Rainout may mean Stewart caught a break
Sunday, August 9, 2009 | Print Entry
WATKINS GLEN, N.Y. -- Another summer Sunday in the Northeast, another rainout for NASCAR. Last week Pocono, this time Watkins Glen. Again, the Cup cars didn't turn a wheel on the scheduled day.
Persistent drizzle on the Finger Lakes district of New York forced postponement of the Heluva Good! Sour Cream Dips at the Glen road race until noon Monday.
This time, officials got to within 10 seconds of the command to start engines before lightning forced fans and teams to take shelter, and then the rain started.
At 4:04 p.m., NASCAR officials determined they couldn't get the track dry in time to run the full 90-lap, 220-mile race in adequate daylight. The road course is not lighted for night racing.
In a rapidly emptying garage, the only person with a smile on his face was Darian Grubb, Tony Stewart's crew chief.
Not that Grubb wasn't annoyed at the rainout, and not that the second in a row made it any worse.
"Every week's a new week," he said. "It's always annoying."
But on the brighter side, "It's going to be an interesting race tomorrow," Grubb said. "It's going to be hotter, and slick. It'll be fun to go."
Stewart will start 13th, but is a master of slippery tracks in general and road courses in particular, so, Grubb predicted, "It could play right into our hands."
The weather forecast for Monday isn't great, with a 40 percent chance of rain, but the predicted high is 86 degrees, after a weekend when drivers practiced and qualified on a cool track with ambient temperatures in the low 70s.
NASCAR, AutoRacing, Tony Stewart
Cup regulars up to speed on road courses, too
Saturday, August 8, 2009 | Print Entry
WATKINS GLEN, N.Y. -- There just might be more drivers capable of winning here Sunday than for any NASCAR road race I can remember. The era of oval-track stars giving up on turning right is fading fast.
The event is officially called the Heluva Good! Sour Cream Dips at The Glen, about as awkward a mouthful as the profitable practice of title sponsorship has made yet. But, all things considered, this could indeed be a helluva good race.
Eight drivers in the starting lineup have won NASCAR road races, either here or at Sonoma, Calif., or both: Kyle Busch, Juan Pablo Montoya, Kasey Kahne, Tony Stewart, Kevin Harvick, Robby Gordon, Mark Martin and Jeff Gordon.
The first four starters -- Jimmie Johnson, Kurt Busch, Denny Hamlin and Marcos Ambrose -- haven't won a Cup road race yet, but appear entirely capable.
AP Photo/ Russ Hamilton
Jimmie Johnson won the pole for Sunday's Cup race at Watkins Glen, but a road course win still eludes the three-time defending series champ.
"In the old days it was going to be Mark Martin, Rusty Wallace and Ricky Rudd, and you could count on that," said Boris Said, now an ESPN analyst and the longtime tutor and guru of road racing techniques to the long-resistant Cup drivers. "Now, there are 15 or 20 guys who can win here, easily."
The practice of substituting "road racing ringers" for Cup drivers is dwindling. There are only three true ringers in Sunday's field: Andy Lally for David Gilliland, Patrick Carpentier for Michael Waltrip and Ron Fellows for Sterling Marlin. Three more non-Cup regulars are entered due to road-racing skills, but in cars fielded especially for them: Said, P.J. Jones and Tony Ave.
The difference in the Cup regular on a road course from 10 years ago is "night and day," Said said. "I remember 10 years ago when I substituted for Jimmy Spencer ... my first time ever in a Cup car. I had to come from the back after the driver change. It seemed easy to pass these guys.
"And now -- to get into the Chase they can't afford to give up those points. So they've all worked at it. I've always said these guys are the best drivers in racing. But road racing is really just a different discipline. And a lot of these guys, like Kevin Harvick and Kasey Kahne, guys I've worked with, were terrible when they started and then after the test they're faster than I am.
"So it's like showing a duck water," Said continued. "Once you give them a few things that are different, and how to do it, they work at it."
Said Ambrose, who grew up road racing in Tasmania, Australia, and Europe before turning to NASCAR: The Cup drivers "don't do it a lot but they've had good training, they've had good experience now in the two tracks that we go to and they're forced to contend with.
"Kasey Kahne winning at Infineon [in June] surprised many," Ambrose continued, "but it didn't surprise me because you can just tell that he can drive the wheels off a race car whether it's on a road course or an oval."
Overall, "The depth is huge," Ambrose said. "The road course ringers that come in haven't had the impact like they used to five or six or seven years ago ..."
Said Martin, NASCAR's preeminent road racer of the early 1990s who has since been deluged with competition: NASCAR drivers have improved "significantly" on the serpentine circuits.
When he was winning here -- three in a row, 1993 to 1995 -- "it was much easier to put a whipping on two-thirds of the field then than it is today," Martin said. "That's because the whole field has pretty much the same access to all the knowledge that we do [he learned his expertise from his car owner of the time, road racing specialist Jack Roush] and the drivers have all really stepped up to the plate."
So have the team engineers and mechanics, with much stronger road racing specialty packages -- especially brakes, which Kahne credits a great deal for his win at Sonoma.
"The biggest key to success to this racetrack for success, other than staying on the road, is brakes," Said said. "They really pay a big dividend."
Jeff Gordon, NASCAR's all-time winningest road racer with nine wins -- four here and five at Sonoma -- dominated in the late 90s and kept winning into this century.
But, "We don't have the advantage over the competition that we had at one time," Gordon said. "Especially with this car [the COT] -- this car makes the competition so much tighter and so much closer that it's hard to get an advantage."
Watkins Glen is a much higher-speed circuit than Infineon, with more places to pass, and "I think especially the double-file restarts here are going to be pretty interesting," Montoya said. "I think they're going to be pretty wild. But you know, it's all about surviving."
With this many contenders, and double-file restarts, Heluva Good! might turn out to be an appropriate race name indeed.
NASCAR, AutoRacing, Tony Stewart
An afternoon in Tony's world
Saturday, June 27, 2009 | Print Entry
LOUDON, N.H. -- Let's title this blog "An Afternoon of Life Around Tony."
You know who the leading candidate is to drive a third car for Tony Stewart if he fields one next year?
Me.
Eat your hearts out, Brad Keselowski, Martin Truex Jr. and Kasey Kahne -- the most oft-speculated drivers for the third Stewart-Haas Racing seat, should adequate sponsorship be acquired.
This is on the record. ESPN has it on audio and video.
"Hinton is our No. 1 draft pick right now in our books," Stewart said. "I mean, we've been watching him for years, and obviously, as you guys [the assembled media] heard, his depth and knowledge of the sport makes him a logical candidate."
AP Photo/Bob Brodbeck
Could it be possible that Tony Stewart actually is considering Ed Hinton to drive a third Stewart-Haas car in 2010? Uh ... no.
Oh, well. Guess you picked up on the sarcasm.
Last time he offered me a ride was a couple of years ago at Daytona, where he said qualifying laps are so easy that "I could put Hinton in the car, especially because he's got so many laps around this place -- in his mind."
It's all part of the running banter between us that's been going on and off for years.
But because the local New England media, not very well versed in NASCAR, seemed all aghast and giggly over Stewart's shots, I thought it wouldn't hurt to explain.
"There's no such thing as a silly question, unless you already know the answer," my freshman chemistry professor at Ole Miss, Dr. George Vaughan, used to say.
Obviously I wandered far afield from premed, and so I hadn't encountered another adamant practitioner of that philosophy until Anthony Stewart, Ph.D. in the school of hard knocks, who simply cannot abide being asked a question to which the questioner already knows the answer.
That's how it started Friday. Although I knew better, I asked Stewart a question to which I already knew the answer, and he knew I knew -- and I knew he knew I knew. More about why I had to ask anyway in a minute.
I'd noticed there'd been eight different winners of the past eight races at New Hampshire Motor Speedway. That's unusual for a flat, tight, 1-mile oval where it's maddening to get a chassis setup right. Looks like whoever hits on the right setup ought to get the edge and hold it for a while.
I knew why it hasn't worked out that way: the changes as the track has aged after resurfacing the harsh winters and hot summers that change the asphalt race to race the rains that have cut some races short and left surprise winners -- take this race last year, when Stewart dominated but the rain found Kurt Busch in front and left him the winner the advent of the frustrating Car of Tomorrow, a chassis setup nightmare the ongoing scramble to make the new car work, in which teams try a different setup every time they come back to a track.
Everybody comes here guessing, every time, and somebody's right and the rest are wrong.
But the public doesn't want to hear me say it. They want to hear drivers say it.
"You just said it better than I can," Carl Edwards responded to a question of mine at Daytona this past February. Edwards chuckled. "Of course you did. That's your job."
But Edwards' stepfather is a professor of journalism at the University of Missouri, so Edwards understands the rock and the hard place reporters get caught between, and does his best to answer anyway.
Not so with Professor Stewart. He deems all this a waste of time, and rightfully so, from his point of view. We've had our share of run-ins since he arrived as an Indy car rookie in 1996, but 90 percent of the time the issue has culminated with this: "Ed, you've been around long enough to know the answer as well as I do, so why do you ask me?" Or, "C'mon, Ed, you know the answer to that."
The real slam-dunk comeback, once, was, "Ed, you've been around this sport longer than I have. You know the answer better than I do."
And so it came to pass that the banter recurred on Friday when I asked Stewart about eight different winners in four years here.
Oh, another thing about Stewart: You've got to watch every word in how you phrase a question. Give him an opening, he'll pounce.
So my question ended, "Have you ever thought about why this has been such a crapshoot?"
I knew I was dead meat the moment "thought about" came out of my mouth. He dearly loves the ones that imply he would sit down and waste his time pondering the esoteric points of racing.
He gave me that Stewart look that only racing reporters know, and said, "I can honestly say I've never thought about that. Never have." He laughed.
Then he actually gave me a pretty good answer, which you can read in my other currently posted piece from Loudon -- it has a lot of quotes from a lot of drivers -- about eight winners in eight races here.
But the fun wasn't over, for then I went and did it, following up: "So it's a place you can get a handle on but not keep a handle on?"
I guess in the era of sound bites, we're all looking for the perfect sound bite. As my onetime colleague, the maestro sports columnist Dave Kindred, once said, "In this business, you ask 200 questions to get one answer."
So maybe I was fishing for a tighter answer.
"Well," Stewart said, "apparently if nobody has repeated in eight races, I would say that you kind of answered your own question, there, Ed. You could be smarter than all of us."
Just as I figured it was my turn at the top of Tony's bad list this weekend, FoxSports.com's Lee Spencer asked a question to which Stewart reckoned she knew the answer, and he said, "Go take a seat beside Hinton."
"So does Lee pass me for depth and knowledge of the sport?" I heckled.
"Uh no," Stewart said.
Then Scenedaily.com's Bob Pockrass asked a highly technical question about rules for a backup car after Stewart had crashed his primary during opening practice. Pockrass asked if Stewart wouldn't have to go to the back of the field (which you do if you wreck a car during or after qualifying). But Stewart shot back that Pockrass ought to know that if you wreck a car before qualifying and go to a backup, but keep the same primary engine, then you can start where you qualify.
It was a minute technicality that has rarely if ever come up before, but Stewart pointed out that "It's only been in the rule book for five or six years, Bob Hinton, pull up another chair over there beside you."
Then some local New England TV guy threw one right in Stewart's wheelhouse, asking if Stewart might ever go back to drive in the Indianapolis 500 again.
"Probably not, unfortunately," Stewart said. "We've answered that one about 8 million times too."
Then he went on to give a nice, elaborate answer as to why not. But he just had to get his shot in.
After the conference broke up, Stewart came over to me, grinning, saying, "You knew the answer to that question Bob Pockrass asked -- "
I hung my head. The rule was so minute, and had come up so rarely
"Didn't you?"
I found a way to evade, bob and weave.
"You mean the rule about wrecking a car before you qualify," I said.
"Yeah," he said.
I nodded. He nodded. I was out of that one.
"So," I said, "Did Pockrass pass me at the checkered flag for depth and knowledge of the sport?"
"No," Stewart said. "We look at the big picture, long term."
"Lifetime achievement," cracked his chief publicist, Mike Arning.
Just an afternoon of life around Tony.
NASCAR, AutoRacing, Tony Stewart
Race goes on, but change is in the Michigan wind
Saturday, June 13, 2009 | Print Entry
BROOKLYN, Mich. -- Once-mighty Detroit lies little more than an hour's drive to the east. And so time was when the garage area at Michigan International Speedway teemed on race weekends with bigwigs who'd cruised over from Ford, Chrysler and General Motors.
The grandstands were packed with factory workers cheering for the brands they built on the assembly lines over at Dearborn, Warren, Auburn Hills, even Flint in its long-past day, and the plants just across the Canadian border in Windsor, Ontario.
It's less crowded around here now. Not that it's a ghost town. Just subdued. You can feel the pall.
