 | RACING PERSPECTIVESAtlanta: Toyota Breaks Down the Fourth Wall
by Michael Daly-Staff Writer
03/12/2008
In movies the term "breaking the fourth wall" goes back decades, but in NASCAR the fourth wall isn't quite the same, and it left Jeff Gordon pontificating about his Las Vegas wreck before winning the pole for the Atlanta 500. Breaking the fourth wall, however, took on new meeting as the day a lot of NASCAR fans didn't want to come nonetheless arrived in the victory of Toyota at the Winston Cup level.
If it wasn't clear already that Kyle Busch is the leader in the JGR camp, it should be clear now, as the driver nicknamed "Rowdy" vaulted past Tony Stewart and Denny Hamlin in the JGR scheme of things almost as soon as the Daytona 500 took the green flag. That first-place role in the organization got cemented as he brought JGR's flagship car its first win since November 2003 at Miami. The performance of Busch further sinks the reputation of the driver he replaced, J.J. Yeley, demoted to the JGR satellite that is the #96 and saddled with yet another mediocre effort at Atlanta.
It also further sinks the chances that Toyota's non-JGR teams will get anywhere. Michael Waltrip Racing's ineptitude was nicely illustrated when Dale Jarrett refused to get out of Kyle Busch's way in the final few laps and nearly crowded him off track, this despite the fact Jarrett was so far behind you'd need Dick Tracy to find him. Bill Davis' bunch was hard to find during the day, while Brian Vickers remains alone on an island with Dieter Mateschitz's organization and rides that quasi-lone wolf status to some underreported consistency.
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With Tony Stewart now playing second banana at JGR, one wonders how any potential showdown between the #20 and #18 transpires. Stewart for his part has been less visible in his racing than in his unoffical role as point man in attacking Goodyear, caught in yet another of its periodic bouts of ineptitude and inconsistency with tires. One can say that Goodyear really has never gotten it right with regard to tires since the mid-1990s when leftover tire-war tires proved strikingly racy in exciting up-front battles at several tracks.
Certainly Goodyear deserves criticism and NASCAR deserves criticism for not allowing tire competition, as given the quest for more revenue, allowing direct competition from Firestone and Hoosier would certainly be a help.
It would, however, be wrong to ignore that Goodyear did have a tire package in 2001 and 2002 that combined with the highest downforce ever allowed by the sanctioning body; this hard tire package proved unusually competitive as far as different winners went - 26 drivers for 14 teams won races in the 2001-2 period, and problems blamed on tires and/or downforce were more often the result of an unusual period of radical weather shifts during many race weekends that threw off setups with sometimes-dizzying frequency.
In this situation, some of Goodyear's problems. both now and in the previous four seasons, stem from loss of downforce and the resulting effect on tires. The present-generation racecar certainly has made problems worse and the mini-epidemic of blown right fronts in previous weeks has surprisingly obscured the continuing failing of the COT as far as its promised improvements to the sport go.
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So the question becomes - what to do about it. Widening tires by maybe an inch can't hurt - more grip is never a bad thing. More stagger so the cars turn more easily can also help. Giving the cars downforce back certainly can help.
This mixture of bad tires and a bad racecar package is further aggravated by an Atlanta surface that has earned a reputation of recent for wearing out tires. New tires were so much faster than old ones that it is amazing more cars didn't change four tires on every stop. Throw in some lengthy green flag periods and the race made a very high number of competitive cars into lapped traffic and left the leaders just pounding out laps.
This all adds up to a track in a strong racing demographic that is having more trouble attracting fans, with some estimates of this Atlanta 500's crowd as low as 50,000 - a far cry form the over 100,000 Winston Cup tracks used to take for granted. Atlanta's reputation for good racing has been overrated for quite some time, and this race, worse than usual, won't help anyone's reputation.
The scene where the COT debuted comes up next, but then expecting anything from Bristol beyond crashes and a lot of unjustified hype is too much to ask right now.
Questions? Comments? Contact Michael Daly at stp43fan@hotmail.com
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