Opinions vary about Martinsville's future

MARTINSVILLE, Va. – There’s nothing like walking into the middle of a movie.

After sitting in bumper-to-bumper traffic for one hour, 20 minutes trying to get into Martinsville Speedway Sunday morning, the first thing I heard when I walked into the press box was track president Clay Campbell on an audio feed from the downstairs media center.
He didn’t sound happy.

Taped to the back of the press room door was a sign telling me what was going on. At 10 a.m., Campbell commenced an effort to “address recent, persistent, unfounded and irresponsible stories and rumors about Martinsville’s demise.”

“Unfounded” and “irresponsible” are strong words, and within just a few minutes I was told the flash point for this rebuttal was a column on nascar.com written by David Caraviello. Click here for a link to that story if you want to read it in its entirety.

If you’ll take the time to go to that link and go all the way to the bottom, you will see a tagline on the bottom that says the opinions expressed there are solely those of the writer.

That’s what Caraviello is paid by NASCAR.com to do – express an opinion. That doesn’t give him carte blanche, of course. A good columnist is still responsible and his opinions are founded in fact. But the nature of opinion is that people have the right to agree or disagree, and it’s perfectly understandable that Campbell and the folks at Martinsville Speedway wouldn’t agree with what Caraviello wrote.

That, however, also doesn’t mean Caraviello is necessarily wrong, either.

I don’t agree with some of what’s in the column either. “Compared to most other race tracks in NASCAR, the place is a dinosaur,” Caraviello wrote. “And we all know what happens to dinosaurs. They go extinct.”

Martinsville is not a dinosaur. Campbell and the capable staff who works with him have done a remarkable job of striking a unique balance between the old and new schools. This .526-mile track has grown markedly as the sport has grown around it, but it still also has managed to maintain a small-town charm that makes a weekend here fell as much like the centerpiece event at a county fair. And I think there should be room in the sport for that.

That having been said, though, Caraviello is right on when he writes that the prospect of new tracks in places like the Pacific Northwest, New York City or Denver are bad omens for a track in a market as small as this one is.

While it is petty to try to make it a big deal that Martinsville doesn’t have paved parking lots, it’s not to correctly note that a lot of big-time sponsors don’t bother with hospitality here. It is hard to get people here from any significant distance.

I stayed at the nearest major commercial airport, near Greensboro, N.C., this weekend and drove 42 miles each way each day. You can stay in Danville, Va., which is a little closer, but unless you’ve been doing it for a couple of generations, good luck finding a hotel room in Martinsville itself. It would have taken me maybe half the time it did to get to my parking spot if guards weren’t standing, arms crossed and scowls affixed, across the logical place to enter while hundreds of cars were directed around the posterior to get to the elbow to get to where they should have been going.

“Right now, it's a race track being saved by red tape,” Caraviello writes. If International Speedway Corporation does ever overcome opposition and get a track built somewhere else, especially if that new track is a short track, Caraviello is right to say that the clock is ticking here.

It’s not irresponsible to point out that Martinsville is in a vulnerable spot. You could argue all day that other tracks deserve to lose a date before this one does, but that doesn’t mean that’s what would happen.

Clay Campbell and his staff have a strongly vested interest in keeping Martinsville out of the discussion when it comes to where Nextel Cup dates for future tracks might come from. But their enemy in that fight is not a columnist like Caraviello who effectively presents the opposite argument and backs that up with things that are rooted in his more objective reality.

Busch was right to speak his mind

I expected there would be a little bit of blowback against Kyle Busch for what he said when he got out of his race-winning car Sunday at Bristol Motor Speedway, and we’re certainly hearing it.

Busch won the Food City 500 and then basically used victory lane as a platform to tell everybody the car of tomorrow – and this is the word he chose – "sucked."

He called the new car a "thing" about 20 different ways and said it was "terrible" and no fun to drive. Now keep in mind he did most of this as he was being interviewed as the winner just before they handed him the big trophy.

I have to admit that I was a little bit surprised when one reporter asked a NASCAR official if Busch’s use of "sucked" might draw him any kind of penalty for using bad language on television. As unpleasant as you might think that term is, it’s not a word the Federal Communications Commission has among those that can get television networks fined when someone uses them.

Every time someone says "hell" or "damn" in a postrace interview now, I get 20 or more e-mails asking me why that guy doesn’t get fined the way Dale Earnhardt Jr. did for his use of another four-letter word after a win at Talladega a couple of years ago.

You will note that I didn’t write the word Earnhardt Jr. used, and that should tell you something right there. It’s a word that, right or wrong, is considered "wrong" beyond whatever limit might be drawn on language that’s fair game in public discourse.

You might consider "hell" or "damm" or even "sucked" just as bad, but the people drawing the lines on such things don’t. When it comes to television, that line is drawn specifically by the FCC. The reason Earnhardt Jr. got penalized is that the word he used is considered obscene by the FCC and that put the network carrying that race – along with the stations that aired the broadcast – at risk of being fined. NASCAR penalized Earnhardt Jr. to stop others from putting the TV guys in that predicament again.

It’s not NASCAR’s rule that the Earnhardt Jr. word is worth a points deduction and these other words aren’t. It’s the government’s. The blowback that I expected and am hearing for Kyle Busch regards the attitude his words represent.

Some fans feel that Busch gets paid pretty well to put up with the challenges of driving whatever race car they strap him into and that he should just shut up and drive it. Others feel that, at the very least, Busch’s remarks could have been saved for later instead of being part of his initial reaction after a victory.

I reject the first reaction. Busch and the rest of the drivers in NASCAR’s top series have not only the right but the responsibility to be honest with the fans about what they believe. There’s nothing worse than a guy who’s being an obvious shill for NASCAR because he believes sucking up will help him down the road. Fans see right through that. Some drivers go too far in complaining about virtually everything NASCAR does (some of us in the media are guilty of that, too), but no driver should be expected to swallow his tongue before giving what might be considered a "negative" response.

On the other hand, maybe Busch could have tempered his initial remarks to some degree. "We still have a lot of work to do on this new car," which is one of the things Busch said, sounds a lot better than saying "this thing sucks." And maybe victory lane isn’t the place to proclaim your verdict on a car you’ve just raced for the first time.

This new car that NASCAR debuted last weekend isn’t the one these drivers are used to. Until they’ve raced it a few times, they won’t know what "good" is in terms of how this car handles. All they know now is that it almost universally was felt not to be as "good" as the old car, which is the only car most of these guys have ever raced in at this level.

But as soon as the Bristol race was over, everybody wanted drivers to "grade" the car of tomorrow project. Some guys, including the race winner, elected to do so. I think it’s awfully hard to be too critical of a guy for simply giving you an honest answer to your question, no matter how bad the question might be.

We now venture into dangerous waters

I come today to say that NASCAR isn’t always wrong. Nor is it necessarily corrupt.

This, of course, means that I have been forced to drink the Kool-Aid. Or paid to walk over to the dark side. Or threatened to have my garage pass revoked if I don’t toe the line.

It can’t be that I am giving you an honest opinion.

Nobody’s allowed to do that these days, in a world where the truthful definition of “fair and balanced” is anything but that and where people are no longer allowed to respectfully disagree.

You’re either for us or you’re the enemy. That’s that.

But what the heck, I am stupid enough to try this anyway.

We’ll start with “debris cautions.” Late last year, after a race at Atlanta in fact, I wrote a column in which I said NASCAR is damaging its credibility by throwing caution flags for suspect reasons. I have not changed that opinion, at all, but after last Sunday’s race at Atlanta I also feel it’s important to point out that not every caution flag should automatically be considered suspect.

Just because a television broadcast doesn’t follow the safety truck around the track to show workers picking up debris, that doesn’t necessarily mean there was no debris there. I’m convinced some fans wouldn’t be satisfied unless the safety truck brought a piece of debris to the “Hollywood Hotel” so the experts there can offer their analysis of what the debris actually is.

You have to remember that NASCAR has to make decisions in real time. If something is on the track in the racing groove, officials have to decide if it constitutes a hazard. It might be a harmless piece of plastic, or it might be metal with a razor-like edge on it. If there’s any doubt, the yellow has to come out.

My main criticism of NASCAR, then and now, is the double-standard they seem to apply. In my opinion, the right thing to do is to throw the yellow when there’s any doubt that the track is unsafe for racing. But that should be done 10 laps into a race or with 10 laps to go – with no difference in how quickly the decision comes. I still maintain it was absolutely ridiculous that no yellow was thrown on the final lap of this year’s Daytona 500 until after Kevin Harvick and Mark Martin crossed the finish line.

It’s a problem for NASCAR that fans assume a late-race caution is bogus until they’re convinced otherwise. That’s the credibility issue I keep harping on, and one day I hope NASCAR realizes it’s a problem it needs to go work on.

That notwithstanding, however, it’s absurd to believe that NASCAR throws a caution with 20 laps to go in an attempt to manipulate the finish of a race in any particular way. The late-race caution at Atlanta was not an effort to hand Jimmie Johnson a victory, no matter how convinced you are that’s what happened. Sorry, but that’s just now how the sane world works.

We move on.

NASCAR got sued last Friday by AT&T, and Brian France had a pretty good line about it on “The Morning Drive” radio show on Sirius NASCAR Radio the other day. He said it’s flattering, in a way, to have companies suing for the right to stay in the sport.

The deal is that Jeff Burton’s No. 31 Chevrolets have been sponsored by Cingular. But Cingular, as a brand name, is going bye-bye. Cingular has merged with AT&T and the new company wants to put its logos on Burton’s car. NASCAR, however, says no because changing the brand would violate the terms of a grandfather clause in its agreement with Sprint Nextel.

The easy stance to take here would be to say Nextel should take a chill pill and let AT&T do what it wants to do. But how is that fair to Nextel? They’re paying $70 million a year for 10 years to be the title sponsor of Nextel Cup, and part of what they were supposed to get in that deal is exclusivity in the wireless sector.

Remember when Winston was the title sponsor? How close to a NASCAR garage did Marlboro ever get? That was being “loyal” to the title sponsor. How come Nextel doesn’t get that same “loyalty?”

Nextel allowed Cingular and Alltel to stay in the sport as long as they stayed where they were – they couldn’t move to another car or change from an associate to a primary if that had been a possibility. But one of the things Nextel was “getting” for its $70 million was the right NOT to have AT&T and Verizon and other competitors come into the sport and counter its involvement with sponsorships of their own.

