s vague yellow-line rule, a rule whose vagueness emerged in comments from Ramsey Poston, which only aggravated controversy over the sanctioning body’s competence and the integrity of its rules-writing. It remains the highlight of Regan Smith’s career.

FINISH OF THE DECADE – 2004 FIRECRACKER 250 – The race itself had some spirited dicing but it was the final ten laps that made it waht it was. Junior emerged with the lead following Robby Gordon’s cut tire, but with three to go Michael Waltrip and Jason Leffler stormed from 25th to the lead; Leffler went for the lead and on the final lap blasted Waltrip into the inside wall on the backstretch; Junior stormed up by Leffler sideslammed him into the fourth turn wall while Mike Wallace, in Fred Biagi’s Ford, ripped past them all and stole the win.

Prolific drafting and passing; a first-time winning team; a comeback winning driver; the deflation of the Earnhardt myth (that his race ended in Turn Four was the ultimate and most delicious irony) – all added up to the finish of the decade.

With the sport, there will hopefully be more such surprises.

So we now have confirmation that Danica Patrick will drive in the Busch Series and ARCA in 2010, and of course we have the usual lack of dissension with regard to media reaction to Patrick’s presence in racing – one strains to find anything in the way of reportage critical of Patrick and of Rick Hendrick and Dale Earnhardt Jr. for seeking out Patrick.

It’s been that way since Patrick debuted in IRL in 2005 with Bobby Rahal’s team, a team fresh off winning the Indianapolis 500 with Buddy Rice. Patrick’s presence wound up diverting effort from Rice’s car, as Patrick’s gender plus the no-frills personality of Rice helped with marketing. 1 Patrick, however, didn’t deliver. In her first race she plowed into a wreck without cracking the throttle. The next year Paul Dana was killed in a similar wreck and wound up all but crucified in the media over the way he’d driven; for Patrick, on the other hand, coverage was kid-gloves.

Patrick did lead laps at Indianapolis in 2005, but after that her performance dropped dramatically – she became just another car in the field, and when sponsorship from Argent Mortgage dried up she went to Michael Andretti’s team. Once again she had quality racecars at her disposal in a series where competitive depth was drying up, and once again she fought for little on the racetrack – but developed a habit of trying to pick fights with drivers on pit road, usually after she’d rammed into a car in the pits. She also went through stretches where she would crash out of races with some frequency. She always managed high points finishes, but this said more about her racecars and the dearth of competitive depth than it did to whatever talent she had.

For the past season she’s flirted with a stock car deal, and yet again not a peep of dissent has been found. That Patrick has shown little talent or ability to make her racecars better is obvious, yet she is treated as a superstar. It has made the process a joke. Some cite it as something the sport needs 2 and it has only confirmed the sport’s absurd approach of trying gimmicks and quick-fixes instead of confronting real issues with real long-term solutions.

Why Danica? As of yet nothing in the way of a credible reason can be found.

A cliche that needs to be banned is “Rubbing is racing.” It needs to be banned. The reason why showed up again in Miami as we saw yet again that in racing, as in anything else, stupid is as stupid does.

If you’re still wondering why Juan Montoya has just one NASCAR win and has been pretty much irrelevant to racing this decade, the reason why showed up at Homestead. They always say you have to use your head in racing – except it never registers with Montoya. It’s one thing to stand up for yourself, but to get repairs on your car just to go back out and cheapshot someone indicates there isn’t much head of his to use. It merely reinforces the garage view of him as a loose cannon, and if someone starts talking about his talent, don’t believe it.

The same applies to Tony Stewart. We of course have seen it many times before and the Firecracker 400 blast was egregious even by the standards of past incidents. He gets some extra love from fans because he’s an owner-driver – though even this is deceptive because his team is just a direct satellite outfit of Hendrick Motorsports – but it doesn’t change that he has the bully streak as a racer; it just took awhile for that to come out again.

This of course comes amid the burgeoning feud between Denny Hamlin and Brad Keselowski, a feud that erupted in the BGN 300. Between this feud and the Stewart-Montoya contretemps some are feeling it is what the sport needs as an injection of competitive fire.

It’s head-shaking – three weeks ago people were screaming about push-drafting at Talladega; now suddenly we hear the view that drivers wrecking each other is needed to inject some life into the sport. This is how much the sport has deteriorated – instead of wanting more lead changes, people want more wrecks to inject life into the sport.

Stupid is as stupid does. Some people in racing need to grow up; some people in racing need to be suspended for at least one race; and some people watching racing need to grow up. What we saw at Homestead exemplifies what kills desire in racing.