The only cheerful, omnipresent manufacturer figure is Lee White, the chieftain of Toyota Racing Development.
Just the Ford presence alone was a festival all its own, and I wonder about old acquaintances long gone to the buyouts, the early retirements
Ford's favorite racing son, the self-made engineer Jack Roush, headquartered in nearby Livonia, always made sure they had something to feel good about.
Eleven times his cars have won here, because Roush focuses his efforts here like no place else.
But this time, Roush's highest-starting driver for Sunday's LifeLock 400 is Matt Kenseth in 16th. Greg Biffle will start 20th, David Ragan 23rd, Carl Edwards 29th and Jamie McMurray 31st.
Kenseth is the only winner this year among them, with his rain-aided victory in the Daytona 500 followed by a fully earned one at Fontana, Calif.
Edwards, the most baffling disappointment this year, not just at Roush but on the whole Sprint Cup tour -- his nine wins last year led to his being named as consensus pick to win the 2009 Cup -- probably has the best chance to renew the Roush tradition at MIS.
Despite his poor starting spot, "This place is an easy place to pass if you've got a fast race car," Edwards said.
Off pace as the Roush Fenway team has been this year, Ford is in the best shape -- or, you could say, the least bad shape -- of the three American-based manufacturers.
"I don't understand everything that's going on with all the money in the country, but what I do know is that Ford is standing on its own feet," Edwards said.
Not so with Chrysler and GM, both of whom are subsisting now on a combination of bankruptcy and government bailouts.
The primary news story of the weekend here has been GM's announcement of NASCAR-wide cuts in cash support for teams. That includes cutting off cash from Dale Earnhardt Jr.'s JR Motorsports, which fields Nationwide cars, and Kevin Harvick Inc., which fields vehicles in the Nationwide and Camping World Truck series.
And the cash flow from GM continues in Cup only to the top teams, Hendrick Motorsports, Stewart-Haas Racing and Richard Childress Racing.
As long as technical support continues -- and Earnhardt believes that it will -- then the cash cuts may be of little real significance. Earnhardt characterized the GM contribution to his Nationwide team's budget as "very small."
His sister, Kelley Earnhardt, released a statement that JR Motorsports shouldn't have much difficulty adjusting to the GM cash cutbacks.
And that's true NASCAR-wide. Manufacturer money has never been as big as the public and some media people assumed. An educated guess would be perhaps 10 percent, tops, of big teams' budgets.
But two Toyotas occupy the front row here, driven by Brian Vickers and Kyle Busch, and three of the top four positions counting David Reutimann. The only Chevrolet, and the only American-based brand, in the two front rows is Jimmie Johnson's No. 48 Chevrolet, starting third.
So NASCAR goes on, at a reasonably good pace, all economic factors considered.
It's just that I-94, the main artery out here from once-mighty Detroit, is no longer pumping as vibrantly with traffic of moguls and workers, all of them fans, to the home track of the American automobile industry.
NASCAR, AutoRacing
Bankruptcy won't keep GM out of NASCAR
Monday, June 1, 2009 | Print Entry
DOVER, Del. -- NASCAR's sky will not fall with the bankruptcy of General Motors, any more than it has fallen with the bankruptcy of Chrysler -- which continues to race its Dodge brand.
To be sure, there's enough information out to set the Chicken Littles scurrying around the newsrooms.
But that very information is what assures me that GM's racing brand of choice, Chevrolet, will go on in NASCAR.
News agencies are reporting that GM will file for bankruptcy at 8 a.m. ET Monday, and that shortly thereafter, President Barack Obama will tell the nation that the United States government is taking a 60 percent stake in GM, with the Canadian government taking 12.5 percent, the United Auto Workers healthcare trust 17.5 percent, and bondholders 10 percent.
That pretty much wipes out GM as we've known it.
But it also assures that GM and Chevrolet as brands will go on, whoever owns them.
The U.S. and Canadian governments aren't going to let GM go under, because too many American and Canadian jobs would be lost. That would devastate North American society far worse than just messing up a sport like NASCAR.
And as long as GM is a brand, it will race. It can't afford not to, any more than Chrysler could afford not to.
Through three different Chrysler financial phases, Dodges have continued to race -- under DaimlerChrysler, then under private investment when Daimler-Benz retrenched to Mercedes-Benz as its core business, and now in bankruptcy restructuring.
Still, just to be sure, I bombarded the biggest Chevrolet racer in the history of NASCAR, team owner Rick Hendrick, with doomsday scenarios Sunday night after one of his Impalas, driven by Jimmie Johnson, had won the Autism Speaks 400.
What if the government should tell GM it must withdraw from promotional spending in NASCAR?
"What if GM tells you, 'Rick, we can't give you another penny for the foreseeable future?' Do you have a Plan B?" I asked.
What I meant was, Hendrick is powerful enough -- just as a retail car dealer, let alone a racer -- to make a deal with Toyota, Dodge or Ford, the other three NASCAR competitors, anytime he wants to.
Hell, the guy could race Mercedes-Benzes, BMWs or Hondas if NASCAR rules were conducive to it. He's got that many dealerships for those brands.
He looked me in the eye, and he said, "My Plan A is Chevrolet. My Plan B is Chevrolet. And my Plan C is Chevrolet."
No one in NASCAR has higher or closer connections with GM than Hendrick, though he never flaunts them. He's been dining privately with GM chairmen and CEOs since the days of Roger Smith. That's more than 20 years.
"I've had no indication they're going to cut back," Hendrick said of GM's NASCAR operations.
As Hendrick understands it, "there's a plan, a get-in, get-out situation," Hendrick said. "I'm hoping that if it happens, they'll get in and get out [of bankruptcy] in a hurry."
Hendrick pointed out that the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression has affected all manufacturers in NASCAR, and "you see Ford and Toyota and Chrysler, everybody's [still] here."
That's because they have to be. The situation has grown far graver than the old "Win on Sunday, sell on Monday" line. If you want to sell American cars at all on Monday, you have to race them on Sunday. That's the only real appeal you have left.
The brands with which Chevrolet has to compete in the showrooms -- Dodge, Ford and Toyota -- are still here. So GM must stay.
The fears of the government pulling the plug on NASCAR began with the inimitable Massachusetts Congressman Barney Frank, questioning whether bailed-out companies should be spending government money on sports promotions.
But there's a vast difference between having "Chevrolet" or "Ford" signage at a golf tournament or a baseball game, and participating in the very endeavor you sell: automobile performance.
Stopping the manufacturers from participating in NASCAR would be like telling Titleist, Callaway, Taylor and Ping that they can no longer support PGA or LPGA players.
The government, no matter how recalcitrant, will have no choice but to understand that if GM wants to sell cars, it must race.
"The numbers are really clear that NASCAR, almost more than anything else, drives sales for GM and the other manufacturers," said NASCAR spokesman Ramsey Poston. "It's one of the things that works better than anything else for them to gain exposure and sell cars. They're reaching over 100,000 fans in person at the track, and an average of almost 9 million fans on television every weekend."
At manufacturer bankruptcy, "We have a little experience," Poston said. "Obviously Chrysler is going through restructuring of their own, and they continue to put their resources, and compete, and market, through NASCAR."
From 1971 to 1980, NASCAR ran with virtually no factory support for teams -- just a little "out the backdoor" sheet metal and a few engine parts. NASCAR did fine that decade.
And so far, NASCAR isn't even at the brink of complete withdrawal of factory support.
So on Monday morning, the sky may be grayer, but it isn't even close to falling.
NASCAR, AutoRacing
Earnhardt uproar steals spotlight from Reutimann
Saturday, May 30, 2009 | Print Entry
DOVER, Del. -- It's fun to watch guys fly in under the radar.
While we in the NASCAR media corps were obsessing on Dale Earnhardt Jr.'s crew chief switch, and Kyle Busch's shots at the move, David Reutimann quietly took the first step toward showing his win in the Coca-Cola 600 last week wasn't a fluke.
Jason Smith/NASCAR/Getty Images
David Reutimann signs the wall in Victory Lane at Dover International Speedway after winning the pole for Sunday's Autism Speaks 400.
Winning the pole for the very next race, Sunday's Autism Speaks 400, is by no means a guarantee that Reutimann can fulfill the hope he immediately expressed after being declared the winner at rain-slogged Charlotte: "Maybe next time, we'll earn it."
Indeed, only 11 times in 78 races at Dover International Speedway has the pole-sitter won the race.
But, mean as the Monster Mile is -- you can come off a corner, see a car turned sideways and slam it, all in one blink of the eyes because there's just no room here -- it can be kind to an underdog.
And it can help that kind of guy prove a point.
In 1990, Derrike Cope came here with a flying fluke under his belt that season. He'd won the Daytona 500 on the last lap, slipping past the fishtailing car of Dale Earnhardt the moment a tire shredded on the notorious black No. 3.
Even after Cope won, Earnhardt was the big story, because he'd dominated the race. From there, Earnhardt's mantra became famous: "It ain't the Daytona 499."
Finally Cope came here and won, and the fluke talk eased a bit, for nobody thinks this is an easy place to get cheap wins.
Reutimann had it tough from the minute he arrived here Friday morning. Maybe I'm the one who made him nervous from the outset.
Amid the Earnhardt upheaval, I couldn't resist asking the good-humored Reutimann, "If for some reason this winning streak should not continue for you, do you have any fears that your car owner [the equally jovial Michael Waltrip] might change crew chiefs on you?"
The media center broke out in laughter, except for Reutimann, who, very oddly for him, could manage only a nervous smile.
"I hope not," he said. "I think Rodney [Childers] and I have got a pretty good program going, and I'd hate to do anything to mess it up."
Now you could see what was happening. The usually glib, no-worries Reutimann had his first Cup win, and it had been sinking in all week so that he knew what it feels like.
And so here was the 39-year-old journeyman who'd labored happily on the short tracks most of his life, and now he'd reached a new level and was fearful of falling from it.
The one-line artist showed signs of becoming another politically correct Cup driver.
"Not that I couldn't work with Bootie Barker," Reutimann hastened to add, in deference to Waltrip's own crew chief. "But I would fight awful hard to keep Rodney Childers as my crew chief. I don't want him to go anywhere."
Now Reutimann was all in an anxious knot over the power of suggestion.
"Oh, man, I hadn't even thought about it. I wish you hadn't said anything," he said to me.
"You know he was just kidding," said a bystander.
"Yeah -- but I don't know," Reutimann said.
Reutimann recovered fast from that one, after somebody asked him about talk that Martin Truex Jr. might be his next teammate at Michael Waltrip Racing.
What would Reutimann say to Truex to convince him he should come to MWR? That the team is a budding power?
Reutimann thought a moment.
"I'm there."
That broke up the room. The one-line artist was back. After the laughter died down, he said, "I even managed to get that one out with a straight face."
This was the guy who had spent the early season creating mirth with his ironic self-deprecation as "The Franchise" after a team member had nicknamed the then-winless driver that.
But then came more anxiety. He went out early in qualifying Friday, and made his family proud of their three-generations-old No. 00 ("double nothing," is the inside family joke) again -- this time with a lap around the Monster Mile at 156.794 mph.
Then, just as he'd had to pace the pit road for two hours at Charlotte waiting to see if NASCAR would call the race with him sitting at the front of the parked field, Reutimann had to wait ... and wait ... and wait ... to see if someone would better his qualifying speed.
"I'm kind of a nervous person anyway," he said when the pole was finally his. "Waiting around for them to decide if we won the race, and then waiting around all day so everybody had a shot at us to try to knock us off the pole, kind of becomes nerve-wracking over time.
"But in the end," he said of qualifying, "we had a good car."
What about his Toyota in race trim? "It's really good."
Maybe last week is showing a little bit here for the 00 team, in that "I think it gives the shop a little momentum, because those guys work so hard on everything.
"For me, I would like to win a race a little differently than that," he said of Charlotte.
Maybe he can, here Sunday on a monstrous place to try to win, and 00 can go from meaning double-nothing to double-wins.
NASCAR, AutoRacing, David Reutimann
With past as a guide, postponement the right call
Sunday, May 24, 2009 | Print Entry
CONCORD, N.C. -- Well, the good news is, the Coca-Cola 600 is going to a true Memorial Day running. Just this once.
After an early Sunday evening of pretty blatant lollygagging under intermittent showers, NASCAR decided not to even try to start the thing until noon ET on Monday.
You could tell, early on, that they had little to no hope.
Funny. You hang around these rain delays and rainouts for enough decades, you learn to sense NASCAR's biorhythms -- whether they're going to try to run, or are just going through the motions before they call it.
It started raining here at 6:06 p.m. ET Sunday evening, and by 6:30 I sensed a whole lot of going through the motions, even after it stopped raining. They knew what the radar looked like.
There just was no spring in anybody's step along the pit road, no sense of urgency anywhere at Lowe's Motor Speedway.
