Qualifying should be same at all tracks

NASCAR made official Friday something that we already know, but something that it hates to admit. Some races are just more important than others.

Two weeks ago at Indianapolis Motor Speedway, rain on Friday forced a schedule shuffle that moved qualifying from Saturday morning to that afternoon. It was the right call to make, since it gave everybody at least a fighting chance to make one of the season's most anticipated events. But if the schedule is what it is at one track, that's how it ought to be everywhere.

When it rained Friday at Watkins Glen, NASCAR went right back to its default procedure. Qualifying was canceled, not shuffled around, and the field for Sunday's race was set by the Nextel Cup rule book.

So teams that traveled to Watkins Glen for the opportunity to compete went home without getting that. Fundamentally, that's wrong.

If the schedule is going to be moved around at Indy to give everybody a fair shot of making the Allstate 400, why can't the same thing be done at the Glen?

There was no Busch race at Indianapolis Motor Speedway during the weekend there, but there was one a few miles away at O'Reilly Raceway Park. Several of the drivers that were in the Nextel Cup race were also in the Busch race that weekend, and when things were moved around it complicated their lives.

Yes, reworking the schedule at the Glen to fit in Cup practice, Cup and Busch qualifying and the Busch race might take some doing. But isn't it worth the effort, or at least wouldn't it be for the teams that went home from the Glen without even getting a chance to qualify?

NASCAR has never done it, of course, but letting only the cars in the go-or-go-home category make runs is a better alternative than what happens when it rains out qualifying.

You could write it right into the rulebook. The eight teams that make it in the abbreviated qualifying start 13th, 18th, 23rd, 28th, 33rd, 38th, 42nd and 43rd in the race. Sure, it's arbitrary, but is it even more arbitrary than letting postmarks and number of entries and things like that determine who races and who doesn't?

Watkins Glen isn't as big a race as Indianapolis. No offense to the fine folks in the Finger Lakes region of New York, but that's a fact. You know it, I know it and NASCAR knows it. But it shouldn't act that way. Every race should be dealt with under the same policies and procedures.
And the guiding principle behind all of those procedures should be to make every possible effort to give everyone a chance to make the race.

Curses! Overwhelmed by reaction again!

Thank goodness, the world is saved!

Tony Stewart was fined Tuesday for the four-letter word he said Sunday after winning the Allstate 400 at the Brickyard. We can all take a deep breath and know the world won't wobble off its axis today.

Seconds -- SECONDS! -- after he said that expeletive Sunday afternoon I had three e-mails from fans wanting to make sure I heard it. If a driver swears in the woods and nobody's there to hear it, does it still offend anybody?

NASCAR is right to fine drivers from saying swear words when the drivers KNOWS he's being interviewed. And since money slows nobody down any more, points have become a necessary evil as part of those sanctions. Stewart lost 25 points and was fined $25,000 for this incident.

If NASCAR didn't levy fines and take points, drivers would curse more than they do. Say what you want to about them being overcome with emotion and not being able to control themselves, but the fact is they do control themselves more than they would if there were no penalties for bad language.

NASCAR ought to try to keep that stuff to a minimum because people do watch races with their families. People shouldn't have to hear that language if they don't want to. If you don't watch "Deadwood" or "The Sopranos" on HBO because you don't like the language, that's your right. Fans shouldn't have to make the decision to watch or not watch racing on that basis, though.

At the same time though, the hand-wringers who get all blubberfaced about one four-letter word on TV every three months are just out of their trees. If you're worried that your child is going to be permanently warped if he hears one swear word, then don't let him out of the house until he's about 23.

It's fake outrage. What goes on when something like this happens is like 5 year olds giggling when somebody says "doo-doo." People get all indignant when 10 minutes earlier they mindlessly used the expletive part of Stewart's word in this context: "BLANK, where's the remote?"

Fining somebody for using a cuss word is pure symbolism. Sometimes, that's important. It shows you're paying attention and that you want people to know it's not necessary to talk like that when people are letting you in their homes on TV.

But it's no more childish to use words like the one Stewart used than it is to react to them the way some people do.

It isn't about the machinery, Earnhardt Jr. insists

Here, right from Dale Earnhardt Jr. himself, is the answer to that silly question about whether changes at Dale Earnhardt Inc. might have changed his mind about leaving that team at season’s end.

"I don’t think my decision would have been any different," he said.

"I didn’t leave because we didn’t have a seven-post machine. I didn’t leave because we didn’t have 25 CNC machines. It didn’t have anything to do with whether we were a three-, two- or four-car operation.

"In racing, you always have to progress. You can’t never sit still and everybody at DEI knows that. …The things that are happening now are great for the company. But it wouldn’t have changed my opinion."