I’ve got nothing in the world against Richard Childress Racing and Jeff Burton’s team – in fact, I know as many guys on Burton’s team as I do any other team in the garage. It stinks that this Cinuglar-AT&T merger puts their sponsorship deal in peril, and if there’s a way it can be worked out so everybody’s happy, that would be great.

But if can’t, I think NASCAR is right to take Nextel’s side on this one.

I hope you don’t think that makes me one of “them."

NASCAR is right to guarantee spots

I know fans really get tired of having sportswriters tell them what’s good for them when it comes to their favorite sport, but here goes.

A lot of NASCAR fans think they would like to see the rules changed so that the fastest 43 cars make each week’s Nextel Cup race. That’s it. You go fast enough, you’re in. No provisionals, no safety net, no nothing. A strict meritocracy.

Sorry, but that really is not what you want. Not at all.

I am not saying the current rules are perfect.

Guaranteeing the top 35 in the standings a spot in each week’s race does put an extreme onus on the “have nots” who have to race their way in for the other seven or eight spots each week.

For a long time, I’ve thought that number ought to be cut back to the top 25, but I don’t think that’s the right answer, either. I know fans will hate to hear this, but 25 isn’t enough for the very reason that you need 35 to start with.

But I am getting ahead of myself.

There are really two reasons you need guaranteed spots in the first place, no matter how you do that. The first one is obvious. If what happened to A.J. Allmendinger in qualifying Friday night at Atlanta Motor Speedway – his car started missing and he didn’t complete a lap – happens to Dale Earnhardt Jr. or Tony Stewart, there has to be a way for Earnhardt Jr. or Stewart to be in the race.

You can say what you want to, but NASCAR needs its biggest stars racing each weekend.
Stewart and Allmendinger should be treated equally in almost every way by NASCAR, but until Allmendinger has at least made a race or two you can’t say he brings as many people to the track as Stewart does. Stewart’s fans buy tickets and make travel plans expecting to see their guy race, and he needs to race even if something screwy happens to his car in qualifying.

You could at least partially accomplish that the “old” way, by putting the top 36 cars in the race based on speed and then assigning provisionals from the top of the points standings down.

But the top 35 guarantee makes more sense because it more likely ensures the top teams will be in the race each week even if early in a given season they’ve had bad luck and find themselves well back in the pack. Kasey Kahne, for example, is 36th in the current standings, and he needs to be racing on Sundays.

The real reason that NASCAR is right to guarantee spots for a certain number of its teams, though, has more to do with the teams and the sponsors than it does the drivers.

If an owner and a sponsor are willing to commit to racing every week, there should be some benefit in that, some advantage. It’s certainly true that some full-season teams and sponsors are being sent home now, but the only way to prevent that is to guarantee any full-time team a starting spot even if that means expanding starting fields beyond 43 cars.

I think that goes too far. The NASCAR garage shouldn’t be a closed shop, with only those willing and capable to run 36 races having any shot to compete. There has to be room for new teams, for teams with partial schedule plans to get their feet wet in the big pond.

Going to 25 exempt teams, though, goes too far I think. That comes off as another case of the rich getting richer, the haves getting more than the have nots. The top 25 teams are almost always going to be the ones with the most resources, and therefore the ones likely to get the most exposure that keeps that kind of support coming.

The real benefit of the current system falls on those teams that are 26th through 35th in the standings, I think. These are the guys who don’t get into the top 10 all that often, who don’t get the maximum television exposure. But if they go into a season knowing they’re going to make the first five races, they know they have a chance of staying in the exempt group and that makes them more appealing to sponsors.

What about new teams? Well, shouldn’t it be at least a little bit harder for somebody new to come in and take away a spot from a team that has been part of the sport? Shouldn’t there be at least some hurdle for new teams to clear?

It might be fair to argue that the current hurdle is too high to clear. Is it too easy for teams to stay in the top 35 and too hard for anybody to ever fight its way in? If more spots were available through qualifying, wouldn’t that give new teams a more equitable chance of carving out its place in the sport?

If you’re going to change anything, I’ve about decided that what you should do is guarantee the top 30 in points starting spots in the races. That allows at least 12 teams to make the race on speed. Maybe you could make that 13 by going ahead and starting 44 cars – there’s really no good reason not to fill out that last row with one more car.

But that’s as far as I am willing to go.

NASCAR's process needs inspection

The devil, as they say, is in the detail.

You wouldn’t expect, for example, there to be much of an issue when it comes to how cars are inspected before a NASCAR race – at least in terms of who goes where in the inspection line.
But early in this Nextel Cup season, that has emerged as a very big deal.

At California Speedway two weeks ago, there were 51 cars attempting to make the 43-car field. That meant eight teams went home early, so qualifying was a big deal for that race.

But before practice that Friday, inspections took so long that several of the guys who needed to race their way into the field on speed didn’t have an opportunity for their cars to pass through the inspection line even once before practice began.

In a 90-minute practice session, some teams were as much as an hour late in getting on track – through absolutely no fault of their own. And that’s wrong.

NASCAR has to put itself in position to give every team entered in an event at least one chance to clear inspection before any car goes on the track. Whether that means setting up two inspection lines and adding more staff or some other option, it’s on NASCAR to have the personnel present to give everyone a fair shot.

Now if a team’s car gets kicked out of line for having something wrong, that’s different. But if I’ve got a car that’s ready for inspection at the proper time and that has everything on it that is in compliance with the rules, there’s no way I should be penalized by losing practice time because of a backlog in NASCAR’s inspection process.

Teams go through inspection in the order of their standing in the points, and some might argue that’s backward. The top 35 already have the advantage of having a guaranteed starting slot, why give them the advantage of having the best chance at getting a full practice in, too? Why not invert the field and inspect the guys at the low end of the totem pole first? Or, even, have a lottery to determine inspection order the same way they do now to select qualifying order?

Those ideas offer interesting debate topics, but the point is that it should not matter what order the cars are inspected in. There shouldn’t be any advantage, one way or another. If you go from first to last, last to first or at random, the only fair way to do it at all is to have things set up such that everybody gets a fair shot at being on the track the same amount of time for practice sessions.

As long as a team shows up on time to present its car for inspection and as long as that car is in compliance with the rules, it should never miss a minute of on-track time because NASCAR can’t get it inspected before it’s time to start practice.

Slams against Petty and NASCAR fans by Washington state lawmakers sidetrack legitimate debate

International Speedway Corporation tried last week to make some headway toward getting a track built near Seattle, but that’s not exactly how things worked out.

ISC had Richard Petty, Darrell Waltrip and Greg Biffle travel to Washington state to talk to legislators and try to drum up support for a bill that would help create the public funding portion of the track project.

There’s plenty of resistance to the idea of public money being used to pay for any sports facility, whether it be in Washington state or anywhere else. And many of the newspaper editorial writers in the Seattle area seem steadfastly opposed to the bill in question because they question its fiscal wisdom.

All of that is completely fair game. So, too, is opposition to the track project from the folks in Kitsap County, where the site ISC prefers is located.

Some of them don’t want a major sports facility built close to where they live. They don’t want their lives upset by the crowds that would come in and by development that might be spawned by having the track in their area.

That’s the kind of public debate that’s completely warranted when a project the scope of a NASCAR track is proposed. What’s troubling, though, is how tawdry the debate grew thanks to words that came out of the mouths of two elected officials during the racers’ visits to their state.

First, House Speaker Frank Chopp referred to Petty, the seven-time Cup series champion, as “that guy who got picked up for a DUI.”

Uh, no. Not only has Petty never been picked up for driving under the influence, he has never allowed his race teams to be sponsored by any form of alcoholic beverage because he promised his mother he never would.

Chopp said he “wasn’t sure” Petty was the guy he was thinking of, so I guess he thought that made it OK. Later, he apologized and called the remark “inappropriate and wrong.”

Well, at least he got that part right.

Then there’s House member Larry Seaquist (who, for the record, is a Democrat as is Chopp).

Mr. Seaquist offered the following opinion when the idea of having NASCAR fans in the state came up: “These people are not the kind of people you would want living next door to you. They'd be the ones with the junky cars in the front yard and would try to slip around the law.”

Hmmm. That sounds like a stereotype, doesn’t it? That’d be sort of like stating that anyone who lives in Seattle has webbed feet (because it rains so much there, you know) and puts double-caff, half-fat lattes in their babies’ bottles (since the only thing they drink there is coffee).

That would be silly of course. But there’s one judgment here that I can make based solely on what was said this week on this topic, and that’s that Richard Petty has forgotten more about class and respect than at least two pinheads in the Washington state legislature.

NASCAR isn't always like other sports

DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. – Some leftover thoughts and opinions from Speedweeks:
– I sometimes get criticized by longtime NASCAR fans for making analogies to "stick and ball" sports when I write about racing. The comparisons don’t work, they say.
Sometimes I think they do. I think there are aspects of big-time racing that compare nicely with the other major professional sports. But there are also times when you have to be careful to consider the differences. I think the final lap of Sunday’s Daytona 500 is one of those instances.
Some of the national, nonracing columnist guys were saying on Monday’s talk shows that letting Kevin Harvick and Mark Martin race to the caution flag with cars wrecking behind them was OK. They compared it to a basketball game, where a player might be going for an uncontested layup and an official won’t call a foul off the ball to prevent that. Or to hockey, when a penalty call is delayed until one team completes a scoring opportunity.
The points have some validity, I guess. There’s also the fact that referees "swallow the whistle" late in close games, declining sometimes to make calls that could swing a final score. Let the athletes decide things, not the officials, the thinking goes.
But the racing equation differs in two ways, I think.
First, there’s the safety issue. By holding off on the yellow Sunday night, NASCAR required drivers to keep going wide open as they headed into a patently dangerous situation.
This business about how the cars were all going toward the apron is silly. NASCAR couldn’t have known that would continue to a point where the track would be safe for racing. Remember, these guys will throw a yellow for a ball of tape on the track – the hated "debris caution" – if they think it’ll pick up the pace of a race. How do you justify that on the basis of safety and then let action continue through a 10-car pileup?
You either race back to the checkered flag or you don’t. That’s what a rule is. You can do this or you can’t do it.
Second, there’s the fact that the drivers who were not in front of the wreck are competing, too. Teams won and lost a lot of money and points based on whether they got through that wreck, and the teams that didn’t also had expensive cars torn all to heck. Every competitor deserves a safe track to run on, not just two guys who happen to be racing side-by-side to win the Daytona 500.
– I learned something Monday that I didn’t know.
NASCAR spokesman Ramsey Poston was on "The Morning Drive" on Sirius NASCAR Radio Channel 128, and Marty Snider and I asked about the finish of the truck race Friday.
Johnny Benson went below the yellow line and passed Travis Kvapil for second in the three-wide finish with winner Jack Sprague. Callers and e-mails had asked us about that, so we asked Poston.
He said the yellow line rule includes a caveat. "When the drivers can see the checkered flag, you can get all you can get," he said.
That was news to me. He’s saying that once the flagman has the checkered flag in his hand and is waving it, the area below the yellow line is not out of bounds.
– There might be ways to explain why the rating for ESPN2’s first Busch Series race were down 26 percent from the same race on TNT last year. But any way you slice that, it’s not good news.
ESPN had its hype machine going full blast for weeks leading to Saturday’s race. I don’t think it’s television’s fault. NASCAR, as evidence by lower ratings for the Daytona 500 on Sunday, has some real issues to face forthrightly. And the Busch Series is in real, real trouble of further losing its identity and, thereby, its appeal.
– Having said that, ESPN has assembled a great staff of people to contribute to its racing coverage. Marty Smith, Terry Blount, Tim Cowlishaw and Angelique Chengelis are first rate. If they’re allowed to do their jobs the way they know how, everybody else is going to have to work a little harder to keep up.
– Speaking of other people in my business, I don’t know how often this happens, but the Daytona Beach News-Journal ought to win a bucketful of awards in Florida’s respective newspaper awards contests for how it covers Speedweeks. My own employer, The Charlotte Observer, does a good job for our readers, too, I think. But if you’re ever down there for Speedweeks, make sure you buy the local paper every day. Those folks get it done.