One high official told me before 7 p.m. that they'd be very unlikely to attempt a start if there was any rain after 8 p.m. -- it was sprinkling again at that hour -- because it would put them at a 11 p.m. start, and they weren't going to do that.
Darn. I've always liked to see these night races go late, just to see how absurd they can get.
In 1997, the North Carolina Highway Patrol had to step in after midnight and call off the 600, lest the outbound traffic get mingled with Charlotte's snarling regular morning traffic.
At 12:20 a.m., only 265 of the full 400 laps had been completed. So NASCAR announced that at 12:45, they'd give the field the 20-to-go signal, and let 'em scramble for it.
Jeff Gordon won it, got to the winner's interview around 2 a.m. and then, everybody's night's sleep shot anyway, hung out and talked with us until nearly 3.
That 1 a.m. finish was the record folly for night racing for TV's sake, running into the rainstorm hours, until the July race at Daytona in 2005.
That was a masterpiece. The thing ended around 2 a.m. And this was a race that, when founded as the Firecracker 400 by Big Bill France, originally started at 10 a.m. specifically to avoid the afternoon and evening thunderstorms of summertime Florida.
Tony Stewart won the '05 Pepsi 400 six hours after the scheduled start -- and 16 hours after the time Big Bill knew the race should start.
Maybe it's my decades of covering 24-hour races that make me take these NASCAR situations far less seriously than my U.S.-bound colleagues in the media do. Wee hours spent at racetracks long ago became mundane to me.
I think it was in 1995 at Le Mans when it rained for about 23 of the hours -- although, to their credit, sports car endurance races run right on through the rain. Which goes a long way toward helping you stay awake.
But there was just no fun to be had Sunday evening here. Give NASCAR credit for wising up since '05 at Daytona, off the '97 blunder of the marathon race here.
Now, NASCAR's policy is never to start what it knows it can't finish. And the radar in the Charlotte area showed just too many little cells, moving and combining.
Lowe's officials' handling of the announcement to the fans was a throwback to the dirt track days. It was, in itself, fascinating to hear.
They got the golden-voiced Ken Squier, CBS's longtime Shakespearian soliloquy deliverer of NASCAR, to lament the "dark, rainy night" and introduce track president Marcus Smith, who began by telling the fans, "Y'all are so fantastic "
The fans booed anyway.
But they went away orderly.
Because NASCAR had done the right thing this time.
NASCAR, AutoRacing
15 years ago, Gordon won and the tears flowed
Saturday, May 23, 2009 | Print Entry
CONCORD, N.C. -- You look at the old footage and see the kid weeping and covering his face in disbelief in Victory Lane after his first Cup win, and it somehow seems a lot longer than 15 years ago.
And yet for the man who is now graying at the temples, pushing age 38 and having problems with his back, the senior statesman of NASCAR drivers, "it's been a blur, kind of, ever since then "
It's been 15 years since Jeff Gordon won his first one, the Coca-Cola 600 here at Lowe's Motor Speedway, known simply as "Charlotte" back then.
AP Photo/Mike Conroy
Two months after winning his first Cup race at Charlotte in 1994, Jeff Gordon celebrated a victory in the inaugural Brickyard 400 at Indy.
Now he has 82 victories, and a win Sunday night in the 600 would tie him with Cale Yarborough for fifth on the all-time winners list, and send him after the tie for third, at 84, between Bobby Allison and Darrell Waltrip.
The gruff driver who rode the kid unmercifully in 1994 about crying like a baby, Dale Earnhardt, is gone. When Earnhardt was killed in 2001, Gordon became the go-to guy, the driver of record, for all of us in the media whenever there was any sort of issue about NASCAR.
Earnhardt's sidekick, Rusty Wallace, who joined in the ribbing -- and whom Gordon beat that night -- is retired from driving and working as an ESPN commentator. Darrell Waltrip, who told the two tough guys to leave the kid alone, is long retired, long gone to the Fox broadcast booths.
Ray Evernham, the crew chief who made the two-tire call on the last stop, to get the kid out front and keep him there, went on to a career that brought him recognition as the best crew chief of all time in NASCAR, then became a team owner, and is now on a fun-only schedule, as a commentator for ESPN and the operator of a small dirt track in North Carolina.
So much has changed, so many milestones have been passed, that it seems an awfully long time since the kid wept uncontrollably.
I missed that race. My assignment that year was the Grand Prix of Monaco, in the wake of the deaths at Imola, Italy, of Ayrton Senna and Roland Ratzenberger, and the serious injury at Monaco to Karl Wendlinger. It was a fortnight so terrible that the French newspaper Le Figaro ran the headline: "Fomule 1: La Série Noire." Formula One: The Black Series.
"We thought we walked on water," F1 czar Bernie Ecclestone told me on race morning. "And now someone's drowned."
I tell you this to put in perspective just how long it's been since the kid wept. It was the weekend the world's great motor racing safety revolution began, with F1 going immediately into radical surgery on its cars.
Not for seven more years, until the death of Earnhardt, would NASCAR begin its own safety revolution. But F1 had already provided a road map to the HANS device, better seats, soft barriers.
Ascension Day came early that year, and Monaco was run in mid-May, and so I got home in time to see the kid weep on TV in time to memorize the spelling of "Evernham," the guy who'd made the pit call, for it was pretty clear he was going places.
It seems so much longer since, when an F1 or Indy or NASCAR driver had a bad wreck, you knew there was a significant chance of death or serious injury. It's still a concern, but a relatively remote one.
The kid who wept has survived, without serious injury, so long that the constant pounding and wrenching of the routine act of racing has aged and deteriorated his back.
He's such a big name now that he can make headlines anytime he wants, with a quick comment. Take just the other day here. Somebody asked him whether his back problems could be enough to hasten his retirement.
He said yes, if it didn't get better. But it is getting better.
"If my back were the way that it was at Bristol this year, it's definitely going to shorten my career. I can't race like that for long periods of time."
Voilà! Headlines everywhere that back problems could shorten his career. But Gordon will turn 38 in August and has long questioned whether he'll race much past the age of 40.
If he goes out with back pain, he'll go out the way David Pearson did -- Pearson never suffered a serious injury, never so much as a broken bone, his entire career. He lasted long enough that back pain got him, the way it gets a lot of people, in and out of race cars.
Think of it: Jeff Gordon has lasted so long, between the kid who wept and the graying man, that it is taking back pain to raise questions of his retirement.
But to Gordon it's been a blur -- he first told me that in the spring of 1995, when he was clearly NASCAR's rising star. And he has told me that twice again this weekend here, as I've asked how vivid the memories of '94 remain in his mind.
Hard to remember the details for 15 years, he admitted, especially through the blur, "and to be honest, since 1994 the things that have happened to this team and me personally have just been unbelievable. It's been one heck of a ride."
For Gordon, for NASCAR, for all the motor racing world.
NASCAR, AutoRacing
Want to win the 600? Follow these rules
Friday, May 22, 2009 | Print Entry
CONCORD, N.C. -- Get a grip on Turns 3 and 4 of Lowe's Motor Speedway, and eat during the race.
Those are the two tricks to winning the Coca-Cola 600 touted by the two drivers who have dominated it over the past six years, Kasey Kahne and Jimmie Johnson.
Even approaching this, the 50th running of NASCAR's longest race, we media types keep asking drivers how they handle that extra 100 miles.
"You need to eat during the course of the race to make sure you have energy for the end of it," said Johnson, who won three 600s in a row -- and five out of six Cup races at Lowe's Motor Speedway -- from 2003 to 2005, before giving up the edge to Kahne.
"When Ray [Evernham] was still around [Kahne's team], he passed me a Power Bar, some type of bar during one of the cautions about halfway through the race," Kahne said via teleconference this week. "The first year I got it, I put it aside -- I didn't feel like eating.
"And the second year he said, 'Just try it, just do it.' And I ate it, and it was night and day how much better I felt for the final 100 miles of the race."
Kahne won the 600 in 2006, and again last year. The only 600 not won by him or Johnson since '03 was by Casey Mears on fuel strategy in '07.
Johnson lost his edge in '06 when the track was resurfaced, but before that, he realized that "there's a must-take line in [Turns] 3 and 4 that I [could] always set our car up to run.
"As soon as I would hit that spot, I'd fly through 3 and 4," Johnson continued, "and pass two cars at a time sometimes through there."
The edge "has mainly been in 3 and 4 for myself, too," Kahne said. "I always worked really hard on that corner to get the car through there like I want it to."
Why are 3 and 4 more important than 1 and 2?
"I feel like 1 and 2, to me, has a little bit more grip," Kahne said. "So it's a little bit easier to get through. If you can get through 3 and 4, usually you're really fast in 1 and 2 also."
So to pick a winner Sunday night, watch who's getting through 3 and 4 better as darkness falls and the track tightens up for the later stages of the race.
And watch who's getting an energy bar handed through the window on pit stops. Johnson may actually eat two or three times, as his crew cuts an energy bar into halves or thirds.
But then there's Kyle Busch, who not only doesn't eat, but also drinks very little before the race and in the early stages.
"If I could get a hamburger to fit in the helmet, I might have that," Busch quipped here Thursday. But, "I don't think I can get it in there. I don't diet any differently [for this race]. The only thing that I'll do is that I probably won't hydrate as much before the race."
Say what? "Won't" hydrate?
"Because it's such a long race, you don't get any opportunity to go to the bathroom," Busch said. "I won't hydrate at all until I get in the car, probably. You'll actually start the race probably almost dehydrated, and then you'll hydrate through the event just to keep that state so you don't have to go to the bathroom every hour."
So in summary, the keys to that extra 100 miles seem to be: 1) Don't be hungry; 2) Don't be loose or tight through 3 and 4; 3) Don't be nagged by the urge to go to the bathroom.
That, plus dodging all the wrecks.
NASCAR, AutoRacing
For Mark Martin, it's not about the title
Friday, May 8, 2009 | Print Entry
DARLINGTON, S.C. -- Mark Martin had one earnest request to the media on Friday.
"I would appreciate it if you wouldn't write that I'm coming back for one more shot at the championship," Martin said at Darlington Raceway, in his first news conference since re-upping for another full season with Hendrick Motorsports next year.
Martin, 50, known in the NASCAR garages as "the best driver never to win the championship," is a four-time runner-up for the Cup, and has finished in the hunt eight times in his career.
But he has stopped fretting about that, and would like for the talk to stop.
"I do this because I love racing with all my heart," he said.
It took a partial season in 2007 for him to get his priorities in order, he added. He had to break some of his obsession with championships.
"Just for example, in 1999, on Friday night before the 400 on Saturday at Daytona in July, I broke my wrist, my ribs and my knee [in a practice crash]," he said. "I did that because I wanted to win a championship."
Later, "I raced for a year and a half with excruciating back pain," he said. "I never missed a practice session, I never missed a test session, I never missed anything. Because I wanted to win a championship.
"I was allowing that points thing to affect how I felt about racing. I focused on that more than I really realized how much I love it."
Then, "When I finally stepped out of the car and ran 26 [of 36] races in '07, I started gradually realizing how much I love to race. And I'm going to keep it that way. ... I'm not going to try to will more points than we can score at the finish line each week."
The fun of it all set in his mind, and Martin said his conversation with team owner Rick Hendrick about another full season was very brief and to the point.
"After Phoenix [where he won on April 18] was the first conversation I had, and that lasted -- five minutes would be a stretch. The conversation with Rick was probably less than five minutes, probably more like 60 seconds.
"He said that's what he wanted to do, and I said that's what I wanted to do.
"So here we are."
Just for the fun of it, mind you.
NASCAR, AutoRacing, Mark Martin
Junior Johnson a proud papa after son's first win
Wednesday, May 6, 2009 | Print Entry
I haven't heard this much excitement in Junior Johnson's voice since Dale Earnhardt stuck Darrell Waltrip in the fence at Richmond in 1986. And that time, it was anger.
This time it was joy, glee and enormous fatherly pride in his son, Robert, 15, who the other night won "the first race he drove, anywhere," Junior said by phone.
Courtesy Junior Johnson
Does a Cup career await Robert Johnson, left, the 15-year-old son of Junior Johnson?
How'd the boy look?
Junior thundered laughter.
"He shocked me."
More proud laughter.
"When the race started, he left out [in a hurry]. You'd have thought he'd been driving for 10 years."
No NASCAR dad in the Cup garages today is as qualified as Junior Johnson to know when he's got a natural on his hands. The legendary moonshine-runner-turned-racer was a natural himself in the 1950s and '60s -- no one, before or since, has been as flat-out, all the time as Junior.
But, "I don't know if I was that gung ho to go as he was," Junior said of Robert's run last Saturday night at Caraway Speedway, a highly respected cradle track for stars, in the Sportsman division.
"He was tickled to death, and so was I," said Junior, 77, who sold his racing team in 1995 and retired to his cattle ranch in the Blue Ridge foothills of North Carolina.
But his only son has him looking toward a return to NASCAR -- which requires that drivers be at least 18 -- within three years.