Jeff Gordon has won 79 races in his Nextel Cup career, but he has no trouble picking out a favorite.

"The Daytona 500 is our biggest event, there’s no doubt about that," Gordon said.

"But on a personal note, I like Indy. I like the Brickyard. My biggest win, and I don’t think I’ll ever top it, was the inaugural Brickyard 400 (in 1994). It’s always going to be the biggest win for me, personally."

You have to give ESPN2 credit for how it rolled with the changes that weather caused to the schedule at Indianapolis on Saturday.

The network swapped back and forth from Indianapolis Motor Speedway to O’Reilly Raceway Park during practices that wound up overlapping. It got in some coverage of National Hot Rod Association qualifying from Sonoma, Calif., then showed action from Busch and Nextel Cup qualifying from both of the Indy tracks, too.

Nice hustle.

It’ll be a while before we all figure out what to actually call Yates-Newman-Haas-Lanigan Racing, the team that comes out of the partnership between Robert Yates Racing and the Champ Car team that was announced here on Friday.

It will also be a while before we fully understand what all it means, too.

"A merger of equals is where somebody loses his job," Yates said. "This is not where anybody loses his job. This is a partnership, so we grow it. It’s like if you have a full baseball team and then you bring on nine more guys, you don’t have shortstops in between. In our business, we’re missing some of the shortstops."

What I think that means is that Yates figures he can get some engineering help from Newman-Haas-Lanigan that will help his stock cars go faster.

What’s in it for the Champ Car guys? Well, it gives them a foot in the NASCAR door and that might be a door some of the sponsors they work with over there want to walk through.

Remember, Yates now has two cars sponsored by one company – M&M Mars – and that’s not going to continue forever.

Carl Edwards will drive with a brace on the right thumb he dislocated in a crash in a late model race in Nebraska on Sunday and expects to have no problems.

When Edwards went to his doctor in Columbia, Mo., to have the thumb looked at and to have the brace fashioned. When he went in, he took the steering wheel off his brother’s race car in with him and had the brace built around how his hand needed to fit around it.

If you would, please include our friend Ray Cooper in your thoughts and prayers over the next few weeks.

Coop has done the manufacturer’s notes for the media for Dodge for the past several seasons after doing the same job for Chevrolet and also covering NASCAR as a sportswriter.

He found out last week he has cancer and started radiation treatments a few days ago. Both of his parents have been battling health issues, too, and on Saturday his father, Eugene, passed away in South Carolina.

Hello, Rick? About that balance on our engine deal ...

Just a few things I can’t help wondering about:

Mark Martin’s No. 01 Chevrolets will use Hendrick Motorsports engines this week at Indianapolis and again next week at Pocono before switching over to Dale Earnhardt Inc. engines after this week’s merger between DEI and Ginn Racing.

I wonder if Ginn Racing zeroed out its balance with the Hendrick engine department, or if some level of debt might be “forgiven” in return for considerations by DEI in regard to other matters involving Hendrick.

I’ll give you (number) 8 guesses as to what I’m talking about.

I also wonder if anybody really thinks Regan Smith is going to be satisfied with running Truck Series races when a week ago he was told he would be in a Nextel Cup car for the rest of this season?

Smith has been a good soldier all year long, saying and doing all the right things as his schedule was adjusted in tune with the fortunes of Ginn Racing. But at some point, doesn’t a contract have to be a contract and doesn’t Smith have to be treated with the same respect he’s treated the team?

I wonder if anybody else realized before I did that only two drivers have scored more than 700 points in the past five races – the five races since Hendrick Motorsports announced Kyle Busch wouldn’t be back next year.

One of those drivers is Carl Edwards. The other is Kyle Busch. Yes, I figured that after the decision to go with Dale Earnhardt Jr. over Busch in 2008 was announced the No. 5 team might start falling apart. And while there has been some outward tension, the team and its controversial driver are still getting the job done.

Busch isn’t perfect and I won’t pretend that he is. But he’s a heck of a race car driver. If you don’t recognize that, you’re not paying attention.

I wonder about people who’re saying that if changes being made at Dale Earnhardt Inc. had been made sooner, Dale Earnhardt Jr. might have stayed with the team.

First, Earnhardt Jr.’s decision to leave was always far more about the relationship he and Teresa Earnhardt have had for the past 25 years than about how they’ve worked together at DEI.

Second, when Earnhardt Jr. announced that he was leaving everyone realized that DEI was at a crossroads. To the credit of Teresa Earnhardt, as well as Max Siegel and the other people who are working along with her, they’ve found a pathway that now looks like they’re heading toward long-term viability in the sport.

Yeah, I was among those who said and wrote that if DEI didn’t find a way to keep Earnhardt Jr. that it was in big trouble. Who knows how things will ultimately turn out, but if I had to make a call on whether I was right or wrong about that right now, I’d have to go with dead, flat wrong.