So, do we understand you to say that a certain level of cheating is acceptable?

Sights, sounds and observations from Wednesday at Daytona International Speedway:

NASCAR chief executive officer said in his "state of the sport" speech on Tuesday that when you have 120 cars at a given track you’re bound to have a certain number of them who try to beat the rulebook.

That’s sad, isn’t it?

Counting all the Nextel Cup, Busch and Truck cars here this week, it’s more like 140 cars. Let’s say that "only" seven of them are found to be violating the rules. That’s a conservative estimate, since we already know about five for sure, but let’s just keep the math simple.

If there are seven cars out of 140 that can’t be counted on to play by the rules, and if France and NASCAR find that percentage acceptable that means that it’d be 5 percent of the cars here. So, by that accounting, it’s acceptable for the people in racing to be honest 95 percent of the time.

OK, now let’s say you’re a father. You’ve got a son who’s about 6 years old and he’s beginning to ask you all of those questions you never quite know how to answer.

"Daddy?" he says. "If I play fair 95 percent of the time, if I tell you the truth 95 percent of the time, if I obey 95 percent of the law, will I be OK?"

Which is the right answer?

a) Yes, son. That’s about the best I should expect.

b) No, son. You need to be honest 100 percent of the time.

It was very windy during Wednesday’s practices. There were whitecaps in Lake Lloyd in the track’s infield and, at one point, a wheeled beer cart in the Fan Zone was blown around several revolutions by the wind. Fortunately, since crowds weren’t as big on Wednesday as they will be later this week, the cart was empty and no beers were lost.

I said this on our Sirius Satellite NASCAR Radio show Wednesday morning and I will say it again here. The only racing that Evernham Motorsports should be doing this weekend should be seeing which of its three transporters makes it back to the shop in Statesville first.

I really respect Ray Evernham. I think he’s trying to build a championship quality race team and I know, without a question, that he works as hard as anybody in the sport at trying to reach his goals.

But there’s no way to sidestep the fact that having all three of your crew chiefs – or team directors, in the Evernham lexicon – suspended in the same weekend looks awfully bad.

It’s always interesting to look at how the two 150-milers sort out, and this year certainly follows that pattern.

The first three starters in Thursday’s first race – David Gilliland, David Ragan and Boris Said – have never raced in a Daytona 500. Johnny Sauter, who starts fourth, has one career start in the race.

So there’s a total of one Daytona 500 start among those in the first two rows. And who starts next? The defending champion, Jimmie Johnson.

Johnson has Hendrick Motorsports teammate Casey Mears in that 150, while Jeff Gordon and Kyle Busch are in the other. Dale Earnhardt Jr. and his teammate Martin Truex are also in that race, as are Joe Gibbs Racing teammates Tony Stewart and Denny Hamlin and both Kyle Petty and Bobby Labonte from Petty Enterprises.

But Reed Sorenson is flying solo – his teammates Juan Pablo Montoya and David Stremme are in the second race. All three of Ray Evernham’s Dodges – Elliott Sadler, Scott Riggs and Kasey Kahne – are also in the second 150.

Filling the field for the Daytona 500 is really a process that takes several steps.
You have the top 35 from last year and they’re all in. Then, you have the top two finishers from each of today’s 150-mile qualifiers. Those drivers will start in the first 39 spots on Sunday.
David Gilliland starts first on Sunday. Ricky Rudd starts second.

Take everybody from the first race that was in the top 35 – David Ragan, Jimmie Johnson, Casey Mears, Denny Hamlin, Tony Stewart, Martin Truex Jr., Dale Earnhardt Jr., Bobby Labonte, Jeff Green, Greg Biffle, Kyle Petty, Robby Gordon, Dave Blaney, Clint Bowyer, Reed Sorenson, Ken Schrader and Jeff Burton – and add the top-two finishers from that race who’re not in that group. That will be 19 drivers. They will start on Sunday on the inside of the next 19 rows behind Gilliland in positions 3, 5, 7, 9, 11 and so on down to 39 in the order they FINISH in today’s first race.

Now, go to the second 150. David Stremme, Juan Pablo Montoya, Jeff Gordon, Kyle Busch, J.J. Yeley, Elliott Sadler, Jamie McMurray, Ryan Newman, Kevin Harvick, Mark Martin, Tony Raines, Kurt Busch, Scott Riggs, Carl Edwards, Matt Kenseth and Kasey Kahne are the drivers guaranteed spots in that race. Add the top two finishers from outside that group. Those 18 drivers fill positions 2, 4, 6, 8 and so on behind Rudd in the starting lineup.

Now, we have four more slots to fill.

The next three go the three drivers who were fastest in Sunday’s qualifying who’re not guaranteed spots. Boris Said, Sterling Marlin and Johnny Sauter are in those spots for now, but if they make the race through the 150s those spots could pass to, in this order, David Reutimann, Jeremy Mayfield and Mike Skinner.

The 43rd spot goes to a former champion otherwise not qualified if there is one. Dale Jarrett is the first one eligible for that spot, followed by Bill Elliott. If neither needs that spot, the next person in line on speed would get it.

David Poole's 'state of the sport'

On "The Morning Drive," the Sirius Satellite NASCAR Radio show he co-hosts, David Poole played the role of NASCAR chairman Brian France and gave the following speech as what he would say in the "state of the sport" speech that France will give this afternoon in Daytona:

Good afternoon and thanks for coming.
Today I want put aside the normal platitudes and doublespeak you might expect and speak honestly. Our sport faces too many critical issues for today. We are at a cross roads, and beginning today we will chart a new and, I believe, proper path that will buttress our foundation and allow us once again to start growing a sport that, today, faces a number of crises.
We face, for starters, a crisis of integrity.
For too long, we’ve asked our fans to swallow inconsistent officiating and capricious enforcement of rules that seem to shift like sand on the beach where cars once raced under my grandfather’s aegis.
We’ve treated cheating like a family might treat weird Uncle Fred – pretending like everything’s OK because nobody’s really getting hurt. That’s not how a professional sport should be run.
If we are to have any integrity at all, we have to establish a system of rules that can be followed by teams who are eager for a chance to compete fairly and evenly. We have to enforce those rules fairly and without regard to the economic impact of sanctions or other actions on our part.
Every team, no matter how many T-shirts its driver sells, must be treated the same way. It’s hard for us to do that when we have people in our tower on race day who’re also involved with the marketing of our sport. Even if they intend to be fair in every instance, they’re human beings. They can’t help but be influenced by what their actions might mean in the marketplace, not when our company has made that the over-riding priority in how they’re judged in terms of how well they do their jobs.
We’re taking those people out of that impossible situation. Beginning today, we will spend whatever money we have to recruit and hire independent officials with experience at race tracks all across this country to come in and join our officials in forming an independent agency to officiate our races. NASCAR will pay this agency a lump sum each year to pay salaries and expenses and keep these officials trained. This agency will write our rulebook and enforce it and NASCAR will have no influence on that process.
We will, however, insist that beginning with the 2008 Daytona 500 any team caught with a major rules violation before qualifying will be denied the right to race in that week’s event. Any team found to have committed a major rules violation in postrace inspection will lose all points and money earned in that event and will be prohibited from entering the next event on the schedule. This rule will apply evenly, to all teams.
Earlier today, I ordered the creation of a traveling medical team that will attend all of our events and co-ordinate care center operations with local personnel retained by each track. We actually will have two teams, with each team alternating at a given track for a given race. While one team is at a track, the other team will be at the next venue coordinating with local personnel and conducting extensive safety and medical meetings with the people they will be working with when our competitors arrive.
Our sport also faces a crisis in competition.
Let’s be honest with one another. Side-by-side racing has largely become a cherished memory in our sport. We have to get that back. So I have ordered our competition department to call a meeting in Charlotte at which every team member interested in attending can sit down and hear the following message. Beginning in the 2008 season, we will run 10 to 15 percent slower at every track where our cars compete in Nextel Cup, Busch and Truck series events. On July 1 of this year, we will have another meeting at which our teams will present to us their plan for slowing the cars down. If the teams are unable to agree on such a plan by that date, we will formulate our own plan and deliver it to the teams by Oct. 1. But hear this and hear it now, we will go slower in 2008. We can do it the way the teams want us to, or we’ll do it the way we decide to do. But we will do it.
We also have a crisis of emphasis on our hands.
For too long, we’ve been obsessed with television ratings and the image that our sport has with people who don’t even care about it. We’ve tried to cater to people who don’t care about us long enough. That stops, today.
We will no longer, as a company, talk about the championship 365 days a year. We will still crown champions in our top series each year. But the champions will receive trophies and checks for $1 million in Nextel Cup and $500,000 each in the Busch and Truck Series. Money now earmarked for points funds will be redistributed as part of a new formula for determining purses. Television money will also be reallocated in this formula in such a way that performance on the track each week determines how much money a race team and its drivers win.
The minimum purse for every Nextel Cup race, beginning in 2008, will be $7.5 million. No Nextel Cup race winner will be paid less than $1 million for winning any Cup race. The winner of the Daytona 500 next year will earn $5 million, and several other major events on our schedule will pay $2.5 million for first place. There are no more car owner plans or winner circle plans that subsidize the haves at the expense of the have nots. You want to make money in racing?
Race for it.
We face a crisis today, as well, in diversity. Our sport does not look like America, and we know that. We’ve known it for years, and so far we’ve made only pitiably token efforts to change that. Again, that stops today. Beginning in 2008, 5 percent of every purse will be designated to go to fund a program that provides opportunities and, most importantly, a clear pathway of progress for people of color and female drivers to be supported as they move steadily toward competing at the sport’s top levels. We hope our current fans will embrace these efforts, but we say here and now to those who don’t that we will sorely miss them but that we will go on without them.
And finally, but most importantly, we face the crisis of losing the most valuable asset we’ve ever had – our connection to our fans. We’ve stopped thinking about them. We talk about them a lot, but we don’t do much for them – not for the people who support us.
Increasingly, we’ve taken the access to our competitors that once served as our greatest attribute and turned it into a revenue stream. You want to meet a driver or even see one up close? Come on down to the Fan Zone, but it’s gonna cost you an extra $75 bucks. No more. We can’t "upsell" what our fans are entitled to, but at the same time we can’t simply throw open the gates to all fans while our competitors are trying to work.
So, beginning Thursday when Daytona International Speedway opens for the Gatorade Duels, no track will be allowed to sell garage passes. Only people who are working in our garage will have access to this area during times the track is hot. But, beginning one hour after the end of every qualifying session, each track will be allowed to sell for $10 per ticket a pass that entitles any fan access to a two-hour autograph session in the garage. All proceeds from the sale of these tickets will go to create a disability fund to benefit former NASCAR competitors who need financial assistance because of sickness or other hardship. Every driver entered in each week’s race will be required to remain in the garage for this autograph session. This will be the only time during a race weekend when a driver is allowed to sign autographs.
We have a great sport, and it has grown to a point where there is plenty of money to go around. We just need to stop trying to see how much money there could possibly be to make and start trying to see what would make our sport better. That’s how we got as far as we have today, and there’s no reason to go backward any further than we’ve already let things slip.
Today is a new day in NASCAR. I am happy you where here to see this new day come.