"If he keeps learning and learning and learning, he'll be able to make it plumb to the top," Junior said. "But you know how kids are. They get different things on their mind and stuff."
Should Robert divert his thinking to another career, his father would understand. Junior himself never was extremely passionate about racing -- just very good at driving, stretching mechanical rules to and beyond the limits, and obtaining lucrative sponsorships.
"But I think he's really dedicated to it," Junior said. "He's got his mind made up that's what he wants to do. He looks like he's really dead set to make it."
If so, "Every step he makes, I'm gonna be there," Junior said.
Even all the way back to NASCAR, where Junior won 50 races as a driver and 140 more as a car owner before growing weary of NASCAR busting him on rules violations?
"I wouldn't be a bit surprised," Junior said. "You know, I can cope with the rules, whatever they are."
Did he ever, in his time. He was NASCAR's most celebrated "cheater," a word he has long dismissed. "It ain't cheatin'; it's gaining a technical advantage."
If Robert wants to go all the way to Sprint Cup, "I know what it takes and how to get it done," said the man who fielded winning cars for LeeRoy Yarbrough, Bobby Allison, Cale Yarborough, Darrell Waltrip and others.
In my mind, there simply could be no better teacher of stock car racing, anywhere, than Junior Johnson, who has had his son testing privately on both dirt and asphalt tracks -- Caraway is paved -- for more than a year.
"We've worked on dirt more than anything to start with," Junior said. "I want him to learn how to back a car in a corner and save it when he gets sideways and everything like that.
"He's accomplished most all that stuff."
Despite the Caraway win, "I'm not going to let him just drop dirt and take off to asphalt. I'm going to keep stepping back and refreshing his memory on what it takes to handle a car."
The training will remain methodical throughout.
"When he moves, he'll be able to handle a move that we make," Junior said. "I'm not going to rush him into something headstrong, hoping to get there real quick.
"We've got plenty of time. He's got three or four years yet to go [before he's eligible for NASCAR]."
Teenaged Robert is sponsored by Junior Johnson's Country Hams. Might he need to turn 21 before he can be sponsored by the legal liquor brand, Junior Johnson's Midnight Moon?
Junior thundered laughter again: "I don't know about that, now."
So if they could get the brand on the side of the car, Robert Glenn Johnson III would be the third generation in what you could call the moonshine business.
NASCAR, AutoRacing
How two cars can beat the restrictor plates at Dega
Thursday, April 30, 2009 | Print Entry
So what's all this business about two cars, hooked up, flying past drafting lines of 10 or 12 or more at Talladega?
Used to seem that the more cars, the faster in a line.
But Dale Earnhardt Jr. and Ryan Newman formed a breakaway duo late. Then they were run down and passed by the tag-team of Carl Edwards and Brad Keselowski to form the final duel and set up Edwards' now-notorious crash.
Sprint Cup director John Darby, chief technical officer of the series, explained the two-car phenomenon.
"As they team up like that [in pairs], they double their horsepower," Darby said this week on a NASCAR teleconference.
"But they don't necessarily double their drag that each individual car would have, so that enables them to go through the air quicker."
An unrestricted engine in 32 of the 36 points races develops more than 800 horsepower. Engines stifled by carburetor restrictor plates, in the four races at Talladega and Daytona, develop only a little more than 400 horsepower.
So what developed at Talladega was that two cars, jammed together, usually touching nose-to-tail, essentially developed 800 horsepower in a package that amounted to just a little more than one car.
Edwards and Keselowski had the best "one-car package" because they worked on the high side, which, Earnhardt said later, was more conducive to "winding out the engines" fully.
"Brad is pretty smart," Earnhardt said of his protégé. "I guess he was the first one out of anybody to figure out that was what [had to be done] to get back up to us."
Figuring out how to make one unrestricted car in a restrictor-plate race is what won the race for Keselowski.
NASCAR, AutoRacing
Like Earnhardt, David Poole mastered his craft
Tuesday, April 28, 2009 | Print Entry
In his own way, the late David Poole was as much of a success story as the late Dale Earnhardt.
Both came from Carolina mill towns and working-class families; both were driven to rise higher, and both did; both were toughened by the climb.
Young Earnhardt hit the dirt tracks, and you know the rest.
Young Poole hit the books and won a Morehead Scholarship to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Otherwise, he couldn't have afforded college at all, he once told me.
He pounded the keyboards and traveled with Dean Smith and the Tar Heels as a working journalist all the way through school.
Then he rose to become one of the greats in American auto racing journalism, not just of his time but ever.
David Poole died Tuesday of a heart attack, soon after finishing his daily Sirius satellite radio show and probably thinking about the next one -- and his next column in The Charlotte Observer, and his next blog on Thatsracin.com.
He was 50. Just 50. Remember that next time you think sports journalists -- particularly NASCAR writers, in this case -- have the greatest, the cushiest, the most fun jobs in the world.
It's hard work and serious responsibility, this truth-telling business. And here I differentiate between the amateur, cottage-industry blogs and Web sites that are springing up everywhere and the true professionals, the serious journalists like David Poole.
If you do it the way he did it, the pressure is constant, even in your sleep. You're always on call, like a resident physician.
It's largely thankless -- you try to be the fans' voice to NASCAR and NASCAR's voice to the fans, and neither side is happy. When everybody's mad at you, you figure you're doing your job right, you're being fair.
After he took the radio gig -- several hours daily, early mornings, on top of the Web site, on top of the paper, on top of writing books, on top of doing guest TV appearances for ESPN and others -- I told him, "Poole, that's one job too many."
"Probably," he said, and shrugged, and went on typing -- I think it was in the media center at Richmond -- on deadline for the Observer.
He was making the transition from print to electronic media, as all of us have or will -- or else find other lines of work entirely.
Our beloved newspapers are dying, their time almost over. David was changing, but he'd have stayed with The Charlotte Observer until its last edition if he could -- he would change, but he would not desert. He would do it all.
He never let up. Never backed off. He was never anything but intense, driven, passionate about motor racing and journalism. Even when he told a joke -- and he could make an entire media center explode with laughter in five or fewer words -- it was with intensity in his voice.
Like Earnhardt, Poole never knew any other way but to be hungry. Both toughened, developed sharp edges. They ruffled, intimidated, angered some people -- you don't do well in NASCAR by being warm and fuzzy.
But they got their jobs done, very well indeed.
The night Earnhardt died, I went on autopilot, as you have to do about the death of a friend in this business. You have to report it first and analyze it for the public. Then and only then do you get to go home and do your own grieving.
I've been on TV and on the phone and at the keyboard all afternoon and half the evening, working on autopilot about the death of David Poole.
I'm going home now.
NASCAR, AutoRacing
Martin easy to like through thick and thin
Monday, April 20, 2009 | Print Entry
Not enough NASCAR people offer specific examples of why they like and respect Mark Martin -- and why they're genuinely happy for him when he wins, as he did Saturday night at Phoenix.
Well, here's an up close and personal example.
We'll have to rewind through a 15-year period, but stick with me -- the 1990 part is both vital and gut-wrenching.
Down to the wire of that '90 championship, there were two contenders: Martin and the relentless player of mind games, Dale Earnhardt.
The day before the penultimate race of the season, at Phoenix, the two contenders were brought into the media center for a joint news conference about the championship.
No sooner had they sat down in front of the microphones than Earnhardt went to work on Martin's head.
The specialty concession of Phoenix International Raceway was homemade lemonade, and the track publicist brought Martin and Earnhardt each a large cup.
"This got any vodka in it?" Earnhardt cracked into the microphone, making sure everybody could hear.
"Well, no," said the publicist.
"We want some vodka in this, don't we Mark?" Earnhardt pressed.
Martin said not a word, although the allusion was clear to the savvy in the room.
Martin in his youth had had a drinking problem. That was back in the time where you see the gaps in his Cup career statistics chart. He ran a full season in 1982, part of a season for four different owners in '83, disappeared entirely from the Cup series in '84 and '85 and didn't return full-time until Jack Roush hired him in '88.
By Phoenix 1990, Martin hadn't had a drink in years -- still hasn't, 19 years later -- but Earnhardt kept boring in.
There would be a test session the following week, at Atlanta, going into the finale there.
"I'll tell you how me and Mark are gonna test," Earnhardt said. "We're gonna go out and make a lap, and then we're gonna come in and have a beer. Ain't we Mark?"
Martin said nothing, remained stoic-faced. In the audience I whispered to a colleague that Earnhardt had played some harsh mind games in his time, but this was the worst.
"Then we're gonna make another lap, and come in and have another beer. And another lap, and another beer. Ain't we, Mark?"
Earnhardt won that championship, but it wasn't because of that particular mind game. It hadn't fazed Martin; it was just the cruelty of it that stuck with me for years.
Now fast-forward about 15 years. Martin was in the Chase. I wrote a column about the diminutive man who by then had become known as "the best driver never to win the championship."
I cited all the times he'd barely missed the title -- four times he'd finished second, and four times third -- and pointed out '90 as his first near miss, complete with the Earnhardt story.
Next race was Talladega, just like this week. At the desk of a hotel in Anniston, Ala., I ran into a Ford publicist who said, "Mark wants to see you."
I thought, "Oh, hell. He's upset that I dredged up his old drinking problem."
Next morning, I stepped up into the trailer and saw him up in the lounge. He waved me in and said sit down. It took him a few seconds of gathering his thoughts before he spoke.
"I just wanted to thank you," he said. "I had no idea anybody realized what he [Earnhardt] was doing that day -- let alone that anybody would remember it all these years."
He wasn't upset about the column. He appreciated it.
That's the kind of man the stars of NASCAR were lined up to congratulate in Victory Lane at Phoenix on Saturday night.
NASCAR, AutoRacing
Little Widow made a big impression
Tuesday, April 14, 2009 | Print Entry
The Little Widow still exists, pretty as ever.
I found her -- actually, it -- through idle Easter Googling that led to my most serendipitous find ever on the Internet.
The Little Widow, you see, is why I am what I am, where I am, who I am. Its siren song to a child changed the course of a life in the bud.
I'd thought it was long gone, destroyed, rusted away in some junkyard, decades ago relegated to my memory.
Courtesy Tobby Taylor/Misschicken.com
The Little Widow, smaller and sleeker than the boxier Miss Chicken, was built on a rail frame with a severely chopped-down body. She is more typical of the innovation of the Mississippi constructors of the time, who went for light weight and low profile.
But there the Little Widow sits -- restored, gleaming black -- in pictures from a recent car show, looking as race-ready as it was the night it was the very first glimmer, inkling, spark of my passion for motor racing.
If you want to see it, here's a link: www.misschicken.com. Scroll down the home page until you see the striking little black open-wheel car.
When first I saw and heard it, I wasn't much older than the kid in the picture.
There are some links to other pictures of the car in its heyday on my hometown dirt track, in what was then a racing hotbed.
Was this North Carolina? Indiana? Georgia? Not at all.
This was in Mississippi, of all places.
On summer nights as a preschooler I would lie awake in the dark with the screened windows open, listening to the iron thunder rolling across the trees from the fairgrounds a few miles away.
"What is that, Mama?" I would ask.
"Old stock car races," she would say.
"Can we go see them?"
"No, honey. Only sorry people go to those old stock car races."
The matter was closed for several summers, the taboo absolute -- and tantalizing.
Then my Cub Scout pack was invited to the races. Our leader was a postman. A coworker moonlighted as track announcer at the Laurel Fairgrounds Speedway, a half-mile dirt track, and agreed to let us all in free.
The announcer was called Fats Harvison. Hearing that, I guessed he must be some sort of gangster from New Orleans. Turned out he was quite skinny, and was a mild-mannered mail carrier with a rich and wondrous voice.
The great racing voice Chris Economaki, decades later, would tell me his lifelong philosophy about calling races: "The crowd must never leave the track having seen nearly as good a race as it thinks it has seen. That is the job of the track announcer."
By that measure Fats remains, in my heart, the best who's ever been, or ever will be.
Climbing high into the old roofed grandstands originally built for horse racing, I beheld a little black object in full broadslide through a turn. It came off the corner faster than any car I had ever seen anywhere, and when it reached full throttle I put my fingers in my splitting ears, without even thinking about it, to ease the banshee scream.
They didn't have race cams in those days, so the engines didn't crack or rumble. They shrieked: a horrific high, operatic scream, relentless, the roof of the old grandstand an echo chamber that made it even more painful to hear.
The nearest sound today is that of Formula One cars.
Something called "time trials" was occurring.
There was nothing "stock" about the Little Widow, or any of the other cars. "Stock" was just a word they got from the eastern side of the South. These cars were all highly modified, with rail frames, their bodies cut down so much that even though they had roofs, they were actually smaller than the Indy cars of the time.
The tiny black car came past in a blur, and Fats Harvison bellowed on the loudspeakers:
"This is Ellis Palasini, Leland, Mississippi, in the Little Widow."