As a matter of fact, I don’t think I could have been MORE wrong. It seems now that the best way for Earnhardt Jr. and for DEI to move forward is for them to do it on diverging paths.

I wonder if ESPN has somebody who’s smart enough to say that too many bells and whistles can ruin a good broadcast. I sure hope so.

ESPN has a great team assembled to do Nextel Cup races. I know how much doing Cup races means to anchor Jerry Punch and I am very happy he’s getting this opportunity. But when ESPN started this year doing Busch races it threw so much at its viewers that it was hard to figure out what to look at on the screen.

Fans want to see the race. Everything else is icing, and as much as I hate to admit it, you can have too much icing on a cake.

Climb the fence for $1 million? Not me

So after the race at Chicagoland Speedway on Sunday, somebody in Victory Lane was giving Tony Stewart grief about his form as he climbed the fence in celebration of winning the USG Sheetrock 400.

Maybe it started when Matt Yocum, Tony's sports information director, challenged Stewart to a climbing contest. I don't know. Anyhow, before long apparently my name got drug into it.

So when Stewart got the media center, I knew where he was going to go.

"I'll bet a million dollars you couldn't get to the top of that fence," he said to me.

OK, let's just say up front that he's probably right. Tony's not carrying nearly as much weight up the fence as I would be, and he's certainly had more practice. These are among the several reasons I have more sense than to be trying to climb any fences.

But for $1 million?

He didn't set any kind of time limit. For $1 million, I might be able to make it if you give me a couple of days. But there'd have to be a lot of padding down just in case I fell off. The thing that worries me the most when Tony goes fence-climbing or when Carl Edwards tries his backflips is that they only have to miss one time before it's a bad, bad deal. I'd just as soon not break my leg -- or my neck, for that matter.

Anyway, here's the payoff to the story.

Sunday night, Tony and I bantered back and forth a little while about fence climbing and that was that.

Monday morning, I went back to the track to do the Sirius NASCAR Radio show. I was supposed to go on the air with Marty Snider for The Morning Drive show at 6 a.m. Central time.

I pulled into the track about 5:35 and when I got to the garage area, all I could find were locked gates. The radio equipment I needed to use was inside a Safety-Kleen trailer located inside the garage.

On the other side of a fence.

I tried to find some security guard. While Pat Patterson, who helps us get on the air from each track, and I were looking for someone to let us in, the clock was ticking.

I had my rental car parked right up against the bottom of the fence. It was 5:50 and nobody with a key was in sight.

I stood there a minute and looked at the hood of the car and the top of the fence. And, for just a second, I thought about trying to go over the top.

Then, my brain actually engaged. Marty could last a segment or two if it came to that. I was going to wait on a key, which eventually came about 5:57 and everything worked out well.

All I could think of the rest of the day was getting stuck on the top of that fence, or falling off and laying there in a big pile long enough for somebody to come take a picture.

And send it to Tony Stewart.

A little bit about a lot on qualifying day at Chicagoland:

NASCAR defends its current policy on substance abuse saying that its broad nature gives it wide freedom to test whoever whenever it feels necessary.

The problem I have with that is that it also means it has the power NOT to test whoever whenever it wants to.

Kevin Harvick is right about how NASCAR should remove room for speculation by establishing a program in which all drivers in its national series are tested at least twice a season.

The thing NASCAR has going for it is that it doesn’t have any kind of player’s union that it has to deal with. It can, and usually does, do pretty much whatever it wants to do. That means NASCAR can have it both ways. It could set up a random program and still keep the “reasonable suspicion” that exists under the current policy.

The problem is that for the random part of any such program to truly have credibility, it needs to be administered by an independent agency outside of NASCAR’s control. And NASCAR is never going to give up that kind of control.

* * *
Tony Stewart said the smartest thing he’s said in a week Friday at Chicagoland Speedway.

After ripping Joe Gibbs Racing teammate Denny Hamlin after their crash at Daytona on Saturday, Stewart declined to comment in detail about the incident here.

“If I had just kept my mouth shut like I should have done I wouldn’t have to worry about dealing with it this week,” Stewart said.

Precisely.

Regardless of what he thought about what Hamlin did wrong in their incident at Daytona, Stewart shouldn’t have chewed his teammate out in a televised interview following it.

* * *
Friday’s developments with Budweiser and Dale Earnhardt Jr. leave things in an interesting position.

Let’s suppose for a minute that Dale Earnhardt Inc. keeps Budweiser. Does Budweiser have enough invested in the No. 8 to make it such that it wouldn’t want to let that go to another sponsor? Or do Bud and DEI understand that it would be hard for anybody to just step into a red No. 8 that isn’t named Dale Earnhardt Jr.