No. 99 Aflac Ford (Carl Edwards) (Photo Credit: Getty Images for NASCAR)

CARL EDWARDS – No. 99 Aflac Ford Fusion – HENDRICK HAS WON FIVE CONSECUTIVE RACES HERE. HOW MUCH IS THAT TEAM A MEASURING STICK DURING PRACTIVE OF WHERE YOU NEED TO BE FOR THE WEEKEND? “That’s a good question. We were watching the 48 and the 5, they were both in qualifying trim, and Bob [Osborne] and I watched them really close to see how we stacked up, and they’re good, obviously. But, that’s all you can do with practice, watch the guys that you think are going to be best prepared, and that’s how you see where you stand.”

AS IT STANDS RIGHT NOW, YOU ARE THE ONLY CUP REGULAR WHO WILL RUN A FULL SEASON NEXT YEAR IN THE NATIONWIDE SERIES. DOES THATMAKE YOU THE PROHIBITIVE FAVORITE? DO YOU SEE A TREND TOWARD FEWER CUP DRIVERS RUNNING A FULL SEASON IN NATIONWIDE? “Is Brad Keselowski not doing it?” NOT SURE. “I think he said that he was going to do it. I believe that’s the only other guy, that I know of. You never know. You look at the way Mike Bliss is running right now, what Leffler has been able to do on and off this season, there’s no telling what can happen. That’s sort of what’s kind of fun – one of the things that’s fun is running against new people, different people, as they’re gaining experience. Hopefully, but I’ve learned that you can’t rest over there. You’ve got to stay up on the game. That’s why we’re making the changes we’re making now, to be the best we can for next year.”

ON THE DEVELOPMENT OF HIS CAREER, AND THE IMPORTANCE OF SPONSORS. “It was tough. Personally, if it weren’t for Jack Roush taking the risk of running me with blank, white vehicles, sponsorless vehicles, I definitely wouldn’t be where I’m at. Mike Mittler, he spends all his time and all of his hard-earned money, with virtually no sponsorship, he got me in front of Jack, Then Jack put me in that 99 and told me, ‘Hey, look, we don’t have a sponsor, so either go or go back home,’ but he did take the risk and gave me the races. If that would’ve been a five-race deal with Jack, I don’t know if I would’ve made it. If he would’ve said, ‘We have to get a sponsor and it’s only three or four races,’ and then in the Cup Series, Jack was able to run me for 2004, I think it was 17 races with virtually no sponsorship. I don’t know if they could do that right now. But if Jack hadn’t taken that risk, I definitely wouldn’t be here.”

GIVEN THE EXPECTATIONS COMING INTO THIS SEASON, HAS IT BEEN FRUSTRATING THAT YOU STILL HAVEN’T GOTTEN A WIN AFTER WINNING NINE RACES IN ’08? DOES WINNING BREED WINNING, AND NOT WINNING BREEDS NOT WINNING? “If winning bred winning, we’d have won plenty this year – we were so good last season. It doesn’t really work like that. You show up at the race track. And first of all you have to be fast enough to win. Otherwise, you can’t really plan on winning. If you’re fast enough to win, things have to go your way. If they go your way, you might win. But, so far this season we just haven’t had a lot of races where we’re fast enough to win – at Texas in the spring, I felt like we were fast enough to win, we were leading coming to the final pit stop and we had trouble on pit road, and that was the bad luck part, and that cost us that win. Talladega, we were close to winning. That didn’t work out. Martinsville, we were extremely fast and had trouble on pit road again. The difference between this season and last season is instead of one out of 10 races were fast enough to win as we are this season, last season I felt it was like eight out of 10 races we were fast enough to win. So, we just have to be better. And that’s what we’ve been working on.

WWE Fatheads - Raw on your wall!

“Of course it’s frustrating – that’s why we do this, to win, and it sure feels good to win, and it’s frustrating not to. I personally can’t let that frustration get in the way of our performance. That’s what we’ve been working on as a team – going forward, working hard, that’s all we can do.”

WOULD YOU HAVE BELIEVED THAT AFTER THE FIRST TWO RACES OF THE YEAR THAT ROUSH FENWAY WOULD’VE HAD STRUGGLED THIS MUCH THE REST OF THE YEAR? No. You guys probably all felt the same way I did: this is going to be great – you guys might not have thought of it that way, but, Hey, Roush is going to be, this is our year. Matt won the 500, which that could’ve gone any way, but then to come out and win the next race. Vegas, we struggled there. At Texas we were very fast. We’re right back where we were, we’re going to win tons of races, it’s going to be great. And then all of a sudden these other teams, a lot of them really picked up and figured out either A) what we were doing, or B) they figured out something new and they picked up and we were kind of left to scramble to get better. So, that was definitely a surprise. It just goes to show you that anything can happen. You can’t rely on your past performances, you have to keep building and going forward. I think that’s what – it took a real shift in thinking to get back on track like that. Now we are, and I feel like we are gaining, but we’ve got to keep working like this throughout the winter.”

