Bump, bump...who's there?

I hesitate to even offer an opinion about what happened on Lap 264 of Sunday’s USG 400 at Chicagoland Speedway.
Because Jeff Gordon was involved, a great many fans automatically have an unalterable position on the incident. Gordon haters think it was dirty pool. Gordon’s fans think it was either just a racing incident or justified payback for what happened earlier this year at Bristol.
Matt Kenseth’s fans, meanwhile, are obviously upset. Kenseth said he’d probably have run out of gas anyway, and it looked like Gordon would likely be fast enough to make the pass before the checkered flag even if Kenseth kept going. But that doesn’t ease the frustration of seeing your favorite driver’s car being spun out while running in the lead with only a few laps left.
I don’t really have a dog in the fight, aside from the fact that it gave us all something to write about and argue about after the race.
I never have thought that NASCAR can – or should – try to officiate all of the contact out of stock-car racing. Rubbin’, after all, is racin.’
But what always has fascinated me is the situational officiating involved in the sport. Everything seems to depend on who’s involved or when something happens. And in that regard, NASCAR’s not all that different from any other sport.
In basketball, a foul should be a foul. But the same contact called in the first five minutes of a big game is not necessarily going to be called in the final five minutes, and everybody understands that.
Have you ever noticed how rarely you see holding called on an offensive lineman if an NFL or big-time college team is driving for a late touchdown? I have. On the other hand, a defensive back gets a little more leeway on contact sometimes when it’s late in a close game.
I have been covering NASCAR for 10 seasons now, full-time, and I don’t think I can ever remember a car contending for a victory being called for a pit-road speeding penalty on his final stop.
One of these days, I would love to see NASCAR hand out to the media a printout of what its new computers that supposedly measure pit road speeds showed for every car on every trip down pit road. But I am not going to hold my breath waiting to see that data.
Which brings us to what happened Sunday.
I honestly believe that if Gordon had done the same thing to Kenseth on Lap 50 of a race at Daytona or Talladega, NASCAR would have given Gordon a “rough driving” penalty. And if it was something that should have drawn a penalty in those circumstances, then it should have been met with some kind of sanction on Sunday.
Having said that, though, haven’t a lot of drivers throughout the sport’s history made a name for themselves by showing how much they wanted to win by driving “tough” in similar circumstances throughout their careers?
Gordon talked after Sunday’s incident about being hungry for wins and about how Kenseth should have expected what happened, especially given what happened with Kenseth bumping Gordon late in the race at Bristol earlier this year. He also hinted that he still owes Tony Stewart one, from an incident last year between those two, and that if Stewart sees Gordon coming in a similar situation he’d better “be ready.”
If you closed your eyes, that sounded a whole lot like a fellow named Earnhardt used to sound after he’d shown how hungry he was to win.