OK, so let’s say Budweiser goes to another team. Now Bud needs a new number and, if DEI wants to keep the 8, so would Earnhardt Jr. Could you imagine there being somebody in a No. 8 who’s not Dale Jr. and who’s also not driving for Budweiser?

Some fans don’t care, but this is important stuff to a lot of people.

Take the guy who called our Sirius Satellite NASCAR Radio show Friday and said that he was a Rusty Wallace fan for years and years, and then one day all of the T-shirts and hats he owned suddenly indicated allegiance to Kurt Busch. He’s not a Kurt Busch fan, so he’s got a lot of stuff he can’t wear any more.

* * *
While spending more than an hour on the phone trying to get credit for air miles I didn’t get for a flight last month, I came up with some more new marketing slogans for America’s airlines.

US Airways – We apologize.

Delta Airlines – We love to fly when circumstances are not beyond our control.

United Airlines – Please pardon the inconvenience.

American Airlines – Hey, at least you didn’t have to drive.

* * *
I’ve stumbled on a new name for this track. I am going to start calling it CVS.

I don’t know if everybody has CVS stores near their homes. We do in North Carolina. It’s a competitor to Walgreen’s (or Rite Aid or Duane Reade).

Anyway, this track is not in Chicago, at all. I don’t know what would constitute Chicago “land,” but I’ve decided it should be called Chicago Vicinity Speedway – CVS.

Knowing you can win? Yeah, you gotta like that feeling

The only No. 1 that Martin Truex Jr. pays attention to is the one on the side of his race car.

He’ll leave it to others to speculate how the pecking order at Dale Earnhardt Inc. might be shuffled now that teammate Dale Earnhardt Jr. has decided to leave next year.

"I never really thought about it," Truex said.

"All I ever wanted to do was win and do the job that these guys deserve – get them wins and run up front each week."

It’s hard not to wonder, though, if Truex hasn’t gone through some kind of transformation in recent weeks.

When Earnhardt Jr. announced his departure in May, Truex was 20th in the Nextel Cup standings. Going into tonight’s Pepsi 400 at Daytona International Speedway, he’s ninth.

"It just feels good that we're performing the way we should," Truex said. "That’s the bottom line. We’re having a blast coming to the race track every weekend."

He should be.

After finishing 11th at Darlington and 16th at Charlotte, Truex got his first Nextel Cup victory at Dover, leading 216 laps in a dominant performance.

He then finished third at Pocono, second at Michigan and, after a 24th on the road course at Sonoma, third last weekend at New Hampshire.

"Once you get on a roll, it just keeps coming," Truex said.

"You keep running well and everybody's having fun. It just gets so much easier, I can’t even tell you. I just really look forward to each race every weekend and hopefully we just keep doing what we've been doing."

The victory at Dover was particularly gratifying, of course. After winning 13 races and a pair of championships in the Busch Series, Truex went until October in his rookie season in Nextel Cup last year without a top five.

He was fifth at Talladega and then runner-up at Homestead last fall, but until the victory at Dover he hadn’t been back in the top five. Since then, though, he’s been out of it only once.

"I think the biggest thing winning does for you is get rid of all the doubt that anyone has ever had," Truex said.

"All of the questions that anyone has ever had about ‘Can we do this? When will it happen?’ You don't worry about that anymore. You know you can win and you just have to figure out how you're going to do it again. That’s almost as tough but you don't really worry about it quite as much.

"Once you get it once you want it more, obviously. But you know how to do it, you've been there, you've done it before. Everybody on the race team, their confidence is up knowing that they can get it done. They can do the job as good as anybody out here. That goes a long way."

It's hard to argue against racing for a win

I just wanted to expand a little bit on something I wrote in my postrace "Observations" from the race Sunday at New Hampshire.

NASCAR must have been thrilled to hear Denny Hamlin and his crew chief, Mike Ford, talk after their victory about how they've decided to take gambles to get wins between now and the start of the Chase for the Nextel Cup.

That's precisely the attitude NASCAR wanted to foster with the changes it made to the format this year. They wanted drivers who're comfortably in position to qualify for the 10-race playoff to have something to shoot for in the run-up to the Chase, and that's what it appears they've done.

Hamlin and Ford went on and on about how they wanted to get the 10 bonus points for a win that they'll be awarded once the Chase begins. They want to get more, too, over the next nine weeks. They know that if the Chase started today (which it doesn't), Jimmie Johnson and Jeff Gordon would each have 5,040 points while Hamlin would have only 5,010.

That's 30 points to make up in the Chase, and 30 points is 30 points. If Hamlin can win a couple of more races, he'd chop away at that deficit.

I still don't agree with making the first 26 races worth, in effect, 10 points more than the playoff races are worth. I still strongly believe that if you win in the final 10 you ought to get MORE for that than you do in the first 26.