• Sirius radio's "Morning Drive" forum

How can you not pull for a guy like Boris Said?

Sights and sounds from Saturday at Daytona International Speedway:
It’s hard not to pull for a guy like Boris Said, who’s among the drivers who’ll be fighting for the final few available spots in the Daytona 500 field in today’s qualifying and Thursday’s 150-mile qualifying races.
Said was talking this week about how hard it is for him, as a part-time driver with a part-time team, to work his way into Nextel Cup races when 35 (or 36, with a former champion’s provisional) are guaranteed to full-time teams.
“I’ll go back to Indianapolis last year, which was probably the most nerve-wracking thing I’ve ever gone through,” Said said. “I was the bubble for a little while and it came down to the last guy, who had been faster than me in practice.”
Said said the mood in his trailer at that moment was like the movie “My Dog Skip,” which is sad enough to wring a tear from even the hardest of hearts. But the last car didn’t go faster than Said, meaning his car was in the Allstate 400.
“In 15 seconds it turned into ‘Brokeback Mountain’ with guys slapping each other on the butts and hugging and kissing each other and telling them we loved each other” Said said. “It was such an emotional swing that day.”

The more I think about it, the more the simplicity of what Dale Earnhardt Jr. is doing in his contract negotiations with Dale Earnhardt Inc. emerges in my mind.
I am sure Earnhardt Jr. has some problems with how DEI is being run as a racing company by his stepmother, Teresa Earnhardt. I am sure he has concerns about the company’s future as a racing enterprise.
But I’m also convinced that this is as much about how Earnhardt Jr. believes he was treated when he was a boy, when he was shipped off to military school, as it is about anything else.
Basically, he feels like Teresa Earnhardt didn’t want him around. Now, he’s got a chance to let his stepmother see much that hurts.

You can’t make stuff like this up, I promise you. Tums is an associate sponsor on Reed Sorenson’s No. 41 Dodges this year, and it’s trying to be a little bit “different” in its marketing.
Next week, it plans to put out a list of favorite restaurants near tracks, presumably ones that might encourage people to use more of its product.
This weekend, Tums has released results of a Harris Interactive poll that asked male and female NASCAR fans which drivers “make their hearts burn and which ones give them indigestion.”
Not surprisingly, Dale Earnhardt Jr. topped the list of those that make fans’ “hearts burn.” He was picked by 48 percent of all fans and 55 percent of female fans. Jeff Gordon was second, Tony Stewart third and Kasey Kahne fourth.
Gordon, conversely, was first in the “indigestion” category, with Stewart second, followed by Kurt Busch, Kyle Busch and then Earnhardt Jr.

Sometimes, qualifying order is a big deal at a track. That’s usually true, for instance, if qualifying starts when the sun is out and goes into darkness. Later is usually better in that circumstance because the track cools off and, usually, gets faster.
Qualifying at Daytona takes FOR-EVER. Time trials begin at 2:10 p.m. Sunday and it might be 6:30 or so when it’s all over. That means it could cool off as the day goes along, but what seems to impact qualifying more here at Daytona is the wind – direction and velocity – so it’s hard to know whether earlier or later will be better Sunday.
For what it’s worth, Brian Vickers, Joe Nemechek, Kenny Wallace, Denny Hamlin and Kyle Busch are the first five scheduled to run Sunday afternoon. The final five scheduled are Kevin Lepage, Elliott Sadler, David Reutimann, Carl Edwards and Tony Raines.
Ricky Rudd, fastest in practice on Saturday, is slated to go out 49th. Teammate David Gilliland goes out 26th. Sterling Marlin, also fast in practice, is 15th in the qualifying order. Juan Pablo Montoya is 30th and Jeremy Mayfield is 42nd.

During Speed’s practice coverage Saturday, Darrell Waltrip was talking about what a great accomplishment it was for Toyota to have any of its brand-new cars in the top 10 in practice speeds in its first outing – Jeremy Mayfield’s No. 36 was fourth fastest. Whether you agree with that or not, the fact that he has appeared in about 40 commercials touting Toyota’s entry into the sport, that he has driven Toyotas in the Truck Series and that his brother, Michael, owns three Toyota Nextel Cup teams makes it hard to take anything DW says about Toyota anything other than an advertisement.
…Everybody’s talking about how many cars there are here this year, but while checking on something else I found out there were 58 entered in the Daytona 500 last year. That’s only three fewer that this year’s “glut.”

Friday's sights, sounds and so on at Daytona International Speedway

Sights, sounds and observations from Friday’s activities at Daytona International Speedway:
Last year, Miller tried to get Budweiser to make a bet about whether Kurt Busch, driver of the No. 2 Miller-sponsored Dodge, would finish ahead of Bud’s No. 8 Chevrolet, with Dale Earnhardt Jr. driving.
The stakes were that the loser would have to run a race in the other beer company’s colors. Budweiser didn’t take the bet.
This year, Miller says it will change the name of the baseball stadium in Milwaukee from Miller Park to Budweiser Park for a 2008 regular-season series between the Brewers and St. Louis Cardinals if Earnhardt Jr. beats Busch. If Busch wins, the Cardinals’ home (Busch Stadium) will be rebranded as Miller Lite Stadium for a Brewers-Cardinals series.
"It's too bad for Anheuser-Busch that they didn't take us up on our challenge last year, when Kurt and the team were dealing with the first-year 'new team' transition,” said Tom Long, Miller’s chief executive officer.

Workers have been tinkering with signs at the end of the road leading to Roush Racing’s headquarters at the Concord Regional Airport this week, in preparation for next week’s announcement that the Fenway Sports Group is buying into ownership of the team.
The announcement is scheduled for Wednesday afternoon at Daytona Beach’s minor league baseball park, Jackie Robinson Stadium. Look for the team’s new name to be Roush Fenway Racing.

One thing my media brethren seem to be doing a lot of this preseason is asking drivers their opinions about two of the sport’s top issues – the Dale Earnhardt Jr. contract negotiations and Juan Pablo Montoya’s arrival in the sport.
Patience with such questions, in some camps, is beginning to wear a little thin.
“It’s funny,” Michael Waltrip said on media day Thursday. “I raced for 15 or 20 years and all I heard was ‘How’s Darrell?’ and ‘Where’s Darrell?’”
Darrell, of course, is Waltrip’s brother. “Then I went to race for DEI,” Michael Waltrip said, “and I always hear, “How’s Junior doing?” Pardon me if I don’t choose to answer questions for him.”

It’s hard for everybody to keep up with all the changes that go in NASCAR, even somebody who’s literally inside the race car. During Friday afternoon’s Shootout practice, Kasey Kahne came over his radio with a question. “Who’s in the 44 car?” Kahne said. The answer is Dale Jarrett, with his new Toyota team at Michael Waltrip Racing.
There’s absolutely no way anybody who covers the sport regularly will make it through the first five races without, at some point, typing in that Jarrett drives the No. 88 Fords. Habits like that are just really hard to break.

Best line I wish I had come up with: Ken Willis, the East Coast distributor for wry wit in his columns in the Daytona Beach News-Journal, noticed that a lot of people employed by ESPN seem to be walking around the premises this week. “There are so many ESPN folks on property this week,” Willis wrote, “you’d think Terrell Owens was doing sit-ups in the Fan Zone.”

Man, it’s only the season’s first weekend and the race for this year’s Emmy Award for sports television coverage already seems to be over. Ray Dunlap’s reporting on why the Daytona track’s tunnel is painted yellow (it’s Nextel’s color) and his first-hand reports from a speedboat in Lake Lloyd locked it up.
…Speaking of television tom-foolery, Thursday night’s draw for the Budweiser Shootout was shown “live to tape” beginning at 8 p.m. What that means is that the draw actually happened about 7 p.m. and was recorded for broadcast an hour later. Television calls that “live to tape” because they don’t bother to edit it. Otherwise, the whole thing might have taken about 15 minutes. In English, “live to tape” means “taped.”
…NASCAR chairman Brian France will give a “state of the sport” report to the media on Tuesday. The Observer has learned that France will reveal the state of the sport is “just peachy.”