From that moment, my world changed. There was far more to it than Ole Miss football and the New York Yankees, my first two sports obsessions.
Down through the decades, at the starts of races from Daytona to Indianapolis to Monaco to Le Mans, the Little Widow has screamed past me in my mind.
A lot of cars then had names, or combinations of names and numbers: Little Widow, Purple People Eater, 2x4, 12 Gauge.
The year was 1958.
Not until Easter Sunday 2009 did I learn on misschicken.com that the Little Widow lost only two races that summer of '58 on Palasini's tour of tracks in Mississippi, Louisiana and western Tennessee.
The other eye-misting Easter surprise was that not only does Ellis Palasini still live in the Mississippi Delta town of Leland, hard by the big river, but that at almost 78, he has a Web site, www.EPV8.com.
Courtesy Misschicken.com/Bo Freeman
The grandstand and frontstretch of the Laurel Fairgrounds Speedway in 1955. This was the source of the mysterious thunder that kept little Eddie Hinton awake on Saturday nights.
And, it turns out, Fats Harvison is alive and well at 86 in Laurel.
So I have spent the past 24 hours, except for some sleep, wandering through my childhood, viewing pictures of racetracks long razed. A couple of years ago I asked my brother if we could go to the place the Laurel Fairgrounds Speedway once was, and he took me to what was nothing more than a vast asphalt parking lot where hundreds of FEMA trailers were stored from the Katrina disaster.
Palasini and his archrival, Ival Cooper (my second-favorite driver) didn't learn to race by running moonshine. Palasini learned to drive on tractors and combines on his family's vast plantation in the rich Delta land.
Cooper learned by racing fully loaded log trucks for the hell of it on dirt roads leading out of the backwoods of Arkansas. After moving to Mississippi for a better day job, he never did think racing cars was very daunting. He has been dead for decades, although I can't find records of the circumstances. I heard once he'd been killed racing, long past his prime.
Palasini quit in 1972, apparently bored with the takeover of Southern racing by late models, cars with fenders that weren't nearly as powerful or quick as the modifieds and supermodifieds he loved so.
The Little Widow was Palasini's sportsman-class ride. That was supposed to be the slower class, but it had a small-block V8 Chevy engine mounted on a rail frame fashioned from the driveshaft of a truck, covered with the chopped-down body of a 1934 Ford coupe.
It looks nothing like those supposedly pioneering North Carolina cars of the 1950s. Beside the Little Widow they are big, clumsy, bumbling oafs.
Palasini's even-faster car, in the modified division, was called the Black Widow and carried the simple number "V8" on the side. But that particular V8 engine was a highly modified version of what went into Corvettes in those days. Well-to-do Delta planters could afford such exotic machinery.
Cooper's No. 248 had a Cadillac engine. Bob Herrin's "Little 312" carried a GMC truck engine, modified by the maestro engine builder Buck Ishee in a place called Sullivan's Hollow.
These were all open-wheel cars. Even the "sportsman" cars were modified, and the "modified" cars were extremely modified. The only cars with fenders were the junkers, the "jalopy" class, and they were run as more of a joke, an intermission from the serious stuff.
I didn't see a serious fendered race car until showroom-like cars began to appear on TV, racing in a league called NASCAR, which didn't impress me at all -- why, Fireball Roberts' Pontiac looked no cooler than any sitting in our neighborhood driveways.
To this day I find it highly amusing when racers and race fans assume my background is in full-bodied cars because of my Southern accent. Along the Gulf of Mexico, from Florida to Texas, it was all open-wheel in those days.
In the 1960s they paved the Laurel track and made it part of a supermodified circuit that included high-banked half-miles at Jackson, Miss.; Mobile, Ala.; Montgomery, Ala.; and Pensacola, Fla.
New drivers arrived, among them two brothers from Alabama named Bobby and Donnie Allison. (You want to know how good Ellis Palasini was? Ask either of the Allisons to this day.)
To big races, 200- and 300-lappers, would come the hotshots from as far away as Indiana and Texas, hunting easy pickings. But they would always leave badly beaten, amazed by the brilliance of Gulf region mechanics like Ishee, Chicken McComb, Fred Sabbatini outdriven by Palasini, Cooper, Gene Tapia, Armond Holley, Wayne Niedecken.
What dried up the Mississippi racing? Lack of money, probably. And the advent of fendered late models, which nobody down there ever really cared for.
And racing got too professional to be sport.
Once, at Laurel, I paid my 50 cents and scanned the pits for the Black Widow and the Little Widow, and they weren't there. Fats apologized to the crowd, saying Ellis and his father were running combines on the Delta plantation 24 hours a day trying to get the crops in before the rains came.
Think about it. Wouldn't you love for racing to return to such simplicity that its stars could go missing because they had to get their crops in?
Maybe the preachers killed off racing in Mississippi, calling it sin to their congregations, so that the decent folk abhorred a pastime for "sorry people."
For decades afterward, Mama would admonish me: "Honey, no good will ever come from you going to those old stock car races."
In that time, I have known the greatest and most renowned racing drivers in the world, from Graham Hill to Ayrton Senna to Michael Schumacher from Richard Petty to David Pearson to Jeff Gordon A.J. Foyt, Mario Andretti, all the Unsers and Allisons and Earnhardts.
For some reason, I never have felt awed in the presence of any of them.
But today I have written the first fan letter of my life to a driver. It's an e-mail to Mr. Ellis Palasini, Leland, Miss.
NASCAR, AutoRacing
Chasing history down U.S. Highway 1
Wednesday, April 1, 2009 | Print Entry
GREENSBORO, N.C. -- Just got home from a lovely day trip into the past two centuries.
Destination was the 20th century, down in Darlington, S.C., home of NASCAR's first big track -- and to this day its most difficult.
We were shooting some TV advance material for ESPN at hallowed Darlington Raceway with its all-time maestro driver, David Pearson, and the man I think resuscitated the Lady in Black from her deathbed in the 1990s, Jim Hunter.
To get there from here, you drive through several glimpses of the 19th century, down U.S. Highway 1, for which the path through the Carolinas was originally cleared for another purpose -- Sherman's army marching 60,000 strong, felling forests as it came.
This was the second leg of their trip, the first being their more famous March to the Sea, from Atlanta to Savannah, Ga. Once rested at Savannah, Sherman turned to the north, wreaking vastly worse wrath than he had in Georgia, for as one of his soldiers said upon setting foot in South Carolina, "Here treason began, and here, by God, it shall end."
Somehow the western edge of his army barely missed the town of Cheraw, S.C., and as you drive through today, if there were no power lines or automobiles, it could just as easily be the spring of 1842, the year St. Peter's Catholic Church was established -- the old wooden church stands now, little changed from then.
My all-time favorite observation about the Carolinas was from the eloquent Charlotte Observer columnist Ron Green Sr., who once told me, "The Mason-Dixon Line should have been drawn between North and South Carolina."
That's how different they are. Their populations even have very different Southern accents.
Crossing the state line headed south, you're not only entering a different state but almost a different region, and the pace of life slows down by half.
The very border is a demarcation line between the pre-spring buds of North Carolina and the blooming, pollen-misted spring of South Carolina.
And there is the deeply traditional challenge of passing through Society Hill, S.C., without running afoul of the law.
It's the Eastern Seaboard's most notorious and longest-running speed trap, where, as far as I've been able to tell through the decades, every male citizen is a town policeman sitting in a patrol car with his radar pulsing.
Past Society Hill you're home free down to Darlington, and there we met -- Hunter and Pearson and me, and an ESPN crew led by producer Bonnie Larkin -- to sit on the dock at Walter McKnight's house, overlooking the lake and across to the Pearson Grandstands.
We talked for a good two hours on camera, and I haven't laughed that hard, that long, in years. What did we talk about? I can't tell you yet. It would spoil the fun of the feature pieces that will air on "NASCAR Now" the week, and the day, of the Southern 500, May 9.
Suffice it to say there's a lot of Hunter, who managed old Darlington from 1992 to 2000 and brought it back from dilapidation to dignity, talking about the history of the place.
And there's a lot of Pearson, telling the secrets of how he won 10 races, more than anyone else, on the Lady in Black & and precisely why he would barely turn the steering wheel coming off corners where drivers such as Cale Yarborough, Darrell Waltrip and Richard Petty would saw and yank on their steering wheels for dear life.
Pearson always looked like he was driving down an interstate, and I always wondered how he could do that, and today he finally told me. Just another case of legerdemain by the Silver Fox that no one could guess for decades.
Couldn't leave Darlington without stopping by the Raceway Grill, home of the best hamburger steak (smothered in onions and melted cheese) in the Eastern time zone. And french fries cut from fresh potatoes.
Which left me drowsy for the drive back north, up the way Sherman's army had come, and just at the state line I stopped and read the historical marker for the exact dates. They crossed into North Carolina on March 4-7, 1865.
Three days to cross the state line. That must have been some army.
The immortal Kurt Vonnegut Jr. admonished us all, in the last book of his life, to remember the times that we are truly, sublimely happy, for when you think about it, those times are relatively few in anyone's lifetime.
Today was one of those times.
NASCAR, AutoRacing
Hamlin plays the classy card at Martinsville
Monday, March 30, 2009 | Print Entry
I'm well aware of the old line, "Show me a good loser, and I'll show you a loser."
And I've heard many a football coach say that to win, you have to really, really, really hate to lose.
AP Photo/Steve Helber
Jimmie Johnson, left, earned the Martinsville victory. Denny Hamlin earned respect for the way he handled the loss.
I have no doubt that Denny Hamlin hates to lose. But I had to admire the class with which he lost Sunday to Jimmie Johnson at Martinsville Speedway, a track where both excel -- but where in the past six races, Johnson has won five times, and Hamlin but once.
With 15 laps to go, Hamlin was leading when Johnson edged his right-front fender inside Hamlin's left rear. They rubbed, Hamlin slid high, Johnson got underneath and went on to win.
Hamlin was heartsick afterward. You could see it on his face and in eyes that retained a sort of stunned stare for a good half hour following the Goody's 500.
Yet he made himself smile, and even laugh, as he acknowledged that losing a fender-rubbing contest with Johnson as the aggressor coming from second while Hamlin was trying to defend his lead was all accepted procedure for short-track racing.
At 28 years old, Hamlin has made no secret in recent weeks that he feels he should have more Cup wins on his résumé than just four in his 3½ seasons -- two of those in his rookie year.
I've lost count of the races he should have won when his pit crew has cost him. He has complained occasionally about that, but not nearly as much as he has been hurt by it.
Taking that into account, then adding that Martinsville is one of two "home tracks" -- Richmond being the other -- that can be claimed by the Chesterfield, Va., native, and that he lost Sunday in such a rough-and-tumble way, I expected Hamlin to be livid when he climbed out of his car, maybe raging.
But here's the first answer he gave to Fox TV reporters:
"I'm honored to be on the racetrack with guys like Jimmie and Jeff [Gordon, who finished fourth] and Tony [Stewart, who was third]. Those are the guys who are the best in the business.
"And, you know, it's just that we came up short. That was short-track racing. I would have done the same to him [Johnson], and if it comes back around, I will do the same.
"But that's just the way it is. This is Martinsville. You gotta battle for every inch. I was trying to protect the spot and he was trying to get it, at the end of the race, and that's the way it goes."
Later, in the media center, I asked Hamlin just how hard that was, to give such a classy answer after such a heartbreaking -- and to some, infuriating -- loss.
Hamlin not only gave me yet another classy answer but also added that he really, really does hate to lose but keeps his dignity.
"It's not that hard," he said, "because I know I would have done the same thing. You can't sit here and … nobody can sit here and tell me they wouldn't do the same thing that [Johnson] did. You know, with 15 to go, I'd rather be in second than first because I'm going to move the guy out of the way."
And then he broke eloquently into the disappointments of a career that started off as such a skyrocket.
"It's tough to say that you've gotten used to losing," he said, "but I've gotten used to the disappointment at the end. It's not like a new thing.
"My hunger is still the same, for sure. I want to win races but I can't help being in the position I was in."
He questioned himself for taking the lead from Johnson with 45 laps to go. Maybe, Hamlin thought, he should have stayed in second and made Johnson the vulnerable one late.
When Johnson came into the media center for the winner's interview, he became quietly, dignifiedly incensed when we told him what Hamlin had said about being moved out of the way. Johnson felt he'd actually had the position by his front fender, and that Hamlin had squeezed him, and that's why they had touched and nearly wrecked -- "the fact that he chopped me," as Johnson put it.
Johnson was nice about it, soft-spoken as usual.
The winner came away as a class act, but the loser -- hating the result though Hamlin did -- came away as the classiest act of a typically slam-bang day at Martinsville.
My 21-year-old son, who was a Dale Earnhardt fan growing up, has been a Hamlin fan for a few years now because Hamlin's driving style reminds him of The Man in Black.