But if the new format has Gordon, Hamlin, Johnson and anybody else thinking about taking more chances to win rather than believing a second- or third-place finish is just as good as a victory, then I am all for that.

To penalize or not to penalize ...

There will be a lot of talk this week about what penalties Brian Vickers, Kyle Busch and Johnny Sauter should get for failing inspections after competing this week.

Vickers failed inspection after Friday's qualifying and his time was disallowed. That knocked him out of Sunday's race, and I don't expect his team to get any more of a penalty than that.

NASCAR actually said as much Friday.

Busch and Sauter had their cars chosen, at random, for postrace inspection Sunday. NASCAR also picked Robby Gordon's car and it passed, but Busch and Sauter were too low on the left-front corner.

Some fans will want them to face the same 100-point, $100,000 and six-week suspensions that Dale Earnhardt Jr., Jeff Gordon and Jimmie Johnson got. If you're going to crack down on car of tomorrow violations, shouldn't the penalties at least be the same, especially since Busch and Sauter actually competed in the race with their cars out of compliance when the other three didn't?

That's an interesting point, and quite frankly it's hard for me to argue against that. But that's not likely to be what NASCAR is going to do. It's likely going to say that these violations were the result of any "tampering" or other attempts at manipulation, but rather came from wear and tear on the cars in the event. The cars were high enough in pre-race inspections, but too low after the race. Unless some kind of intentional manipulation is found, which doesn't seem likely, what NASCAR does in this case, I think, will provide the precedent for future "unintentional" violations of this nature.

Remember, I'm not saying I necessarily agree with that. I am just telling you that's likely to be what happens.

There's no gray matter in cheating

How much better could racing be if nobody had ever said the phrase "if you’re not cheating, you’re not trying?"

Seriously. Instead of spending all that time and energy working on ways to defeat the rule book, what would the sport have been like if guys had spent nearly 60 years working every bit as hard to make their cars better within the rules?

I absolutely reject the notion that enforcing rules takes away the opportunity for racers to be "innovative" or "creative." The fact is, of course, that thousands of mechanics over the history of stock car racing have made immeasurable contributions toward making race cars better without getting up every morning trying to figure out how to "beat" NASCAR.

Yet the "cheating" mentality permeates the sport. I think it pollutes it, in fact. Integrity is not a valued commodity among racers, it seems, as least not as highly as I believe it should be.

You’ve got people looking at the rule book and deciding that if something isn’t prohibited, by actual word printed in that book, it’s legal. This "gray area" is where they try to make a living, but what it shows me is a lack of "gray matter" in their brains.

Here are the salient portions of the rule governing penalties against Hendrick Motorsports at Infineon Raceway:

Rule 20-2.1
The car body must be acceptable to NASCAR officials and meet the following minimum requirements:

• Streamlining of the contours of the car, beyond that approved by the Series Director, will not be permitted.
• If, in the judgment of NASCAR Officials, any part or component of the car not previously approved by NASCAR that has been installed or modified to enhance aerodynamic performance, will not be permitted. All cars must remain standard in appearance.
• Fenders may not be cut or altered except for wheel or tire clearance, which must be approved by the Series Director.

OK, where’s the "gray" there?
ANY part not PREVIOUSLY approved by NASCAR that has been INSTALLED OR MODIFIED to ENHANCE AERODYNAMIC PERFORMANCE is not allowed.

Why would flared out fenders between templates not be covered by that? The team itself said they were trying to get more downforce. Isn’t that "enhance aerodynamic performance" on the face of it? It wasn’t done for wheel or tire clearance and it wasn’t approved.

So don’t tell me it’s not in the rule book. Right there it is.

TNT coverage at Infineon horrible

It’s been a long time since a network did as bad of a job with a NASCAR race as TNT did Sunday at Infineon. Soup to nuts, it was not a good day.
The story in the prerace show with Marty Snider showing photos of race car drivers to people visiting wineries was just dumb. Show pictures of wine makers at the race track and see who could ID them.

Somebody had the bright idea to put the open-air rotating prerace show/in race analysis set inside the track between sides of the Turn 11 hairpin. Even if Larry McReynolds hadn’t been losing his voice, nobody could have heard him. It was an audio disaster.

Then the Kyle Petty in-car commentary thing was just a total bust. Somebody taped – TAPED! – him using a four-letter word as he was being wrecked and played it back. Then Bill Weber "apologized" for the language. Hey guys, you don’t get to say, "Oops, we’re sorry," if you playing something back on tape.

Finally, TNT went off the air after the race without showing the finishing order. That’s inexcusable. Several cars ran out of gas late and that jumbled things up, so maybe TNT thought NASCAR was going to have to sort the finishing order out and didn’t want to air bad information.

