NASCAR garage area isn’t a playground at some elementary school

OK, and I am really dating myself here, but I am reminded of a line in a song by America called “Sister Golden Hair” about being “one poor correspondent.”
It has been nearly two weeks since I’ve updated this blog, and that’s bad. I’ve got reasons, which we’ll get to, but that’s still fairly lame.
But we’re moving. When I way we, of course, I mean my wife is trying to move the stuff we own from one house to another. It’s maybe 2 miles from one place to another, but it might as well be from Charlotte to Phoenix, which is where I am flying today (which is Thursday, in case this winds up being posted for more than week, too).
I went to Texas last weekend for the race there, of course, and Katy had one of her good friends down to, at least in theory, see the grandbaby. Pam, who’s from Illinois, wound up getting drafted into the moving vortex and we’re hoping that she’ll still speak to us after a respectful cooling off period.
Moving is about as much fun as…well…I can’t think of a decent metaphor. Working in an asbestos mine? Mucking out pig sties? You fill in the blanks.
Anyway, while I had a minute before the plane took off I thought I would comment about the incident after the race in Texas in which Kevin and Delana Harvick and a NASCAR official went down after a confrontation with someone on the No. 10 team.
Whenever there’s some kind of postrace altercation, I usually get feedback from fans who tell me that I overreact when I say NASCAR is right to fine, suspend and otherwise penalize people for such antics. Let these guys show a little emotion, these folks say.
Well, I am here to tell you that the garage is a very dangerous place right after a race. A lot of people are moving around a lot of heavy stuff in a big hurry, trying to get the gear packed up so they can all race to the airport and brag about how fast they got back to Charlotte.
If you’re going into the garage after a race, you have to have your head on a swivel and be ready to react to just about anything. You can get run over by all manner of contraptions in there if you’re not careful.
Now, if you add to that environment someone who’s out of control in anger over something that happened near the end or after a race, you’ve got a mess on your hands.
I didn’t see what happened Sunday night, but I’ve talked to people who either did or talked to people who did. There’s a ramp that runs down from pit road into the garage area at Texas, and the best I can tell someone pushed Harvick on that ramp and he lost his balance. That set up a bowling-pin effect, with Delana and the NASCAR official going down, and then a crash cart ran over the official’s ankle.
NASCAR was right to suspend the crew member from the 10 team who apparently pushed Harvick to start all of that. It would have been nice if NASCAR had anticipated the confrontation and taken more measures to keep it from happening, but that’s revisionist history. Sometimes people who’re hot at each other wind up in the same place and there’s nothing you can do to stop that.
As to what happened on the track to lead to the postrace incident, I will say the same thing about this one that I say about all of them. I don’t care what happened on the track. I don’t care who was right or who was wrong. It doesn’t matter. You can’t bring that into the volatile postrace environment without creating unnecessary risk to people who have no dog in the fight, and there’s no place for it in the sport.
I’ve heard all the old stories about people chasing each other around after races swinging tire irons or pulling pistols on each other. I could say that’s all part of the sport’s colorful past and times have changed. But that’s wrong. It was just as insane for people to act that way 20, 30 or 40 years ago as it would be today.
The garage area isn’t a playground at some elementary school where the worst thing that’s likely to happen is a skinned elbow. There’s too much happening after a race to let this kind of stuff go on, and NASCAR was right in moving quickly to address the issue. And the next time it happens, the penalty should be more severe.
Actually, just like with me moving, let’s hope it’s a LONG time before there is a next time.