And a dad who sees beyond the driving, sees the character, is just fine with the son's choice of favorites.
NASCAR, AutoRacing, Marc Davis
Rough debut for owner-driver Marc Davis
Saturday, March 21, 2009 | Print Entry
A rough welcome to Bristol Motor Speedway left 18-year-old Marc Davis short of his goal of a top-20 finish Saturday in his debut as the first African-American owner-driver in a major NASCAR race since Wendell Scott retired in 1973.
But, considering the circumstances, "I'm happy with it," Davis said of his 27th-place finish in the Scotts Lawn Builder 300. He had run as high as 19th before being spun out by Burney Lamar just past the halfway point of the Nationwide race.
The spin took Davis into the wall backward, damaging the rear bodywork and the spoiler on his Toyota and dropping him back as far as 33rd.
"We had a really good run going," Davis said. "I believe it was the 32 car that spun me out, and that took us back a step. We had to repass the cars we'd already passed several times."
If not for the wreck, "I thought we could have been in the 20th- to 15th-place area," Davis said. "Even with the damage, the car was still fast."
Davis and his father, Harry Davis, decided to form their own Nationwide team after Joe Gibbs Racing, for which Marc had been a developmental driver, failed to find sponsorship for a Nationwide ride for him this season.
The Davises are running on about $75,000 per race in sponsorship, from Howard University radio station WHUR and The Word Network, an urban religious TV channel. Top Nationwide cars run on about $200,000 per race.
Marc Davis, a go-or-go-home driver, qualified 28th among 52 cars that tried to make the field for Saturday's race. His next try at a Nationwide race is scheduled for May 1 at Richmond, Va.
"We accomplished our first two goals," Harry Davis said. "One was to make the race, and second was to finish the race. We were hoping for a better finish, but the reality is that short-track racing at Bristol is hard on equipment, and it just took its toll.
"But we got in the show and we finished the race, so it was a good day, and we'll live to go on to Richmond."
NASCAR, AutoRacing, Marc Davis
Davis hoping for start, then a fast one, at Bristol
Friday, March 20, 2009 | Print Entry
I'm unabashedly pumped for Marc Davis in Friday afternoon's Nationwide Series practice sessions at Bristol. The two sessions are critical to his taking his next career step and making a little history in the process.
Worth Canoy/Icon SMI
Marc Davis is hoping to get his car sorted out quickly in Bristol practice.
"We definitely need to get good practice on short runs to get ready to qualify," he said by cell phone Thursday afternoon as he and his father/business manager, Harry Davis, drove toward Tennessee.
If Marc, 18, makes the race, he'll become the first African-American driving for his family's team to compete in a major NASCAR race since Wendell Scott retired in 1973.
The Davises decided to field their own team over the winter after Joe Gibbs Racing, where Marc had been a developmental driver, couldn't find sponsorship to move him up to Nationwide. Marc ran three Nationwide races in 2008, one for JGR and two for Fitz Racing.
At first, the Davises considered starting at California and Las Vegas, but they decided the West Coast trip was just too expensive for a team that operates on about $75,000 a race.
So Bristol is the geographic/economic launching point.
"It's been a long wait the last several months, talking about it, and now we're finally going to the racetrack," Marc said from the road.
"I think it's been a long time coming, and Marc is prepared for it, and we've done the best we can do with the resources that we have," Harry said. "It's just a matter of setting realistic goals."
The first goal is to sort out their Toyota, powered by a JGR engine, in this afternoon's practice, focusing totally on preparing for time trials.
Fifty-two Nationwide cars are entered for Saturday's Scotts Turf Builder 300, and Marc is "a go-or-go-home driver, so he's got to make the race on time," Harry said.
The next goal would be "to finish the race," Harry said.
The son is a little more ambitious than the father, looking for a top-20 finish.
"It's Bristol, so we've just got to stay out of trouble and keep a clean race car and try to come out of there with a top-20," Marc said. "If we make the race -- well, when we make the race -- that should be a given, off the bat."
The Davises' funding, primarily from Howard University radio station WHUR with support from The Word Network (an urban religious TV channel), doesn't match the $200,000 per race some of the top Nationwide teams spend.
But, "We think we've got some pretty good equipment for this weekend, with Venturini Motorsports helping us out," Marc said.
Venturini, mainly an ARCA operation, prepared the car, and Billy Venturini will be crew chief. Some crewmen will be volunteers who are friends of the Davises, with others from the Venturini operation.
The Davises plan to run six Nationwide races this season, along with a handful of Cup races. Marc's projected Cup debut is the road course at Sonoma, Calif., in June.
Is the historical significance a major thought to Marc?
"It is now that you brought it up," he said. "But at the end of the day, you know me: It's all about racing."
NASCAR, AutoRacing, Marc Davis
Take note, NASCAR: F1 gets it right
Tuesday, March 17, 2009 | Print Entry
My proposal for revising NASCAR's points system has been radically simple for decades now: One win, one point. Period. End of discussion.
In making that suggestion I have been smirked at, ignored, argued with, admonished to be reasonable, laughed at
But today I stand vindicated at last by the great news from Paris. Formula One has done it.
AP Photo/Eric Reed
Matt Kenseth and crew still would have a title under the new F1 championship system, just not the one they have now.
Effective immediately, this season, the world driving championship will be determined by number of wins.
That'll set F1 on its ear, all right, since by the new rules, the enormously popular Briton Lewis Hamilton would not have won the 2008 championship. He'd have lost to Felipe Massa, six wins to five.
F1 will determine only its champion by wins, and keep its current points system to break ties and determine runner-up season positions.
But it's fascinating to examine how different NASCAR would have looked thus far in this millennium under a win-only system.
Carl Edwards, who in all fairness was the most consistently strong Cup driver over the entire course of last season, would have won the championship with nine wins, to Kyle Busch's eight and Jimmie Johnson's seven.
Johnson, the 2007 champion, would have won the title anyway, with 10 wins to Jeff Gordon's six.
From there back, things really would have been topsy-turvy in the Cup series:
Kasey Kahne, who finished eighth in points in 2006, would have won the championship with six wins, to the three-way tie at five of Tony Stewart, Kevin Harvick and Johnson.
In '05, Tony Stewart and Greg Biffle finished 1-2 for the title. That would have been reversed in a win-only system, with Biffle's six to Stewart's five.
In '04, Kurt Busch, who won by points, would have finished fourth on wins with three. Johnson would have been champion with eight wins, followed by Dale Earnhardt Jr. with six -- and this would be remembered as Junior's biggest "almost" year -- and Jeff Gordon with five.
Best of all in the minds of a lot of fans, NASCAR might never have had reason to initiate the Chase.
In 2003, the last year of the season-long points system, Matt Kenseth won the championship with only one win, apparently spurring NASCAR to action. By one-win, one-point, Ryan Newman would have been champion with eight victories rather than finishing sixth in points.
But don't feel bad for Kenseth, who'd have won the championship a year earlier, in '02, with his league-leading five wins, rather than finishing a sharply contrasted eighth in points. Actual champ Tony Stewart would have finished in a three-way tie for third with three wins, behind Kurt Busch with four.
In '01, Jeff Gordon would have won either way with his six victories.
But in 2000, Stewart, who finished sixth in points, would have been champion with six wins. Actual champion Bobby Labonte would have tied for second with Jeff Burton and Rusty Wallace at four.
Maybe today, in world motor racing, will be remembered as The St. Patrick's Day Revolution.
And here I thought Bernie Ecclestone had lost his iron grip on F1. The diminutive czar pushed his idea right through the Federation Internationale de l'Automibile (FIA), after the London newspapers had reported all winter that he had virtually no chance of getting his way this time.
I'm by no means holding my breath for NASCAR to change. But at least now, when I am smirked at, ignored, argued with, admonished to be reasonable, laughed at I'll have the most popular form of motorsport in the world, Formula One, to cite as proof of my sanity.
NASCAR, AutoRacing
Down with doughnuts! Up with Busch!
Thursday, March 12, 2009 | Print Entry
Very rarely, you see a driver-fan phenomenon occur in NASCAR, a spur-of-the-moment event that turns around the attitudes of the masses toward the guy.
The stars and planets may be aligning for Kurt Busch.
Suddenly the long-suffering, reluctant villain is awash in good will in the wake of his unprecedented victory lap at Atlanta Motor Speedway last Sunday.
He threw his Dodge in reverse and backed around the entire 1.54-mile circumference of the track, after a spectacular, dominating run to win the Kobalt Tools 500.
"We've done hundreds of media interviews since Sunday," Busch says, "and every time it's inevitable they'll get around to wanting to discuss our unusual victory lap."
Busch has been so "blown away" -- and so intent on repeating that kind of lap this season -- that he is asking fans to name the lap on his Web site, www.kurtbusch.com.
Dare we say Busch has reversed a long-running trend?
It happened to Darrell Waltrip 20 years ago this May. DW had been roundly booed at most tracks for fully a decade -- largely due to his unbridled mouth -- when in 1989 he was spun out by Rusty Wallace on the last lap of The Winston, now called NASCAR's All-Star race.
Appreciated as a victim rather than a villain, DW has been a fan favorite ever since, and it has carried over into his broadcasting career.
A little background on Busch's lap:
"That's something me and my buddies drew up after a few too many Miller Lites one night," Busch said during the winner's interview at Atlanta.
Suddenly he thought better of the way he'd gotten in a plug for his primary sponsor, looked at team owner Roger Penske and asked, "Is it OK to say that?"
Penske gave him the nod.
Now, notice Busch said, "drew up," not "drove," so don't get on him for drinking and driving. He wasn't.
"We had a name for it, but it didn't feel right," Busch said. You could tell he was searching for a name for the lap.
"I just kept focus, like Don Johnson would coming to the start/finish line, flipped a 180, did a little Miami Vice action. … Happy to do something like that today and create a statement. That could be the name for it, the Don Johnson."
Nah, that wasn't it.
So Busch sincerely wants your help. He wants to name the lap, because he's bent on repeating it several more times this season.
Now a little perspective on how and why this could do Busch a lot of good, imagewise.
Waltrip, as a Fox commentator, remarked during the lap that "He doesn't understand what the Polish Victory Lap's all about."
Waltrip was referring to the late Alan Kulwicki's self-named style of celebration, in which he drove around the track the wrong way, albeit driving in forward gears.
The public-relations effect Kulwicki got by driving clockwise was that the driver's side was turned to the grandstands so that the fans could see him waving the checkered flag.
Kulwicki first ran the lap at Phoenix after his first Cup victory in 1988. Thereafter, the reticent engineer -- who wasn't exactly the warmest and fuzziest of personalities -- became a fan favorite.
By driving in reverse, counterclockwise around the track, Busch got the same effect -- the fans could see him waving the flag.
If you ask me, it was the race performance that won the fans' approval. Nobody could deny the brilliance of the drive, on a day when the tires were so weird that everybody was slipping and sliding and sideways. Indeed, Busch himself scraped the wall twice.
After that, all he had to do was not screw up. And the brilliance was in omission.
Busch did his lap in reverse in lieu of a burnout or doughnuts.
I happen to think fans are sick to the gills of burnouts/doughnuts. I know I am. Busch not only drove dazzlingly, he didn't fog the grandstands with acrid tire smoke.
After veteran Terry Labonte won the Southern 500 at Darlington in 2003, he refused to do a burnout -- just drove around the track with the checkered flag -- and was thunderously cheered for it and got rave reviews in the media.
Burnouts/dougnuts, initiated in North America by Italian IndyCar ace Alex Zanardi in 1997, should be waaaay out of fashion by now.
So my suggestion for naming Kurt Busch's lap in reverse is this:
The Drive Against Doughnuts.
Should it catch on, Busch could be the dark-horse candidate for most popular driver in 2009.
All against doughnuts, say aye.
Aye!
NASCAR, AutoRacing
Before NASCAR, there was Raymond Parks
Saturday, March 7, 2009 | Print Entry
HAMPTON, Ga. -- I have seen the Holy Grail of stock-car racing. It was given to the new NASCAR Hall of Fame here this morning.
It is a tarnished, simple, silver loving cup, less than a foot tall, with the race winner's name misspelled: "Loyd [sic] Seay."
But it is the trophy that assured there would be a NASCAR.
The date is inscribed as "11/11/38" -- Nov. 11, 1938.
It was awarded to Lloyd Seay, who NASCAR founder Bill France Sr. told me and others was the greatest stock-car driver he ever saw, for winning a 150-mile race on old Lakewood Speedway, a 1-mile dirt track on the south side of Atlanta.
This was nearly a decade before there was a NASCAR.
After that victory for Seay and his team, the car owner, Raymond Parks, told me 15 years ago, "We sho' 'nuf got the fever" to race full time.
And they did -- owner Parks, chief mechanic Red Vogt, Seay and second driver Roy Hall -- until Seay, at age 21, was killed in a bootleggers' quarrel in 1941 after he'd won three straight national-level stock car races in an eight-day span.