Well, they’re in such a hurry to get off the air they don’t have time to wait. That’s a simple ratings ploy. Viewership is highest when the race ends, but viewers start peeling off quickly during postrace coverage. By limiting itself to 10-15 minutes, TNT is trying not to have that drop-off count against its overall average, going out on as high of a ratings note as possible.

Two races ago, I got a lot of positive feedback about the job TNT did in the rain-delayed Pocono race. But the feedback this week has been about as bad as I’ve had in a long time.

Keeping the deal real: Authenticity should be among aims for Earnhardt Jr.

We’ve moved to the next step in the Dale Earnhardt Jr. saga, wherein people will begin trying to read the tea leaves to see whether he’s going to take Budweiser with him as a sponsor when he
moves to Hendrick Motorsports.

I am going to be totally honest with you. I don’t know which company will be his primary sponsor in 2008.

But I do know that no deal for that was revealed Thursday at the Nickel & Nickel Winery in Oakville, Calif., where Earnhardt Jr. announced that he’s signed a personal services deal with Sony to endorse that company’s electronic products.

Earnhardt Jr., in fact, was on to us as we tried to pin him down on whether Budweiser would move with him. "I know what you’re getting at," he said, "but I am not going to be able to help you, not tonight."

Oddly, that didn’t prevent The Associated Press from moving a story on the wire that said Earnhardt Jr. had announced he would leave Budweiser for Sony in his new ride. That story was picked up by several major internet sites and, for much the day on Friday that’s what people were reading.

Sony might very well wind up being the primary sponsor on whatever car number Earnhardt Jr. drives next year. But Darrell Waltrip said last weekend he thinks it will be a beverage company, but not one "with a red can."

That would let out Budweiser and Coca-Cola, leading some to speculate about Pepsi or perhaps some kind of energy drink.

There’s also this Adidas clothing deal that’s supposedly in the works, which would give Earnhardt Jr. his own clothing line – more than just T-shirt and ball caps, mind you – in the Tiger Woods/Nike vein. Could blossom into a full-blown deal with his car, too?

Just like what happened when he was deciding on what team he’d be going to, it seems like everybody has a theory. What nobody seems to actually have, though, is a clear idea of what’s going to happen.

That, actually, is not true. I think there are at least two people who know exactly what they’re going to do. That’s Dale Earnhardt Jr. and his sister, Kelley Elledge.

They may not know yet which company’s name will be on the side of Earnhardt Jr.’s car, but they do know exactly how they want to do business going forward.

The setting for Thursday night’s Sony announcement could not have been more elegant. The Nickel & Nickel Winery is in the breathtaking Napa Valley, and there was plenty of good food, fine wine and wonderful weather.

Several classic cars, all of them Chevrolets, were parked around the grounds to add ambiance.

One of them, a classic Corvette convertible, was enough to make any car enthusiast drool.

Was it what you would have expected from Earnhardt Jr.? No, but that doesn’t mean he was sending an "I want to be viewed as more of a grown-up" signal, either.

The site was picked for him, and it was aimed at impressing the people who’ll now be paying him and also giving him use the kinds of computers, high-definition televisions and cameras he already uses.

During the Q&A session, Earnhardt Jr. did make one startling revelation. He has at least two songs on his MP3 player by Barry Manilow, "Weekend in New England" and the "American Bandstand" theme.

We’ll pause for a minute here to let that sink in.
...

...

And we’re back.

Look, the reason Dale Earnhardt had so many fans for so long is that he found ways to project who he really was through the products he endorsed and the companies he worked with.

Earnhardt never seemed like a phony because he never was. He never pretended to be anything he wasn’t, and that meant he always came across as authentic.

That’s all Earnhardt Jr. has to do in picking the directions he’ll move in. It’s not about the money. Rest assured that when he decided to drive for Hendrick Motorsports he didn’t take the highest salary he was offered, and the decision about which company he’ll have as a sponsor won’t be all about the bottom line, either.

If he wanted to go for the most cash, the last number he’d want is the No. 8. He’s already sold a gazillion dollars worth of that stuff. If he changes numbers, his fans will buy more stuff. That’s simple math.

Whatever happens, he’s going to get paid. Handsomely.

Everybody knows that, even me.

For what it's worth, Cup teams are worth a ton

There are a couple of racing “forums” that I look at fairly regularly. Sometimes they’re quite disturbing, to be honest, but every once in a while you find gold.

I look at the forum on www.thatsracin.com because, well, I’d get in trouble if I didn’t. I also check in at www.rpmwarrior.net, which can be an absolute zoo, but sometimes offers entertaining reading.

Saturday afternoon, it provided a link to one of the most interesting things I’ve seen in a long time. It came in the form of a link to a story of Forbes.com by Jack Gage about the value of NASCAR’s multicar teams and individual cars.