NASCAR Media Day sights and sounds

Dale Earnhardt Jr. sucked the air out of the tent in which media day was held Thursday, saying he wants “majority ownership” in Dale Earnhardt Inc. as part of his ongoing contract talks with the company.
There was more to his 24-minute session with print reporters, though. Earnhardt Jr. once again commented about what his stepmother, Teresa Earnhardt, said in the Dec. 14 Wall Street Journal about Dale Jr. needing to decide whether he wants to be a race car driver or a celebrity.
“I don’t make a habit of seeking out attention all the time,” Earnhardt Jr. said. “She portrayed it as I was out there waving a flag saying, ‘Look at me, I can dance and I can sing.’ …What she said was a low blow there.”
Earnhardt Jr. also talked about how the media coverage to Teresa’s remark had helped him solidify the position he has decided to take in the contract talks.
“Everything that has been written…I’ve taken that stuff and helped form my position and opinion,” he said. “You don’t like media opinion to sway your decision most of the time. In this case, I have a bad habit of being too modest. A lot of people helped me understand what I’m actually worth, what the situation is.”
How important to DEI is Earnhardt Jr.? On his Sirius Satellite Radio show Tuesday night, Tony Stewart said it best. “Without Dale Earnhardt Jr.,” he said, “DEI is a museum.”

Earnhardt Jr. also talked about how the talk about him needing to win a championship to “validate” his career is something he’s had a hard time coming to terms with.
“I never though I’d be good enough to race full time or hold down a job as driver,” he said. “I never thought I would win a race at the Cup level.
“I look around at people that have followed in their father’s footsteps and had limited success. I never counted on it. I had no goals set as a driver. I’ve accomplished more than I’ve thought I would. I’ve gone places that I thought I would never see. I’ve got lot of years left to in the championship.”
Earnhardt Jr. said he’s far less nervous to go 200 mph in a race car than he is to appear on the “Tonight” show with Jay Leno or present an award at the ESPYs.
“When we go do things like the (music video) with Jay-Z, I wonder how the hell I got there,” Earnhardt Jr. said. “I’ve driven a race car at 200 miles an hour, flipped and crashed, and seen some really bad things. But, the most scared I’ve ever been in introducing a band (Linkin Park) on stage at the MTV Awards. I never want to do that again.”

Speaking of Tony Stewart, he’s apparently adjusting well to his new role as a member of the media now that he has his own radio show. Stewart hung around on media day as long as just about any driver, holding at least two additional informal chats with media members after his scheduled session was over.
Stewart said he’s lost about 20 pounds, total, but is down about 30 pounds of body fat but having added back 10 pounds of muscle mass. But he swore he’s not trying to slim down to get back into an Indy car.
“Don’t get that started again,” he said. He also took some ribbing about rumors he might be the next big-name driver to head down the wedding aisle. Stewart said that’s not imminent, but he did say he’s given some thought to the kind of wedding he’d want.
“I’ve never been to Hawaii and I’d kind of like to get married on the beach there, with just family,” he said. “Then, we’d come back and have a big party/reception and while we eat dinner we’ll have somebody record the wedding and play it while everybody’s there, so it’s kind of like everybody’s there.”

The prevailing wisdom among the drivers I talked to Thursday is that Richard Childress Racing is ahead of everybody else when it comes to being ready for the “car of tomorrow” races.
Jeff Burton wouldn’t say he agreed with that, but he said that when you look at 2007 you’d better be ready to run the new cars. “Take out the plate races and the COT races are half the season – 16 and 16,” Burton pointed out.

Mark Martin said he’s not sure about the new car. “I’m not even sure we’ll be able to drive on the track at Bristol at the test without knocking the splitters off,” he said.
…Kevin Harvick took some heat for calling Teresa Earnhardt a “deadbeat owner” a couple of weeks ago, but he’s not backing off from commenting about the DEI situation. “Dale Jr. is really the only person in this deal who has the bargaining power,” Harvick said. “He's got it all on his side and deservedly so. He’s the most popular driver. He’s been successful and…he deserves the respect of being treated like a grown man and not being treated like he’s 15 and somebody's stepson.”

It doesn’t go unnoticed that NASCAR holds its annual media day festivities in a tent that looks like it could be the site where the Cirque de Soleil might break out at any moment. Furthering the theme this year, there was circus-themed paintings and decorations scattered about.

There's more to it than simply trying to sell papers or drive web traffic

On the final weekend before we embark on a new NASCAR season, let’s talk a little bit about objectivity.
One of the questions I am asked most often is whether or not I have a favorite driver. The truthful answer to that question is almost always yes. But it changes a lot, certainly from week to week and sometimes from lap to lap.
Allow me to explain.
When you’ve worked nights at newspaper offices as often as I have, the one comment you can barely keep from laughing at is "All you guys want to do is sell newspapers!" Why, as a matter of fact, that’s true. I’ve always wondered if anybody ever called Domino’s and, in trying to register a complaint, said "All you guys want to do is sell pizzas!"
When people level that "sell newspapers" complaint, usually they’re complaining about the tone or approach to some facet of coverage, and of course there’s more to putting out a good newspaper than merely trying to pander for the sake a few more copies being sold.
But, for the most part, it’s good for newspapers when there are good stories to cover. The Observer does better, from a sports section perspective, if the Carolina Panthers are winning or the Charlotte 49ers or an ACC team like Duke or North Carolina makes the Final Four in men’s basketball. The paper and thatsracin.com also benefit when there’s compelling news on the NASCAR front for us to report.
For that reason, every race day I am pulling for the best story. Some days, that might be your favorite driver winning. Some days, though, it might be a better story if your favorite driver loses in heartbreaking fashion. When I have a rooting interest, it’s almost always for the best story.
Certainly, there are some drivers with whom I have a better relationship than others. I find some guys more interesting than others, and I am certain the same can be said from the drivers’ perspectives. Undoubtedly there are guys who don’t think I’ve done them right and therefore I am not on their lists of favorite writers. That’s part of the deal when you’re entering your 11th season on the beat.
Later on this spring, a book will be coming out that I did with Jeff Burton and his team during the Chase for the Nextel Cup last year. Burton and his guys were good enough to let me hang out with them during the Chase race weekends and I was able to get to know a lot of guys on that team a little bit. Does that mean I will pull for the No. 31 car over the rest of the cars in races this year? No, but that doesn’t mean some people won’t see it that way.
I used to kid around that I should change my email address to jeffgordonlovingidiot@charlotteobserver.com to save people time when they wanted to send me hate mail. You could put Tony Stewart, Dale Earnhardt Jr. or several other drivers’ names in there, too, because I’ve been accused to favoring them at times, too.
One of the things I’ve never claimed to be is objective, at least not in the strict definition of that word. According to dictionary.com, objective means "not influenced by personal feelings, interpretations, or prejudice; based on facts; unbiased."
Reporters are human beings, and feelings, interpretations and, yes, even biases are part of everything we see and hear. My job is to filter out as much of that as I possibly can, but my confession to you is that nobody can do that completely.
The best anybody doing this job can promise is that he or she tries to be fair. And so, before I pack up the suitcase to start another season on the road, let me promise to try to do that one more time.
Let’s go racing.

This racing beat has gotten bigger, more complicated each season

Now that there’s been time to let last week’s NASCAR Nextel Media Tour hosted by Lowe’s Motor Speedway digest a little bit, a few things are apparent:

I took over the NASCAR beat for the Charlotte Observer 10 years ago this week, and the one thing that has changed the most in that time has been how complicated the racing business is. Everything, soup to nuts, is just more complex these days. That’s a sign of the sport changing and growing, but it gives a fellow a headache trying to figure out where things are going to be five minutes from now, let alone five years.
This business of partnerships – with the Fenway Sports Group buying into Roush Racing and Ray Evernham saying that he’d like to have a financial partner, too – has to change the sport down the road. You’ve also got Red Bull, a sponsor, owning a two-car Toyota team. The lines are just going to keep getting muddier and muddier, I believe. I don’t know if that’s bad or good, yet. I guess we’ll just have to see.

Reporters who cover the sport are already getting blowback from some fans about how much ink (or, in the case of the Sirius NASCAR Radio show I do each morning, air time) we’re giving to the Dale Earnhardt Jr. story.
As is the case with any story in today’s media, it is easy to lapse into overkill. You sort of wind up covering the coverage sometimes, and that’s a bad trap to fall into. But if Tony Stewart or Jeff Gordon or Jimmie Johnson were in a similar contract position, that’d be big news, too.
The fact that the entire extended Earnhardt family seems to be forced into choosing sides on this deal makes it a story that’s hard to walk away from. And as much as hard-core fans, the people who like to discuss NASCAR every day, hate to hear it, it’s the kind of story that less ardent race fans latch onto and sometimes want to hear more about.
Don’t forget, too, that media competes as much as anybody. If there’s anything remotely new to this or any other big story, everybody wants it first. That turns up the wick, too.

Speaking of Dale Earnhardt Jr., Jerry Gappens of Lowe’s Motor Speedway pointed something out to me at the NASCAR Hall of Fame groundbreaking Thursday that made a lot of sense.
Tuesday night was the Dale Earnhardt Inc. dinner on the media tour. Earlier that day, news of Martin Truex Jr. getting in trouble with the beach patrol in Daytona for urinating on an SUV tire came out and someone asked a question about it at the dinner.
The question was asked in a way that created an awkward situation, and Earnhardt Jr. stepped into that by saying Truex “is in big trouble.” That got a laugh and broke the tension. “I would never do something stupid like that,” Earnhardt Jr. said, grinning at Truex.
It was a little thing, but what Earnhardt Jr. did there was get Truex off the hook. The topic was then dealt with and the discussion moved on. Put in the same situation, Earnhardt Jr.’s father would likely have done the exact same thing.

A big round of applause to Hendrick Motorsports. Instead of handing out “swag” to the reporters who visited on Wednesday, the team announced that it had taken the money that might have been spent on trinkets and freebies and donated it instead to charities in honor of the late Benny Parsons.
Every team, every sponsor and every race track should follow that lead, and any media member who complains about not getting a free hat or notepad should be placed on the “rejected” list when it comes time to apply to participate in next year’s tour or for access to tracks this year.