Not until 1947 would organizational meetings produce such a thing as NASCAR -- and it was Vogt who came up with the name and acronym. Not until 1948 would there be a NASCAR race, and a Parks car won it, with Red Byron driving. Not until '49 would there be a "Strictly Stock" division that would evolve into the Sprint Cup Series -- and that first season, Byron won the championship, driving for Parks.
Parks, now 94 and too hard of hearing to be interviewed, is the sole survivor of his team, which sometimes included a pickup driver -- Big Bill France himself.
Parks was "the No. 1 guy to get it started," Richard Petty said of stock-car racing at this morning's trophy-presentation ceremony. "I guess Mr. France did the organizational stuff, but Mr. Parks was racin' before he ever knowed Bill France."
Parks will donate his entire trophy collection to the Hall of Fame in Charlotte, N.C. But he wanted the initial presentation of five trophies, including the one for the first NASCAR championship, to be here, because Atlanta is his hometown and was the home of his racing team.
Of the five trophies, the one Seay won at Lakewood in 1938 is by far the smallest and least impressive.
Unless you understand that it is the most important trophy in the history of stock-car racing -- the one that "sho' 'nuf" got Raymond Parks excited enough to become a living cornerstone of the sport.
"I think I was 11 years old at the first Cup race [in '49]," Petty said. "Mr. Parks had already been there for years before that. He set the standard. Racing started pretty rough -- rough characters, rough cars, rough situations.
"Mr. Parks brought class. I think a lot of people said, 'OK, if he can do it, we can do it. We can clean the sport up; we can clean ourselves up.'"
NASCAR, AutoRacing
Raymond Parks taught Big Bill a thing or two
Sunday, February 15, 2009 | Print Entry
DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. -- Deity strolled gracefully, for age 94, through the paddock here Sunday morning, hardly noticed by the crowd.
If the throngs had had any idea who he was and what he did, they would have mobbed him. Television crews would have waited in line to interview him. Virtually everyone in the infield would have gravitated toward him, and people would have poured out of the grandstands to catch a glimpse of him.
Raymond Parks is the man who made stock car racing.
It is that simple.
And that complex.
Parks was dapper in a fine suit and fedora, just as he was at races a decade before there was even a NASCAR, when he was giving an outlaw sport enough dignity to make it worth organizing.
At 94 he looks maybe 64, but when you try to talk to him, you realize he is extremely hard of hearing. A friend from Virginia, Grady Rogers, helps him answer questions.
I didn't need to ask much. I have spent decades researching and writing about this living cornerstone, this man who kept an upstart dreamer named Big Bill France going.
The 51st Daytona 500 is the 51st running that Parks has attended -- although last year he retired to his hotel room after the start.
But he was here long before Big Bill France even dreamed of building a superspeedway and running a 500-mile race.
A Parks car, driven by Red Byron, won the first NASCAR race ever run, on the beach here on Feb. 18, 1948. Parks and Byron went on to win the first championship, in 1949, of what would eventually become the Sprint Cup Series.
But Parks runs back far deeper into stock car racing lore than that.
In 1938, at Red Vogt's garage in downtown Atlanta, Parks formed The Racing Team -- hardly a unique term now, but it was then. His drivers were two dashing, young moonshine runners, Roy Hall and Lloyd Seay.
Vogt would build the cars on an unlimited budget, all with cash. Vogt's only orders from Parks: All cars would be freshly painted, with no dents, entering each race.
How did he get that cash?
"Any way I could get it," Parks told me some 15 years ago, when he could still hear well enough to be interviewed one-on-one.
He'd landed on the streets of Atlanta as a teenage runaway from the northern Georgia mountains in 1929, ran moonshine liquor until he'd save a stake, then went into the bonded whiskey business and branched out from there.
By the late '30s, he was a kingpin of legal liquor and amusement machines -- jukeboxes, pinball and slot machines. He also was the founder of Atlanta's own original "lottery" -- i.e., the numbers game -- long before the lottery was cool in Georgia.
The cash was pouring in, and he took to hanging out at Vogt's garage, where both bootleggers and federal agents got their cars souped up without prejudice from Vogt. (Vogt did say, however, that the bootleggers got the better equipment because they had more money to spend than the revenuers.)
Hall and Seay persuaded Parks to back them, and from there, Parks became "the Rick Hendrick of his time," Junior Johnson has said.
The way I see it, Rick Hendrick is the Raymond Parks of his time.
The Racing Team roared across the Southeast, with Vogt towing the cars and the drivers hurtling over the highways with Parks in the new Cadillacs he always kept. They'd run 110 mph on the roads from race town to race town, with Hall or Seay at the wheel and Parks sleeping peacefully in the back seat, trusting totally in his drivers' skill.
Late in his life, Big Bill France told several people -- including me, when I was a very young journalist -- that the greatest driver he'd ever seen, anywhere, was "a fella from up in Georgia by the name of Lloyd Seay."
Seay would take the North Turn at the old beach course here with his Ford coupes turned up on two wheels, the left-side tires spinning wildly in midair. He also drove with one hand only, out of habit, and kept his left arm propped up in the driver's side window.
Such was Seay's skill driving cars that "I heard Lloyd say he could take a '39 Ford coupe and climb a pine tree," an old Georgia bootlegger once told me."I wouldn't doubt it."
The wild ride ended the day after Labor Day 1941.
Seay had won three straight national-level stock car events in eight days -- here on the beach, then at High Point, N.C., and finally at Lakewood Speedway, the legendary 1-mile dirt track in Atlanta, that Labor Day.
Seay sped home to Dawsonville, Ga., that night, and the next morning was shot and killed by a cousin in a bootleggers' quarrel over a load of sugar for making moonshine.
Seay was 21 when he died, and yet-to-be-born NASCAR was robbed of its first great charismatic hero.
Parks never got over that. A few weeks later, a magnificent tombstone appeared on Seay's grave in the Dawsonville town cemetery. To this day, a glass-enclosed picture of Seay smiles eternally out toward old Highway 9, known in Parks' youth as The Whiskey Trail.
Parks to this day has never admitted he placed that tombstone, but everybody knows he did.
In his grief, he got out of racing and went off to war and fought in the Battle of the Bulge, living in the same foxhole in the snow for three straight weeks.
As for Hall, he just went wild with grief. He rode out the war running 'shine. After the war, he was involved in a shootout with police in Greensboro, N.C., then was arrested and extradited back to Georgia on a bank robbery charge.
Parks restarted his racing team with Byron as driver after NASCAR was formed. (It was the brilliant mechanic Vogt, by the way, who came up with both the name, National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing, and the acronym, in the formative meetings here in December 1947.)
Hall got out of prison too late to stick with Parks' reformed team, went back to racing in 1949 and suffered a head injury at High Point, N.C., that ended his career. He died in a nursing home in 1994.
Through the '30s and '40s, whenever Parks had an extra car for beach races here, he always gave a break to the promoter who also fancied himself a driver, Big Bill France.
After the war, France couldn't even afford a pace car for his races. So he'd phone Parks in Atlanta, and Parks would always show up with a brand-new Cadillac that would serve as pace car.
After the 1950s, several decades went by when NASCAR hardly recognized Parks at all. I stopped voting in the International Motorsports Hall of Fame balloting about 10 years ago because Parks' name never appeared on the ballot.
As we sat and talked Sunday morning, Grady Rogers told me that Parks, at long last, will be inducted into the International Motorsports Hall of Fame this year.
That recognition is long, long overdue. In my book, Parks should be included among the first group of inductees for the new NASCAR Hall of Fame.
I did manage to get him to hear one question clearly: "Is it as much fun as when y'all raced on the beach?"
His entourage tried to prompt him by nodding -- say yes, Raymond, to keep good will with the current generation and the giant speedway.
But he remains an honest man. He smiled, he beamed and he shook his head.
"No-ho-ho!" he laughed out his answer."It was more fun back then."
And then, finally, after all these decades, NASCAR president Mike Helton introduced Parks at the drivers' meeting for the 51st Daytona 500.
It had been a long time coming.
But you know what?
Every driver and every crew chief in that meeting gave Parks a long standing ovation. They knew. They all knew.
After that, Helton and NASCAR chairman Brian France accompanied Parks out to a replica of the '40 Ford coupe Byron drove to the '49 championship. There was a photo session.
A small crowd gathered, mainly out of curiosity. They recognized Helton and France, and were fascinated by the old coupe.
"Who's the guy in the hat?" somebody in the jostling crowd asked me.
"Somebody who was more important to the beginning of this sport than Big Bill France himself," I said. "His name is Raymond Parks."
NASCAR, AutoRacing
Here are 12 to watch in the Daytona 500
Saturday, February 14, 2009 | Print Entry
DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. -- My top 12 drivers to watch in the Daytona 500, with odds and reasoning:
- Jeff Gordon: 3-1 -- He's stronger, smoother, more confident here than he's been in years. Only the risk of pileups and the crazy draft keep him from going off at 9-5.
- Kyle Busch: 9-2 -- Wild Thing may lead if he can at the white flag, as he did in winning Thursday's qualifier, then show his spectacular reflexes at blocking.
- Jimmie Johnson: 5-1 -- Hasn't been drafting quite as smart as teammate Gordon all week, but has a plenty strong enough car to benefit from the right push at the right moment.
- Dale Earnhardt Jr.: 7-1 -- He's still the best at getting to the front in plate racing, but has a bad run of luck at getting caught in other people's pileups.
- Mark Martin: 9-1 -- He's more hopeful going into this 500 than any time in memory: so excited about his new Hendrick ride that he just might play rough, for a change, to win.
- Jamie McMurray: 10-1 -- Dark Horse Special: McMurray has been far and away the best of the Roush Fenway Racing Ford drivers all week, lurking at or near the front in practices and preliminary events. Now, if he can just concentrate for 500 miles under this kind of pressure.
- Tony Stewart: 12-1 -- His chances worsened Saturday when he had to go to a backup car after teammate Ryan Newman wrecked in front of him and took them both out. Stewart's backup isn't bad -- he finished third in the Shootout in it -- but it doesn't drive as well as the one he wrecked.
- Martin Truex Jr.: 15-1 -- He's entirely capable of running up near the front all race. It's just a matter of whether he can keep his concentration and keep from getting clipped by wilder drivers.
- Denny Hamlin: 18-1 -- If his crew doesn't fail him in the pits, he can hang in near the front 'til the final 10 laps and from there he's got as good a chance in the final crapshoot as anybody.
- Joey Logano: 20-1 -- Stranger things have happened here. The rookie learned fast about drafting in his qualifier. Won't actively draft his way to a win, but could get into position to get the winning push from someone else.
- Bill Elliott: 22-1 -- Doesn't think his old experience at staying out of trouble necessarily translates now, because back then he could drive off by himself and now he's at the mercy of the pack. But he remains a master of sticking around 'til the end.
- Scott Riggs: 50-1 -- Hey, you gotta pick one storybook scenario. With a pickup team mainly of volunteers, he and new team owner Tommy Baldwin are doing it the old-fashioned, bootstraps way.
NASCAR, AutoRacing
There wasn't a nicer guy than Neil Bonnett
Wednesday, February 11, 2009 | Print Entry
DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. -- Fifteen years ago today, the nicest man who ever drove in NASCAR -- and I use that superlative advisedly -- was killed here.
Neil Bonnett went lightly, joyfully through life, left laughter everywhere he went and never knowingly was even so much as impolite to anyone.
He shouldn't have been back in a race car that first morning of practice for the Daytona 500 in 1994, at age 47. He'd had serious head injuries, including one that had given him severe amnesia in 1990.
But he risked coming back because he loved it and couldn't stay away. His best friend, Dale Earnhardt, had helped him work his way back into NASCAR, advising him that if racing was what he wanted to do, he ought to do it.
AP Photo
Neil Bonnett gets a kiss from daughter Kristen after winning at Ontario Motor Speedway on Nov. 20, 1977.
The circumstances of Bonnett's death remain somewhat mysterious. His car spun suddenly in the fourth turn of Daytona International Speedway and hit the concrete retaining wall nearly head-on.
NASCAR at first called it driver error, but after vehement protests from Earnhardt, NASCAR removed that description from the record.
Darrell Waltrip, who was racing that year on the same Hoosier tires that were on Bonnett's car when he died, told me later that his particular model of Hoosier was narrower, for less friction on the track, and could have been quite tricky either for a rookie or a driver who was rusty.
Earnhardt, until his own death in the 2001 Daytona 500, never got over the death of his closest hunting and fishing buddy.
This is the kind of guy Neil Bonnett was:
One summer day in 1978, he and I were sitting in his den in Hueytown, Ala., talking, when the phone rang in his kitchen. He got up and answered. His wife, Susan, was out at the supermarket.
"No," he said after answering. "No, not interested."
He listened.
"Look, I've told you not to call here anymore," he said, and hung up.