HOW MUCH OF A GRIND HAS RUNNING THE NATIONWIDE SERIES BECOME FOR YOU? HOW MUCH LONGER DO YOU THINK YOU CAN DO IT? “I plan on doing it for the next two years. That’s my plan right now. That could change, but I enjoy it. It seems like a grind when you’re not running well. When I watch that 18 car just motor by those days aren’t any fun, but Montreal was a blast, ORP was a blast, this race in the spring. That’s why I do it, when we’re running really well, racing hard, because really guys that in the time that I’m on the race track and especially the times I’m leading, that’s the most enjoyable part of the job, and that’s good. So as long as we’re winning races and able to compete for the championship, I’d like to keep doing this. It doesn’t seem like too much of a grind. On Friday, sometimes, there’s a lot of running back and forth. If I could just show up for 30 minutes and then race on Saturday, then it would be the perfect situation. That is an idea I had for the Cup drivers, is that we should be allotted only a small bit of practice. I think that would help the series and it would save us some time.”

HOW DO APPROACH OVERCOMING THE 48 TEAM WITH THE WAY THAT TEAM HAS PERFORMED THE LAST FOUR YEARS? DOES IT LOOK INSURMOUNTABLE IN A WAY? “It would if we didn’t have last season when we won more races, scored more points, I felt like we beat those guys head to head a lot of times. A lot of weekends when we raced, I felt like we could beat them. But, even when they’re not that fast, they’re just like that team that won’t go away. They don’t ever lay down. When they’re not great, they’re good. They’ve never bad. And that’s what I think makes them so tough. Yes, I know what you’re saying, and all of the rest of us in our minds does their success make it tougher to go out and battle with them. I could see how it could, but I guess in a way, what we do is just look at them and try to emulate them, and say, ‘Where are we getting beat by them? They out-qualified us by a little bit, they beat us a little bit on pit road, they’re just a little faster on the race track. If we could do all of those things it could be us and them beating everybody else, but we have to race to that level. I guess the answer is no. I’m not demoralized yet. I feel like we can go out there and beat ’em next year just like we did last year, but we’ve got to go do it. We’ve really got to work hard. They’ve definitely raised the bar.”

- PCGCampbell for Ford Racing, Press Release

What Talladega showed aside from everything else is the rampant credibility gaps that exist between the sport and its participants. Much has been focused on the credibility issues that exist with the sanctioning body, and those were exacerbated at Talladega with Mike Helton’s bluff at the prerace drivers meeting. That bluff, though, also exposed the credibility gap that exists for the sport’s drivers, for it was drivers – among them Jeff Gordon as we now know via his own admission – who lobbied NASCAR for “no bump” zones.

Now Tony Stewart has exacerbated the drivers’ credibility gap with his claim that the races are not boring and concurrent attack on the Race-Stream Media over fan backlash after Talladega.

“(You) can fight your guts out and try to get to the front in 100 miles, but what have you accomplished? You haven’t accomplished anything, absolutely nothing.”

This makes Stewart so wrong that I’d call him a liar. For what you’ve accomplished is you’ve gone for the lead. Stewart can talk about driving smart, but driving smart and racing for the lead are not incompatable – indeed the issue of driving smart isn’t relevant to the competitive value of the racing. When Stewart says the races aren’t boring, he’s become a points-racer, not a real racer.

Real racing is going for the lead, no matter the lap. Of course there is an ebb and flow to a race – that will never change, and it doesn’t change that going for the lead is what matters. You cannot win if you don’t lead, and going for the lead means everything between Lap One and Mile 500.

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Jeff Gordon adds to the drivers’ credibility gap. Acknowledging his role in lobbying NASCAR for “no bump” zones, Gordon made statements that, like Stewart’s, betray that a points-racing mentality has replaced the mentality of the real racer. “Bump-drafting through the corners is ridiculous.” False – it’s passing. “I think it’s what allowed 30-plus cars to be on the lead lap (late in the race.” False again – it was no different from April and last October.

The credibility gap exists because drivers have become liars. Gordon’s rhetoric continues when he says, “We need to get out there and work hard to swap positions. Track position is so important in our series, and then they create a car that it’s not important, that you can kind of get up front whenever you want. Eventually you’ll have guys that say ‘We have 500 miles to go, we’re going to just sit here and ride.’”