The first thing I did after reading the story was to send an e-mail to the producer who books guests on our show on Sirius NASCAR Radio. We need to have Jack Gage on to talk to him about his fascinating work on this story.

The second thing I did was start writing this blog. All credit to Gage for the rest of what I am going to talk about here (Note to ESPN.com – This is called giving somebody proper credit for the work he does.)

According to Gage’s estimates, the average value of a multicar NASCAR team is $120 million.

That’s up 67 percent from last year because the 15 teams listed below now field 41 cars, up seven from last year. Also, Forbes got access to more detailed information about the off-track revenues generated by these teams, significantly revising its estimates.

According to the story, Roush Fenway Racing has the highest total value at $316 million.

Hendrick is second at $297 million.

Here’s the basic list (and, yes, these are all millions):

1. Roush Fenway Racing, $316

2. Hendrick Motorsports, $297

3. Joe Gibbs Racing, $173

4. Evernham Motorsports, $128

5. Richard Childress Racing, $124

6. Dale Earnhardt Inc., $118

7. Robert Yates Racing, $103

8. Chip Ganassi Racing, $94

9. Michael Waltrip Racing, $91

10. Penske Racing, $75

11. Ginn Racing, $74

12. Team Red Bull, $53

13. Bill Davis Racing, $53

14. Petty Enterprises, $48

15. Haas CNC Racing, $46

Forbes.com also lists the most valuable cars in the sport, and it shouldn’t surprise anyone that the top three names on that list will all be on the same team in 2008:

1. Jeff Gordon, No. 24, $85,000,000

2. Jimmie Johnson, No. 48, $76,000,000

3. Dale Earnhardt Jr., No. 8, $65,000,000

4. Tony Stewart, No. 20, $60,000,000,

5. Matt Kenseth, No. 17, $47,000,000

6. Kasey Kahne, No. 9, $45,000,000

7. Carl Edwards, No. 99, $38,000,000

8. Kevin Harvick, No. 29, $36,000,000

9. Ryan Newman, No. 12, $31,000,000

10. Dale Jarrett, No. 44, $30,000,000

If you’re at all interested in the business or racing, here’s the link to the whole story http://www.forbes.com/business/2007/06/15/nascar-valuable-teams-biz-cz_jg_0615nascar.html

It’s fascinating.

This ain't news: Standing up for what you do only counts when you actually do what you say you did

K. Lee Davis is the motorsports editor at ESPN.com. Since ESPN is owned by Disney, apparently he believes it’s OK for him to live in a fantasy world, too.

I railed about ESPN claiming on Tuesday night that it “broke” the news about Dale Earnhardt Jr. going to Hendrick Motorsports. That’s just a flat, bald-faced lie.

At 1 p.m. Wednesday, I began an e-mail exchange with Davis about my complaints. He basically told me to suck it up because I was mad that ESPN had beat me to the story.

Here’s his initial e-mail to me:

As far as who broke what yesterday. AP had nothing on the Hendrick Motorsports angle until nearly 4:30 p.m. Marty Smith’s story saying Junior was going to Hendrick Motorsports was published on ESPN.com’s front page at 2:11 p.m. At 2:20 p.m., I made the run through your paper’s web-site and the others I generally check to see who else might have the story. That’s part of my job.

Your site had zilch and every other site had zilch on the Hendrick angle. Plenty were reporting there would be a press conference (we were first on that one, too) and that Hendrick was a possibility, but none had it definitively as Hendrick, and Marty did.

So, it would seem to me, Marty broke that story. Give credit where it’s due.

He didn’t say anything about dragons and unicorns, but he might as well have.

Here’s what happened in the real world. At 1:30 p.m., The Associated Press moved Jenna Fryer’s story saying that Earnhardt Jr. had scheduled a press conference and that her sources said he was going to Hendrick. I was writing a story saying the same thing for thatsracin.com and charlotte.com.

My story was posted at 2:08 p.m.

I am NOT saying I was first. Jenna got her story out first, so if there’s credit due anywhere, it’s to her. But Marty’s story was no better than third. It was a good story and he had some details in his story that I didn’t. Jenna had stuff neither of us had, too. But all three stories were substantively the same.

I don’t think any of us “broke” anything. We all tracked down the same people and did all the reporting we could do and still get a story up with dispatch. This business of a minute here and there is how reporters get into trouble these days.

All three of us kept reporting all afternoon and evening, working to nail down more information.

That’s the job, too. For Davis to say that AP had nothing on Hendrick until 4:30 p.m. is just absurd. For him to say my site had “zilch” on the Hendrick angle is just flat wrong. He said my story wasn’t up anywhere at 2:20. That’s a lie. Flat out.