As he came back and sat down, I guess I gave him something of a mischievous grin.
"No, it's not what you think," he said. "That was the pipe fitters' union. I've told them never to call here again. They're paying $50 an hour now, and if Susan knew that, she'd make me quit racin' and go back to work."
He made a good living racing for the next dozen years, winning 18 Cup races and 19 poles. Then, at Darlington in 1990, he suffered such a bad concussion that it gave him amnesia for weeks and a foggy memory for months.
Back in the early 1970s, when racing's Alabama Gang couldn't beat him at Birmingham International Raceway, he was taken on as a friend, and Bonnett would forever be identified with the Allisons -- Bobby, Donnie and Bobby's sons Davey and Clifford -- and Charles "Red" Farmer.
Later, in 1990 after his amnesia had mostly cleared, Bonnett re-emerged at Talladega -- not to race, but to begin doing television (which he was very good at) for CBS and TBS.
At the time, Bobby Allison was still suffering effects of a life-threatening head injury he'd suffered at Pocono in 1988. As usual, when Bonnett came back out in public, he managed to make light of both his own condition, and Allison's.
"I went over to Bobby's house the other day," he said. "Judy [Bobby's wife] was trying to help us communicate.
"But I'll tell you what: Between Bobby trying to remember what he wanted to say, and me trying to remember what he said, Judy was having a helluva time trying to help us."
Bonnett came here in '94 as an unsung hero from the previous summer. When Davey Allison's helicopter crashed into the Talladega infield in July of '93, it was Bonnett who scrambled into the wreckage -- with spilling gasoline all around that could have exploded at any second -- and pulled Farmer to safety. Bonnett then wriggled back in to get Davey, who was unconscious.
Davey Allison died the next morning in a Birmingham hospital, but Farmer survived with only a broken arm.
I can remember the "meanest" thing Neil Bonnett ever said to the media. He was driving for Junior Johnson, who had put a strong gag order on him about some major deal that was imminent.
We pressed and pressed. Good ol' Neil would tell us, we figured. Finally, at a point when any other driver would have told us to get lost -- or worse -- Bonnett was apologetic.
"Guys, I don't mean to be rude," he said, "but I'm just not able to talk about that."
That was as mean as he ever got.
A few years before he died, with tire wars raging between Goodyear and Hoosier, I stood in the garage at North Wilkesboro watching drivers limp past, injured in crashes caused by blown tires as the manufacturers tried to one-up each other with faster -- and more fragile -- tires.
That day, I quoted an anonymous source among drivers.
"If this doesn't stop, one of us is going to get killed before it's over," the source said. He paused to look around. "You just wonder which one of us it will be."
I think it's OK now to reveal the name of that driver: It was Neil Bonnett.
NASCAR, AutoRacing
The Daytona you don't hear about
Monday, February 9, 2009 | Print Entry
PORT ORANGE, Fla. -- A day off at Daytona is a hard thing to bear.
It's not the silence from the speedway -- the peace and quiet is nice enough, here in the middle of Speedweeks.
The trouble is, today -- with the Shootout crowd gone and the larger crowds for the qualifying races and the Daytona 500 still to come -- is too strong a reminder of day-to-day Daytona Beach, when the races aren't in town.
This isn't exactly Margaritaville down here, and driving up and down the beach highway, A-1-A, is hardly a pleasure cruise. Daytona Beach and its suburbs aren't exactly boomtowns. They are weary, faded, salt-corroded.
So I've drifted back down to the south, to my hotel in Port Orange, to blog with my sliding-glass door open, to see and hear the endless sea, which eases the sadness of workaday Daytona.
Chris Gardner/US Presswire
When the Sprint Cup Series stops in town, Daytona Beach lights up in more ways than one.
The locals are largely a sad lot, the waitresses at the pancake houses and the housekeepers at the beachside hotels, mostly from the Midwest and up East, are struggling to get by, you can tell.
And yet they are amazingly cheerful, upbeat. I don't know how they do it.
Among the elderly walking endlessly up and down the beach, you can distinguish the locals from the snowbirds. The locals are the ones with leathery skins.
There aren't too many, if any, rich and famous along what used to be called the World's Most Famous Beach. Even the Cadillacs and Lincolns are old.
The restaurateurs and bartenders up and down the beach will tell you the NASCAR legions aren't their favorite crowds. The spring-breakers are the worst, damaging property and spending little money. The NASCAR crowds generally behave, but don't spend much.
Oddly enough, the locals love the Bike Week crowds of March the best -- at least, ever since the Outlaws, Hell's Angels and the other serious gangs had it made clear to them they aren't welcome here.
Thousands upon thousands of motorcyclists descend on the area, showing off their custom bikes to one another, paying relatively little attention to the world-class motorcycle races at the speedway.
"I never go to the races, myself," I once heard a guy say on TV, in his star-spangled-banner bandanna. "I just come to look at everybody's scooter."
Not many NASCAR fans realize how troubled day-to-day Daytona really is.
About a dozen years ago, during January NASCAR testing, I was pistol-whipped and robbed in the parking lot of a cigar store that fronts U.S. 92, which runs from the speedway to the beach.
It started out as a carjacking attempt. I got into my rental car with a package of cigars, and when I tried to close the door, it met resistance. I looked up to see a .357 Magnum pointed at my face through the driver's-side window.
At first the two teenagers wanted the car, but when I reached to drop the keys onto the ground, they spotted my watch, and wanted that.
I got one crack on the head with the gun for emphasis. Then when I was deemed too slow producing my wallet, I got whacked on the head again.
Oddly enough, they forgot about the car, grabbed the watch and wallet and ran off. And there I sat, blood pouring down my face, covering a white golf shirt.
A policeman took me to Halifax Medical Center, the hospital where injured drivers are taken. The emergency room there was bedlam. Bloody as I was, and accompanied by a uniformed cop, I was ignored.
It started out as a carjacking attempt. I got into my rental car with a package of cigars, and when I tried to close the door, it met resistance. I looked up to see a .357 Magnum pointed at my face through the driver's-side window.
The policeman tried to get a nurse's attention, and gestured toward me as if the sight of me should be enough.
"He's just gonna have to wait," she said.
After a while, I asked the cop if we could just go. Enough was enough. The gashes in my scalp were superficial anyway.
As we left, somebody thrust a handful of sample packs of antiseptic ointment into my hands.
And that was all the treatment I got that night.
Next day, I met a police detective who would become a friend over the years. It took him a few weeks to find my watch, but he did it. He knew of a pawnbroker he suspected of sending Rolexes to the Middle East, watched the man's place, and one day there was my watch. The detective carried a jeweler's loop with him, and found the serial number that matched.
I had to pay $500 to the pawn shop -- pawnbrokers have a powerful lobby in Tallahassee, the state capital, so that they get paid even for items that prove to be stolen.
I still wear that old Rolex every time I come down here. I have it on right now. It's sort of a badge of survival to me -- and, said the detective, it may have saved my life.
"Those were 90-percent shooters," he said of the teenagers. He figured it was a gang initiation, and said kids that young shoot the victim 90 percent of the time, but that the prize of a Rolex must have been enough for these two.
Once, he took me on a tour of the area just half a block off U.S. 92, the main artery to the beach. He stopped in an empty parking lot just behind an auto-body repair shop.
"Right here, a few weeks ago, there was a gang killing," he said. "They blew the kid's legs off with shotguns before they killed him."
We drove on, past a joint called the Tropicana, locally known as "the Trop." They used to post a uniformed cop on that corner, to keep some semblance of order, until one got stabbed with a sharpened screwdriver.
Outside the Trop, eight or 10 men walked into the street, glassy-eyed, applauding the detectives in the unmarked car, whose faces all these crack addicts recognized.
"Every one of them is holding [crack]," the detective said. "Every one of them. You can count on that."
Beginning with Thursday's qualifying races, fans will zoom happily up and down U.S. 92 in their SUVs and pickups, to and from the speedway, without a care in the world, oblivious to what goes on, on either side of the street.
They don't advertise that sort of thing over at the World Center of Racing.
No use driving up to Ormond Beach, "the birthplace of speed." Long before there was an Indianapolis Motor Speedway (built in 1909), there was racing here, at the Winter Speed Carnival -- the direct ancestor of Speedweeks -- in 1903.
The Ormond Hotel, once the largest wooden structure in the world, with its 5 miles of corridors, winter home to the greatest racers and innovators of the turn of the 20th century -- Henry Ford, the Stanley brothers, Ransom E. Olds, Alexander Winton, William K. Vanderbilt) -- is no more.
The Ormond was demolished in the 1990s to make room for more high-rise condos.
So there are almost no reminders now, of the era that was the springtime of American ingenuity and industry, long before a Washington, D.C., mechanic named William Henry Getty France drifted here and decided to settle in the 1930s, and a decade later organized a fragmented, outlaw brand of motor racing called "stock car racing."
So I sit here gazing at, and listening to, the sounding sea, the same one that rolled in for Olds and Ford and Alexander Winton and the pioneers of the early 1900s.
The sea, and only the sea, remains the same now.
NASCAR, AutoRacing, Mark Martin
Mr. Nice Guy Martin handles criticism with class
Friday, February 6, 2009 | Print Entry
DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. -- Ever wonder what happens between a sports figure and a sports journalist after the latter criticizes the former publicly? When they next meet face to face?
Here's an example of the way it should be handled, but usually isn't. And here's how the sports figure can take the journalist's remarks under advisement, actually weigh them -- which almost never happens.
In the season-opening "NASCAR Now" show on ESPN2, during the Monday Roundtable this week, I said Mark Martin is too nice a guy for his own good, that he's too polite to other drivers on the racetrack ... that there's not enough dog-eat-dog in him to win races -- and a championship -- in this era.
AP Photo/John Raoux
NASCAR mainstay Mark Martin on aggressive driving: "I don't feel like changing who I am is necessary to get the job done."
I said it knowing I was sure to see him face to face, and soon. But I get paid for telling the truth as best I see it.
"When you criticize a guy, always write it as if you're going to have lunch with him the next day," I was advised years ago, by one of the wisest editors I've ever worked for. And I've tried to live by that. It cuts down on the cheap shots and exaggerations.
And so, upon arrival here for Speedweek, I sought out Martin right away, early in the morning of Daytona 500 media day Thursday, to face him and talk to him.
As I walked to get a place up front in his media stall, somebody clapped me on the shoulder from behind, and I turned to see Martin, grinning -- beaming. We walked over to his stall together.
I prefaced my first question by reminding him that everyone he's raced against has said Mark Martin races cleaner than anyone else, and --
"I saw you," he said. "I know."
"I was going to tell you what I said up front."
"I know what you said" -- and now he was laughing.
"Is there not enough dog-eat-dog in Mark Martin?" I asked.
"Are you saying would I turn a guy to win the championship? Is that what you're asking?"
"Well, would you rub on him?" I continued. "A lot of times you're so clean with a guy that you don't even rub him."
"I like what Marty [Smith, of ESPN] said to you," Martin said. "I haven't seen Jimmie [Johnson] knock anybody out of the way to win any of his races."
Well, not slam or turn, but Johnson can be aggressive with his fenders and bumper if he needs to be. Martin rarely touches a fender to the other guy.
"So you feel like you can be aggressive enough to win races?"
"I don't feel like changing who I am is necessary to get the job done."
But then he pondered.
"I will do what I do in the future based on split-second decisions. So I really can't tell you."
Seriously now, the man, at age 50, with 35 Cup wins but none since 2005, was thinking.
"Do I understand that I only have so many more opportunities? Yes, I do. But every decision I make, no matter how I answer your question, will be made split-second. And all those things might weigh into my psyche, but at the end of the day, I really can't tell you."
This is not the only fender-rub Martin has gotten from ESPN.com lately. My colleague Terry Blount, in his new book, "The Blount Report: NASCAR's Most Overrated and Underrated Drivers, Cars, Teams and Tracks," lists Martin as the No. 1 most overrated driver.
But Blount sees it the same as I do, saying Martin is too nice a guy on the racetrack.
Martin in no way apologizes for following his conscience.
"I can tell you that I've had a couple of wins where accidents were part of it. Like the Busch race at Bristol with Davey Allison years ago, where Davey was passing me for the win and moved up before he got clear of me. And he wrecked, and I won the race ..."
To this day, "That win doesn't mean anything to me, because that's not how I wanted to win the race," Martin said. "Really, it's how I feel when I lay down at the end of the day that matters most."
After three winless years, and now with a ride with powerful Hendrick Motorsports ...
"I can tell you that I want to win really, really bad."
He was pondering. Really pondering.
"I can't tell you what I'm going to do. I won't be able to answer that question until it's over with."
Don't ever expect to see Martin turn another driver to win. It isn't in him. But he still would be sainted in this sport if he laid a fender on someone to get a win or two in this, the twilight of his career.
NASCAR, AutoRacing, Mark Martin
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