Where Gordon is damnably wrong is the premise he uses that racing is better when it is hard to pass. This is mind-boggling stupidity. In NASCAR track postition is so important because it’s too hard to pass. At Talladega we have racing where the driver can actually pull off the pass; everywhere else what the sport has is aeropush and general handling getting in the way of passing.

Racing is not supposed to be that way. Lead changes are supposed to rule over aeropush and handling. Now his point about drivers just riding has some merit, but only because it’s the mentality of most drivers in virtually all the races. The reality is there is almost no hunger in these drivers between points-racing and the general lack of incentive to fight.

It says something that Gordon’s motives for lobbying NASCAR have come under fire from Denny Hamlin, as Gordon’s motives appear to stem from weakness in his racecar.

It also says a lot about these drivers that Talladega was ultimately a fight between drivers who still have the hunger, and one of them – Jamie McMurray, given up for dead for most of his career after 2003 – outfought the field. McMurray’s career may be baffling in that he’s won just three races, but his wins at the 2007 Firecracker and this year’s Autumn 500 outrank anything Jeff Gordon or Tony Stewart have done in terms of competitive legitimacy.

Drivers like Gordon and Stewart thus have no credibility and should not be treated otherwise regardless of how many championships they’ve won. A real racer wants to run open throttle, draft and push-draft, and fight for the lead as they do at Talladega – and in April we heard the words of a real racer in Brad Keselowski. The lack of fire that Gordon and Stewart showed in their comments earns them contempt, because they’ve shown they’re not racers.

In the drivers meeting before the Autumn 500, Mike Helton of NASCAR stood before the drivers and issued a bluff. After the Autumn 500 drivers bitter because racecars got wrecked issued a bluff. And in the end, all they did was insult the intelligence of the sport.

Jimmie Johnson griped about knocking the banking down, never mind the greater lethality of wrecks on smaller and flatter tracks and the hideously inferior competitive quality of the racing thereupon. Ryan Newman cited his engineering degree, as if this gives him more knowledge of the real world of racing than others. Dale Junior talked about how “we’ve out-engineered this racetrack somehow,” yet as usual with race drivers he had it backwards. Out-engineering a racetrack is when the cars are too fast for what the track can handle, when handling in general and dirty air in particular stop passing, when the driver cannot make up for bad track position by passing the field under green, when pit strategy is more important than out-fighting the field, when it’s about the car instead of the driver.

This is why teams like Hendrick Motorsports, Roush-Fenway Racing, and Joe Gibbs Racing are virtually alone in competition in modern Winston Cup. Their success has to do with engineering and resources and using that to out-engineer the tracks as well as the other teams – what’s left of other teams, really. Their success is not about drivers who outfight the field even when they have situations where their drivers do just that.

At Talladega little of this applies. In April Brad Keselowski won because he outfought the field – he didn’t outrun it, he didn’t win with superior engineering, he didn’t win because track position stopped his competition from racing him. He won on racing skill. This time around Jamie McMurray displayed what real racing skill is about – he didn’t win because of pit strategy or because aeropush was stopping his foes from taking the win – he won because he outfought the field, because he was able to sidedraft the field and thus beat them.

The drivers’ bluff was repetition of the myth that what they went through at Talladega is somehow so uniquely lethal as to require fundamental changes. In this decade of safety revolution to the point of safety overkill, the dangerous tracks have NEVER the plate tracks; the safety issue has never been in the “big one” crashes or on the plate tracks in general – it has always been with the flatter tracks. We forget how Sterling Marlin’s near-fatal spinal injury of 2002 was on a flat track; we forget Jerry Nadeau’s near-fatal crash on a short track; we’ve forgotten the deaths on smaller tracks than Talladega; we’ve forgotten the melees on the road courses. Instead yet again we get caught up in the spectacle of crashes at Talladega and ignore the more insidious nature of “safer” tracks.

The drivers’ bluff needs to be called. They need censure for acting scared instead of manning up and taking on the superior challenge of superspeedway racing. When Ryan Newman called the race boring, he should have been corrected with note of the 58 lead changes among 25 drivers that had occurred – this is competitive depth every other track wants; certainly Gillian Zucker understands this for Fontana. When Jimmie Johnson or anyone else advocates tearing down the banking, they need reminder that this place is safer than Charlotte, New Hampshire, Homestead, Texas, Atlanta, and Richmond, etc. – those are the places were drivers die or suffer hideous injury.