I think some folks went a little overboard in jumping down Jack Roush’s throat for saying things like he’s “ready to go to war” with Toyota in NASCAR racing.
The American auto industry is in Roush’s bloodstream. He’s a car guy, a Ford guy, and has been for so long that it’s part of who he is.
The company he’s worked with for most of his adult life is going through some rough times, and those hard times have hit Livonia, Mich., the town Roush calls home, as hard as they probably have anywhere. It doesn’t make Roush any happier when people tell him how many cars Toyota builds in the United States or how many people it employs, because in his mind every dollar Toyota makes here is a dollar Ford could be making.
I am not saying that I agree with Roush about how feels about what Toyota may or may not do in NASCAR. I don’t think Roush isn’t willing to compete for whatever share of success there might be for him or anybody else in racing. I just think he wants it to be a fair competition and he’s willing to say that out loud.

Early impressions from the media tour

If you apply the new Chase format to last year’s results, Tony Stewart would have finished second in the final standings instead of 11th after just missing the Chase for the Nextel Cup. He would’ve led Jimmie Johnson by nine points going into the final race at Homestead, but Johnson would have won the title by 16. Of course, everybody would’ve raced differently under those different circumstances, but I knew somebody would ask.

NASCAR presented the seven drivers in the fourth year’s class of the Drive for Diversity program at Monday’s media tour stop. The group includes Chris Bristol, who won at Hickory Motor Speedway last year, as well as Michael Gallegos, Paul Harraka, Jessica Helberg, Jesus Hernandez, Peter Hernandez and Lloyd Mack. The program is advancing beyond weekly tracks into the Grand National Division’s Busch East and West series and the Wheelen All-American Series, which is a good step. But money will ultimately determine whether any of those names become household words, and unless NASCAR starts putting a bunch of its own into the program instead of just funneling sponsors’ money that way, progress is going to continue to be slow in coming.

Sometimes your "uh-oh" meter goes off when you meet somebody relatively new to racing, and sometimes you get a sense the guy might be around a while. I might be 1,000 percent wrong, but at least based on first impressions I think Bobby Ginn is going to be a good car owner for a long time in the Nextel Cup Series.

Ricky Carmichael is one of the absolute best motorcycle racers alive today, but he’s going to start trying to become a stock-car driver at short tracks in Florida for Ginn Racing under Mark Martin’s tutelage. "Let’s be honest," said Carmichael, who’s 27. "The Cup guys are the best drivers in the world. I’m not even about to say I’m ready to be at that level. …That’s like saying Jimmie Johnson and Tony (Stewart) should come and race me. You have to be real. I’m not ready to be a Cup driver by any means." Mabye not, but with that kind of attitude he might get there some day.

Once the conversation with Teresa Earnhardt started, I thought it went pretty well

LOS ANGELES – You’re a NASCAR beat writer from Charlotte, N.C., the hometown of racing.
For six years, you’ve been trying to get Teresa Earnhardt for an interview. The door finally opens, and all you have to do is fly across the country to walk through it.
You arrive a night early. You arrange to have a cab pick you up an hour early to make sure you get to the interview on time. You spend all day doing background work and thinking out your questions. You finally get ready and go out to meet the taxi.
Then, after 25 minutes and two red-faced conversations with your hotel staff, who assures you he’ll be here in five minutes, the taxi arrives. Now, you’re cutting things close. The map says it’s 11 miles to where you’re going, though, so you’re OK.
But then, the cabbie decides to take the freeway. I know nothing about driving in Southern California, but it’s 4 p.m. and I know I am in trouble.
You make a frantic phone call. I’m on the way, don’t leave me hanging. But the person you’re calling doesn’t have his cell phone on.
Six lanes of traffic, and while it never actually stops it moves at a glacier’s pace. Forget the meter, since the company is paying, but it’s a good thing the cabbie said he’ll take a credit card.
None of that will matter, though, if you’re not there on time. You were instructed to arrive by 4:30. At 4:35, the cabbie is letting people over in front of him in the left-turn lane. Thousands and thousands of taxi drivers in the world and I find a courteous one now!
Finally, two mild strokes and $49 later, you pull up in front of the hotel where you’re supposed to do the interview. You have no idea where you’re going inside, but first the driver has to figure out how to get the credit card thing to work.
Finally, you catch a break. Somebody who recognizes you and knows why you’re her sees you walk in and says, “This way.” One floor up, I walk in and I’m still 15 to 20 minutes down the list.
This is why I smirk at people running in airports. Who needs the stress?
Never mind, of course, that it’s already 8 p.m. back at your paper and they wanted your story an hour ago. Never mind that you’re about to finally getting ready to talk to somebody who you’ve been trying to get to for years, and you know you need to try to slip in a question or two that people have been warning you away from for a week.
Oh, and there’s also the fact that it’s almost certain that Teresa Earnhardt has wanted to throttle you for things you’ve written as recently as 10 days ago.
Man, this is an excellent job. The fact is, though, that Teresa Earnhardt could not have been more cordial in the 13 minutes I was allotted. She answered the questions she wanted to answer and that was certainly her right. I hope that she doesn’t think it went too badly and that maybe, somewhere down the road, we can talk again for a little longer and cover a little more ground.
This time, I think I’ll drive.

There has to be a news story when Teresa Earnhardt talks

LOS ANGELES – By the time you read this, I will have spoken with Teresa Earnhardt.
For the first time since Dale Earnhardt’s death in 2001, she agreed to sit down and let me, on behalf of race fans and readers of The Charlotte Observer and thatsracin.com, ask her questions Thursday afternoon. Actually, it was sort of her idea.
There’s a documentary coming out real soon that’s simply titled, "Dale," and it’s the first such project about the late seven-time champion’s life that his family, including Teresa, has been completely behind.
Part of the deal in coming out here for the media day for that movie and getting a chance to talk to Teresa was that I’m not supposed to write specifically about it until an agreed time in the near future. And I will stick to that.
I got an invitation late last week offering to arrange a telephone interview during the day of media sessions she was doing. It took me about 30 seconds to say, "No, I believe I’ll come on out." I want to make sure she has a chance to say whatever it is she wants to say and that I hear it and understand it and don’t have to worry about another call beeping in or any of that nonsense.
Whatever she says, there will be a story about it in Friday’s Observer. In agreeing to hold back on stuff related to what the movie shows and how it’s structured and things like that, I told the representatives who set this up that there had to be a news story written about the fact she’s talking at all.
I’ve gone on the record in my columns that I think Teresa needs to talk to the racing media about her job as CEO of Dale Earnhardt Inc. She, of course, has every right to disagree and not talk to anyone. But I still think that’s part of the job she needs to do.
I’ve been instructed that I can only ask questions pertaining to the movie.
That’s fine, because part of her job at DEI is to sustain the legacy she and her husband built together, and that role of carrying on the legacy is part of the heavy burden she carries in her life after Dale’s death. Sharing the memories that will be in the film is a way to do that, and so questions that relate to the movie also will relate to how Teresa is doing as a person and as a CEO six years after having her life change even more dramatically than the sport her husband loved changed after his passing.
All I’ve ever wanted to do is let Teresa tell her side of the story, whether it’s about how the team is running or about how she’s doing as a car owner and as the leader of a business that is very important to the success of NASCAR.
When I send this blog in, I am going to shut down my laptop and pack it into a briefcase to take over to the hotel where the interview is scheduled to take place. Thanks to the time difference, I’ll be pushing deadline to get a story in the newspaper in time to make deadline tonight.
Look for it on thatsracin.com, and sometime early tomorrow I will follow up on this blog with more about what went on and how things went.
Talk to you then.

Juan Pablo this!

Some of Poole's notes from Daytona:

The second week of Nextel Cup testing started late Monday morning as the track had to be dried. The teams started about 10:45 and went right through a scheduled midday break until 5:30 p.m. That wiped out a planned teleconference with former Formula One driver Juan Pablo Montoya, much to the chagrin of a breathless cadre of media who believe that because Montoya has driven a car in Europe he’s automatically a superior species.

Montoya wound up sixth fastest on the day’s speed chart, two spots behind Chip Pablo Ganassi Racing teammate David Pablo Stremme. Team manage Tony Pablo Glover passed along his simple judgment. "Montoya is really cool," Glover said. "I think he’s going to be the real deal."

David Pablo Gilliland had Monday’s fastest lap at 185.090 mph, just ahead of the Toyota driven by Jeremy Pablo Mayfield, who ran 184.854 mph. Four-time Cup champion Jeff Pablo Gordon was third at 184.744 mph. Regan Pablo Smith, driving for Ginn Motorsports, was fifth best.

James Pablo Hylton, the 72-year-old driver chasing windmills in an effort to make the Daytona 500 field, has a really nice new yellow transporter for his No. 58 cars. On the side it lists his two victories in what’s now Nextel Cup, the last being in 1972 at that big track in Alabama. You know, the Taladaga 500 – that’s how it’s spelled.

Elliott Pablo Sadler went a little overboard in sucking up to his boss in testing, putting the likeness of DaimlerChrysler chairman of the board Deiter Pablo Zetsche on the hood of both of the No. 19 Dodges he’s testing for his Evernham Motorsports team this week.

Michael Pablo Waltrip’s car has a nice message on the side of it here. It reads "We Love you BP." It’s a get-well wish for Benny Parsons, who’s still in a hospital in Charlotte fighting complications stemming from his cancer treatments.