And there is the angle of what actually went on before the infamous Mike Helton drivers meeting speech – the drivers lobbied for “no bump” zones not for safety, but because they were mad that in April two pairs of cars locked bumper-to-bumper broke away from the field in the final three laps and left the race to themselves. As Jim Utter puts it with refreshing acidity, “If I were Helton, I’d throw each driver who asked for the rule change under the bus.”

Talladega is what the sport is about; it is time the drivers stop hating the racing and start becoming men about it.

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NASCAR’s bluff needs to be called as well. Mike Helton’s warning about push-drafting in the corners was 100% bluff, as much as 2006’s identical “no bump” zones at Daytona, zones that saw a lot of push-drafting in the 500 then and where there was push-drafting (some of it visible on bumpercam closeups) at Talladega this time around. The notion that there would be drivers flagged off the track for pushing another car forward through the corners has no credibility because NASCAR has no credibility here. No one truly takes them seriously because their warnings are vague; the way they write rules or issue guidelines is done with playing CYA seemingly always taking precedence over actually addressing issues. In the end NASCAR always assigns itself room for interpretation – the EIRI clause takes precedence.

And the bluff that is the whole philosophy involved needs to be called. NASCAR’s reaction to issues has long been blanket changes – in the infamous NH 300 of 2003 Dale Jarrett crashed, the leaders slowed, but Michael Waltrip barged through to put a car a lap down; NASCAR responded by banning racing to the flag, and the result has been repeated incidence where the wrong winner was declared because the issue was called away from the stripe; nowhere has this rule improved safety, not with crashes happening anyway as cars slow down for the caution. NASCAR’s tardy yellows at New Hampshire and Martinsville this past autumn telegraph realization that not racing to the stripe violates competitive integrity.

NASCAR needs to stop with blanket reactions to issues. Instead, it needs to single out and punish the specific indivduals responsible. The proper reaction to the 2003 incident at New Hampshire would have been some kind of hard penalty on Waltrip – a five-lap penalty, parking of his car, even a race suspension plus a hefty monetary fine. In recent incidents in restrictor plate races the proper reaction would have been punishment of the specific driver involved – a fine and one-race suspension to Brad Keselowski for the Winston 500 melee and also for the last-lap fracas thie time around; a fine and one-race suspension for Tony Stewart for blasting Kyle Busch into the wall; a fine and one-race suspension for Brad Keselowski for the Mark Martin mele; a fine and one-race suspension for Robby Gordon for punting Marcos Ambrose into the wreck that sent Ryan Newman upside-down.

Drivers for their part also need to stop the blanket indictment of rules and instead single out the individuals responsible – Ryan Newman’s anger should be directed at Robby Gordon, not NASCAR; Jimmie Johnson et al’s anger should be directed at Brad Keselowski – telling is one who apparantly does get it, as Kurt Busch’s crew chief ripped Keselowski’s driving for numerous incidents

There was precedent this past weekend for such an approach – NASCAR put AJ Allmendinger on probation for his drunk-driving incident. Why NASCAR cannot likewise target the specific driver responsible for punishment is mystifying even though some drivers over the years have faced probation for on-track controversies. It is reminiscent of 1991, when anger at Ernie Irvan was as brutal as anything we’ve seen in decades, albiet it did not lead to any kind of suspension.

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It boils down to these realities -

1 – NASCAR needs to get the officiating tower out of policing the racing. No more yellow line rules – if it’s paved, it’s fair game. No more “no bump” zones – push-drafting is not why wrecks are happening. No more pit road closure and pit speed limits (discussed in an earlier piece). No more incidence of David Hoots or whoever issuing warnings to drivers. The officiating tower is there to prevent drivers from causing trouble; it is not there to meddle in the racing, because it’s not making anything safer – “We have to protect the drivers from themselves” hasn’t worked and arguably can’t work.

2 – NASCAR needs to stop the blanket reaction and instead go after specific drivers responsible for problems.

3 – NASCAR needs to make more tracks like Talladega – 58 lead changes among 25 drivers is supposed to be the sport’s norm. Pocono, Michigan, Fontana, Kentucky, Kansas, and Chicagoland are some excellent areas for conversion to Talladega-level specs.

4 – There were three periods where the field just pounded out laps instead of raced. To stop it, NASCAR needs to award so many more points for winning the race and so many more points for most laps led as to make it impossible to win the championship without most wins and most laps led.

5 – The roof flaps are a failure – this needs to be acknowledged. A smaller restrictor plate is needed to make it physically impossible to exceed 190 MPH (the well-acknowledged cut-off point for safety in the sport).

The bluffs of NASCAR and its drivers are self-defeating, and at Talladega the bluffs got called again.

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.