Debunking some of the 'other' Chase notions

Why just about every “other” idea for changing the Chase for the Nextel Cup is a bad one:
1. The “separate” system
This idea is that the drivers in the Chase should be treated separately from the rest of the field. The top Chase driver in each race, even if he finishes ninth behind eight non-Chase drivers, would get “first place” Chase points. The second best Chase guy would get the second most points, and so on.
Most people suggest a simple 10-9-8 (or 12-11-10 in a 12-man Chase) system. But it fails in two ways. First, it’s dumb. At Atlanta last year, Kyle Busch finished 27th overall but was ahead of three Chase drivers. So he would have gotten four points in a 10-9-8 system. The next week, Jeff Burton finished 10th overall at Phoenix, but ahead of only two drivers in the Chase. How is it fair for Burton to get fewer points for 10th than Busch got for 27th?
Second, it gives only the illusion of closeness. Going into Homestead last year, Jimmie Johnson would have been seven points ahead of Kevin Harvick. But that only sounds close. Harvick would have had 66 points after nine races, meaning he could only get to 76 by winning at Homestead. Johnson would have had to beat only three Chase drivers to get four points and get to 77. The number of points doesn’t matter, it’s how many you can make up.
2. Eliminating drivers
There are all kinds of suggestions for this, like cutting the Chase field to five drivers after five races, or eliminating the lowest guy after each Chase race so it’s down to two at Homestead.
No. No. No.
If you’d cut the field down at any point in 2006, Jimmie Johnson would have been eliminated.
Then, if he’d surged the way he did down the stretch, everyone would be complaining that he’s not winning the championship the way they did when Tony Stewart wasn’t in the Chase at all and won races.
Cutting one driver after each race is impractical. Do you reset everyone else after each race? That means the season comes down to who finishes ahead of whom at Homestead? A one-race championship? That makes no sense.
The arithmetic takes care of eliminating people. Everybody’s in the hunt through five or six races, but after that the list of people who have a shot narrows itself naturally. What’s the gain in arbitrarily forcing that to happen otherwise?
3. Big bonuses for every win
The whole reason to have a Chase is to try to keep the championship in doubt as long as possible. You might think that’s a bad idea, but it’s what NASCAR wants to do (and there are good reasons for that) and any Chase changes have to keep that in mind.
It would make it possible for a driver to make up more ground with a late Chase win if the bonus were 50 or even 100 points, but the likelihood that such bonuses would allow one driver to pull away early in the Chase is far greater. That defeats the purpose.
4. Do away with the Chase altogether
It never ceases to amaze me how much folks love the old points system now that it’s gone. I’ve actually had people tell me that the Chase hurts sponsors because they’re eliminated from title contention in September. Holy moly! Under the old system, by Labor Day it was usually down to two, three or maybe four teams in the hunt. Once in 20 years it might be five or six.
In the Chase, it’s ALWAYS 10 – and apparently will be 12 beginning this year – until at least the end of September. More teams, and therefore more sponsors, have more of a chance to be in the championship picture longer under the Chase than ever was the case under the old system.
If you think the Chase is hokey or a tricked-up way to pick a champion, you’re entitled to that opinion. But don’t tell me the old system was great, because my memory isn’t that bad.

Junior leaves early as team readies for a race that starts later

It may be bad news for Nextel Cup teams that Dale Earnhardt Jr. checked out early from testing. After driving the No. 8 Chevrolet on Monday and Tuesday, posting the fastest lap in drafting practice Tuesday afternoon, Earnhardt Jr. went home and Kerry Earnhardt worked through some things with the team on Wednesday. That would seem to indicate that Earnhardt Jr. is pretty happy with the car.

Some folks were surprised Wednesday when word got out that the Daytona 500 wiil start no earlier than 3:15 p.m. Eastern this year. Get used to it. Starting times haven’t been made official for Cup races yet, but 2 p.m. Eastern is the earliest tentative time for anything other than two races at Dover and the fall Martinsville race.

NASCAR will require drivers to use six-point safety harnesses this year. That means two straps holding the lower torso instead of the former five-point system that had a single belt coming between the drivers’ legs.

Mark Martin is scheduled to miss his first Nextel Cup race in 20 years when Regan Smith drivers the No. 01 Chevrolet at Bristol this year. “I think I will know what I want to do in the future by the end of that day,” Martin said Wednesday in a Sirius Satellite Radio interview. “My career is at a crossroads.” Martin is looking forward to his partial schedule this year. Martin said that after having three weekends off between Valentine’s Day and Thanksgiving for two decades, he has 19 weekends off in 2007. “That puts it in perspective,” he said. Martin also will drive at least six Truck Series races for the Wood Brothers and, amazingly enough, at least two Busch races (Daytona and Texas) for Roush Racing, his former Cup team.

Tony Stewart is in Tulsa, Okla., for this weekend’s Chili Bowl, but his race team continues to click right along here. Mike McLaughlin is driving it and one of the No. 20 cars was fastest in Wednesday morning’s first session at 184.483. Sterling Marlin, Jamie McMurray, Jeff Green and Jimmie Johnson were next in the morning. Most teams ran in the draft in the second session. Even though NASCAR will allow teams a half-day on Thursday to make up for Monday afternoon’s rainout, several teams still decided to head home after Wednesday’s session. NASCAR also allowed teams to test a third car on Wednesday, beyond the two they were allowed to use Monday and Tuesday.

Trip Bruce will be crew chief for Johnny Benson on the No. 23 Toyotas in the Craftsman Truck Series this year. Rick Ren left the team to work on Ron Hornaday’s trucks at Kevin Harvick Inc. Benson finished second in last year’s Truck Series standings. Bruce has been at Evernham Motorsports since 2005.

Gary DeHart has been hired as director of shop operations for Ginn Racing. DeHart has spent nearly 20 years at Hendrick Motorsports, where he was crew chief for Terry Labonte in his 1996 championship season. Since Bobby Ginn bought the team formerly known as MB2, it has nearly doubled from 85 to 160 employees.

There was a surprise or two, but not necessarily on the speed charts

Jamie McMurray had the fastest lap Tuesday morning as testing continued at Daytona International Speedway, running 184.090 mph, with Mike McLaughlin second in Tony Stewart’s car at 183.981. Jimmie Johnson, Ricky Rudd and Tony Raines were next. Some teams did drafting in the afternoon session and - surprise, surprise - Dale Earnhardt Jr. was fastest at 186.606 mph, with Casey Mears second and Tony Raines third.

Dodge took Elliott Sadler, Juan Montoya and Kurt Busch to Detroit on Tuesday to have them unveil a new passenger car model, the Avenger, which will be on the roads as the 2008 model. The NASCAR relevance is that the Dodges run in this year’s “car of tomorrow” races will be Avengers while the cars in the other races will be Chargers. How will you know? Because Dodge says so. How will you be able to tell the difference? Beats me.

Eric Kuselias will be the host of the “NASCAR Now” program on ESPN2, which will air weeknights at 6:30 beginning Feb. 5. The show will also air at 10 a.m. on Sundays beginning Feb. 18. Kuselias has been a host on ESPN Radio’s afternoon show, the “SportsBash.”

NASCAR finally made it official on Tuesday. No, not how many people are going to be in the Chase (even though every indication is that’s going to be 12). This year’s NASCAR Day is May 18th. Book those party rooms now! NASCAR Day is a fund-raising project where fans buy lapel pins for $5 and then wear their NASCAR apparel to work to show their fans. The money goes to charity through the NASCAR Foundation.

Dale Jarrett and Ricky Rudd both had good lines about age and racing on Tuesday. “That car,” Jarrett said, “doesn’t know how old you are.” Rudd told a story about his first career start at Rockingham. Rudd was 18 and said he walked through the NASCAR garage looking at all of the “old men” he would be competing with. “I was 18 years old. I was racing motorcycles professionally, Rudd said. “I was in the best shape you could ever be in…and I’m thinking, ‘Gosh, there’s no way these guys can compete. They’re not in shape. There’s no way.’”
About halfway through the race, Rudd said, he was so tired he didn’t know if he could make it another lap.
“Donnie Allison had to be 45 or 50 at that time,” Rudd said. “He lapped me for probably the 10th time that day …and he’s driving with one hand and he’s waving to me as I let him go by. I’m sitting there just white-knuckled up on that steering wheel and I’m thinking, ‘I’m missing something here.’”

Voting for the 2007 National Motorsports Press Association’s Most Popular Driver Award, sponsored by Chex, is now open online at www.MostPopularDriver.com. Voting continues until Nov. 19. More than 2.8 million votes were cast last year, with Dale Earnhardt Jr. getting nearly 1.2 million votes to win for a fourth straight year.

Actually being at the track can have its advantages, Junior notes

You could write stories for a week off what Dale Earnhardt Jr. said in his press conference Monday at Daytona. When asked specifically about his stepmother’s comments about him needing to choose between being a driver and a public figure, Earnhardt Jr. got his point across. “You guys that are here every weekend, you know what the sport is like because you're here every weekend,” he said. For the record, Teresa Earnhardt is not. “You know what it's about. I think it's probably on advantage to have a decent personality as a race car driver. …I think it is important to be well liked and be marketable. I think it's any owner's dream to have a driver that's succeeded” at that.

Some of the teams driving Toyotas are going to struggle this year, there’s no doubt about that. But people are underestimating Dave Blaney’s team at Bill Davis Racing, and that was the case before he turned the third fastest lap at 183.756 mph in Monday’s rain-shortened testing. Blaney finished fourth at Richmond and ninth at New Hampshire last year with a team getting ZERO help from the manufacturer of the cars he was driving. Toyota is going to give him as much support as he can handle this year. Blaney will be better than you think.

Boris Said, who was a big story here in July when he finished fourth in the Pepsi 400, is back to try to make the Daytona 500 in the No. 60 Ford. “This year it’s going to be so hard to make these races,” said Said, who has sponsorship to try at least seven Cup races in 2007. Said will be among those not guaranteed a starting spot in the 500 based on last year’s points. “There will probably be 30 people going for eight spots – really seven spots because Dale Jarrett will be here – so it’s going to be a nerve-wracking week for sure,” he said. Jarrett would be in line for a former champion’s provision in his new No. 44 Toyota for Michael Waltrip Racing.

Kasey Kahne went to Australia and raced in a pair of sprint car races over the Christmas holiday. While he had fun in the cars and traveling abroad for the first time, he said he wasn’t too fond of not being home for Christmas. “I thought it would be a good idea just to go and do something different over the holidays,” Kahne said. “But once I got there I realized I was wrong. It’s not the right thing to do. From now on if I go to Australia or anywhere else, maybe I’ll go on the 26th instead of the 20th.”

Robbie Loomis was crew chief for Bobby Hamilton at Petty Enterprises for three seasons and has some fond memories of the driver who passed away on Sunday. “Hamilton was a unique guy,” Loomis said. “He was special. He did his deal, and I think if you look at the way his cancer went it was just like the way he lived his life. He did it quietly and nobody knew a lot about what was going on. He just did his deal. Now he’s up there in heaven probably thinking he’s glad it’s over with.”

Kevin Harvick’s perspective on potential changes to the Chase for the Nextel Cup format is a little different, and it makes a lot of sense. “The guy who had the best year won the championship last year,” Harvick said, speaking of Jimmie Johnson. “So if we’d had the old points system, he would have won the championship. If we had the new points system, he'd win the championship still. To me the best car usually is going to come out on top in the end.”

People add up quickly in NASCAR's numbers game

I was up in Mooresville this week and had about 30 minutes to kill before I was supposed to meet up with someone, so I rode down the road where Robert Yates Racing’s shop sits.
When you come into the business park, you go down a hill and then back up it and the shop’s on the left. As you start down the hill, you can see the shop pretty well. The closer I got to it, the more I was wondering if I was missing a big story.
The place was absolutely deserted. I looked like it USED to be the home of Robert Yates Racing. The deal, of course, is that for about the only time on the calendar NASCAR was shut down.
With Christmas Day and New Year’s Day falling on Mondays this year, just about every team in the sport is taking this week off. It’s absolutely well-deserved on all fronts, but it is just spooky to go to a NASCAR team’s shop on a weekday and not see it bustling with activity.
I’ve spent a big part of my time the past couple of weeks finishing up a book that’s going to be called “Half the Battle.” It’s an inside look at Jeff Burton’s team as it went through the 2006 Chase for the Nextel Cup, and thanks to Burton and all of the guys on his team I think it’s going to be turn out well.
To gather the information to write it, I spent as much time as I could during the season’s final weeks hanging around with the guys on the No. 31 team’s truck and listening to them on the radio as they went through practices and the races.
It’s one thing to know how much work goes into getting a competitive race car on the track each weekend, but it’s an entirely eye-opening experience to see that up close with a focus on one team.
Week after week, I came away amazed at just how much has to be done right and how much has to be dealt with for a team to enjoy any kind of success in the sport.
I walked away after Homestead with a renewed respect for what all of the people who work in the sport do. I was seeing it up close with one team, but it also made me understand that I could walk into any truck up and down the garage and have the same experience if I hung around long enough.
About 25 people, maybe a few more, directly have a hand in getting the No. 31 Chevrolet onto the track for Burton to drive it each week. There are probably that many more back at Richard Childress Racing who don’t necessarily work on preparing that car, but work to make all of RCR’s cars go faster.
And then there’s another entire group who work to make RCR, the company, run so that the cars have a chance to race.
It’s staggering to do that math and multiply it by 43 cars. Even with the crossover work done on multicar teams, hundreds and hundreds of people have a hand in making these cars go.
Hundreds more work in NASCAR, inspecting cars and officiating the races, and each track had another few hundred people working to provide the sport its venues.
Here’s hoping that all of those folks who make a contribution to NASCAR got spend this week with their families and friends, enjoying the little bit of time when the race shops and the race tracks aren’t humming with activity.

Bobby Hamilton is still fighting

In August, Rick Minter from the Atlanta paper and I sat in Bobby Hamilton’s motor home at Bristol Motor Speedway and talked with him about his fight with cancer.
All of the reports about his three months of treatment for the cancer doctors had found in his neck were optimistic. The radiation and chemotherapy had taken their toll, but Hamilton was upright and moving forward.
Rick and I both wanted to write stories saying that Hamilton had defeated cancer. We kept wanting Hamilton and his fiancée, Lori, to say he was cured. They would not.
“She’s very careful about that,” Lori said, speaking of Hamilton’s lead physician, Dr. Barbara Murphy. “She doesn’t say, ‘Oh, you’re cured of cancer, you’re 100 percent clean.’”
The scans and everything that could be done from outside Hamilton’s body looked good. But some of the doctors at Vanderbilt Hospital in Nashville wanted to do surgery to dissect Hamilton’s lymph node to make sure the cancer cells were gone. Some of them didn’t think it was necessary, but Hamilton did.
“I don’t want to go to bed at night,” Hamilton says, “thinking we half-assed it.” Rick and I left and wrote our stories, saying that Hamilton would have that surgery done the following week. I can’t speak for Rick, but I guess I just assumed that no news was good news so I didn’t think about checking in after the surgery to make sure everything was OK.
Then, one day last week, I got an e-mail saying that Hamilton had hired Ken Schrader to drive the No. 18 Dodge in the Craftsman Truck Series in 2007.
Hamilton had said on March 17 when he announced that he was beginning treatments that he wanted to return to drive his truck beginning with the opener at Daytona in ’07. After seeing him in August I knew he had a long road ahead of him to get back behind the wheel. But the Schrader announcement prompted me to send Lori an e-mail asking her how Hamilton was coming along and whether he was going to get to race at Daytona.
Lori answered me quickly, but politely said it’d be a couple of days before they really would have anything to tell us. Maybe I should have been worried by that, but I guess I was still in the wishful thinking mode.
And then, Wednesday afternoon, Amanda Jones sent out a release from Bobby Hamilton Racing.
“In August after extensive treatment from chemotherapy and radiation Hamilton and his doctors were optimistic about findings in his post-treatment CT Scan,” it read. “However, microscopic cancer cells still remained in the right side of his neck. Since that time, Hamilton is continuing his chemotherapy treatment and has gone through several procedures to keep the cancer at bay.”
Hamilton is still fighting. “Cancer is an ongoing battle, and once you are diagnosed you always live with the thought of the disease in your body,” he said. “It is the worst thing you could ever imagine. We are going to continue to search for the best available treatment for my form of cancer. I have flown to several places for other opinions. We know there are some of the brightest minds in the world working on a cure for cancer.
“I didn’t want to be labeled as a victim when I announced it and I sure won’t lie down and be a victim now.”
I hope everybody who reads this will say a prayer for Bobby and Lori and their families, and one for his doctors and another one for all of the smart, dedicated people in this world who’re working every day to kick cancer’s ass.
Everybody who knows Bobby Hamilton would love to see him back behind the wheel for the Craftsman Truck Series season opener at Daytona. But it looks like that won’t happen in 2007.
That’s OK, because 2008 or 2009 works just fine, too.

Fans will be key ingredient in upcoming radio gig

I am really, really looking forward to Jan. 1.
I hope most of you have heard by now that I am going to be part of the “Morning Drive” show that will air from 7 to 11 a.m. weekdays on Sirius NASCAR Radio channel 128. Our show starts Jan. 1 when NASCAR’s satellite radio rights move from XM to Sirius.
I will be doing the show with Marty Snider, who was a pit reporter for NBC and TNT and will continue to be part of TNT’s team in the new contract. He and I agree on some things and disagree on others, which is about the best you can hope for.
I am going to do that show as well as maintain my job as beat writer for The Charlotte Observer.
It means more work, sure, but I’ve been telling people that I talk about racing all day anyway. I might as well get paid and put some of it on the air.
We want our show every day to be a conversation among ourselves, race fans and the people in the sport. We’re going to talk about whatever the fans want to talk about and about what we think the fans are going to want to know. Some days I hope we’ll get it right, and other days I know we’ll wish we could have done better. But the idea is to have fun and to provide fans with what I think has been missing.
NASCAR chairman Brian France has said repeatedly that he thinks NASCAR is an “undercovered” sport. He has talked about how he wants the sport to be talked about and written about not just on race weekends, but all week long.
Well, that’s where we come in. In some of our meetings leading up to the first show, people have said they just hope we’ll have callers. That doesn’t worry me a bit. I know there are race fans out there with strong opinions they want to express. Read my e-mail or the comments on these blogs and you’ll see that. We want our show to be a home for those fans. If you’re fired up about something that has or hasn’t happened, we want you to know that we’ll be there four hours Monday through Friday talking about it.
We’ve talked about having on guys who work in the sport who fans don’t know yet but who we know work hard and do tremendous jobs. We’ll have drivers on, sure, and I hope any driver in the sport will feel totally comfortable to pick up the phone and call us up if he has something to say about an issue we’re discussing. But we also hope any tire changer or transport driver will do the same thing – as well as any fan.
Marty and I want to try to get to the bottom of things as fast as we can. When we hear a rumor, we’re going to check it out and get the people who’re involved in it on the air as soon as we can.
Of course, that’s not very much different at all from what we do now. It’s just that now we’ll have that four-hour block each morning to get what we find out to the listeners. Maybe we can stop a few bad rumors before they really get started.
One thing I hope fans will know right from the start is that NASCAR does not control what we can and can’t say. Sirius is paying NASCAR for the satellite radio rights, and the name of the channel is Sirius NASCAR Radio. But NASCAR won’t control the content. Like anybody else, they’ll try to spin things their way when news is coming out. But we’re going to call it like we see it. If the listeners think we’re shills for NASCAR, we won’t last on the air long. And I hope to be doing this for a long, long time.

Scribe's efforts benefit Victory Junction Gang Camp

I always hate to go to a movie when I know there are going to be reporters depicted in some way.
They always show reporters hanging around in a big group hollering obnoxious questions at victims of horrible tragedies. The way people talk to me about people who cover NASCAR for a living, they think the only thing we do is sit around and wait for free food to be served.
(Let me say this about that. Yeah, they feed us. But once this year somebody was doing a survey and asked me which track serves the best food to the media. I thought about it a long, long time and could not come up with an answer to the question. It's edible, don't get me wrong, but it's not like we're being hand fed grapes by vestal virgins or anything.)
There are some deadbeats in the racing media, just like there are almost certainly some wherever you work. But there are some pretty good people, too.
One of them is a guy named Al Pearce. Al has been covering racing for a long, long time. Nobody in the media, I'd bet, has traveled to NASCAR races via more diffent modes of transportation than Al has, either. He's taken trains, planes, buses, trucks, cars and motorcycles to get to the track.
He's also been on Kyle Petty's charity motorcycle ride every year he's been able to make it, and he's adopted the Victory Junction Gang Camp as a cause.
Two years ago, Al got a plain, white driver's helmet and went around getting every living Cup Series champion to sign it. Last year, he got every living winner of the Daytona 500 to sign a similar helmet. Once he's got all the signatures, he donates the helmet to Victory Junction, and it's then auctioned off to raise money for the camp.
This year, Al's project was to get every living driver who has won the Indianapolis 500 to sign one helmet. As far as some of the historians at Indianapolis know, there's no other helmet out there with all of those names on it.
Al has one to go -- Kenny Brack -- and he's arranged to get the helmet to Brack this week (UPS and FedEx have helped him ship the helmet to some drivers and then get it back to Al after it was signed). He collected a bunch when the IRL came to Richmond earlier this year and has been working on it pretty much all summer. He's also promising whoever winds up buying the helmet at auction that he'll see to any subsequent winner of the Indy 500 adds his name to the helmet.
Al and a group of family, friends and fans around his home in southeastern Virginia have raised nearly $45,000 for the camp with the helmets and a couple of other projects.
Once Brack signs, Al will give the helmet to the folks at Victory Junction and they'll decide when, where and how to sell it to raise the most money for the camp.
It's a really cool thing that Al has done, and there has to be some Indianapolis 500 memorabilia collector out there who's willing to pay top dollar for the helmet Al has put together.