I work for Sirius Satellite Radio, too. Part of that deal is I have to post news to the web sites my paper runs before I give anything to them. I sent in my story, looked to make sure it was posted and then sent it to folks handling the Sirius shows that were on the air in the afternoon.

After that, I checked ESPN.com and the story they had posted on the Earnhardt Jr. announcement will still not yet the one written by Marty Smith.

Maybe you don’t care. That’s fine. This isn’t about me getting credit, it’s about ESPN trying to take credit when they didn’t earn it. I won’t stand for that.

Dale Jr. news makes for long day

A few thoughts that don't really fit anywhere else on what's becoming a crazy week:

--At about 11:45 a.m. Tuesday, I was polishing off a few e-mails after doing the Sirius Satellite Radio show on the NASCAR channel. All I could think of was getting downstairs out of my office for a nap. I think the phone rang or something, but I got held up about 10 minutes. At 11:57 a.m., I got an e-mail saying Dale Earnhardt Jr. had a press conference scheduled for Wednesday at 11 a.m. It's 10:55 p.m. as I write this and I have been up out of my chair maybe 30 minutes all day since.

--I came as close as I ever have to hanging up on a national television show Tuesday. I agreed to go on ESPN's "NASCAR Now" show live via the telephone at 6:30 p.m. to talk about the Dale Earnhardt Jr. story. I am listening to host Eric Kuselias, over the phone, as he starts the show. As he goes to ESPN reporter Marty Smith, Kuselias tells America that Marty "broke this story." OK, I like Marty Smith a lot. He's good. But ESPN didn't even break wind on that story Tuesday. Smith, Jenna Fryer of the Associated Press and I all three posted stories saying about the same thing at about the same time. It was about 2 p.m. or so, and it took that long because we all took time reporting and not guessing. If I had been as big of a jerk as a lot of people think I am, when Kuselias came to me I would have told him I had to go back to work to catch up on all that news that ESPN had been "breaking" and hung up the phone. Mark Packer, a talk-show host who works here in Charlotte, calls ESPN by another name - H-Y-P-E. That about covers it.

--So I get to the Charlotte airport Monday night after another big day in the skies over this great land of ours. My luggage was still in Boston (don't ask), but I got home OK. My wife was coming to pick me up and I walked down the arrivals area to one of the areas that has been designated "NO SMOKING." I know this designation has been made because in several places along that area the words "NO SMOKING" are painted in letters 20 inches high. I was, literally, standing with my feet on one set of those letters. Five feet from me, I hear a clinking noise that's undoubtedly a cigarette lighter. Twice already I had walked from other "NO SMOKING" areas because people were there smoking. The third time was my limit. I looked at this guy and said, "What does this say?" He said, "It says NO SMOKING." And then he took a puff. Lovely world, isn't it?

Coach Hanna will be missed

Sometimes, all you need to know is who’s calling.
When my cell phone rang Wednesday afternoon, I glanced at the caller ID and saw the name “Mark Hanna.” Mr. Hanna was a teacher at my high school, but I knew his call had nothing to do with that.

A few months ago, I’d met Mr. Hanna at an assisted living facility in my hometown and we went in to see his father. Mark Hanna’s dad was Mack Hanna, and while Mark will always be Mr. Hanna to me, his father will always be Coach Hanna. It was the first time I’d seen Mr. Hanna in too long. It would be the last time I got to see Coach Hanna.

Coach Hanna passed away sometime Wednesday morning. Alzheimer’s, the
same thing that took my own father from me long before he actually drew his last breath, had done the same to Mr. Hanna. The day we went to see the man who taught me the real meaning of the
word “coach,” he didn’t know who I was. That hurt, sure, but it also
didn’t matter. I knew who he was, and what he had done for me and
hundreds of young men just like me.

Coach Hanna grew up in Gastonia, N.C., just like me. He just did it in a very different time. He became a young man as the world was trying to end itself, making him a part of what’s come to be known as the “greatest generation.” He served his country and then he came home to serve his community.

He worked for the City of Gastonia for nearly four decades, eventually serving as superintendent for the city’s electrical division. I worked for that department, thanks to Coach Hanna, for two summers while I was in high school, and I can tell you first hand that the people who do that for a living earn every dime they get paid.

For nearly 30 years, on every weekday afternoon (and a lot of Saturday mornings, too) of every summer, Mack Hanna hung up his hard hat and put on a baseball cap. For a lot of those years, that hat was Kelly green with a white “T” on the front. That stood for Temple, as in Temple Baptist Church.

For most of my adolescence, I lived in a house my parents rented for
themselves, my sister and I from the church. We lived in the upstairs and a lady named Arizona Stirewalt lived on the bottom floor. The ball field that Temple had was, literally, my back yard.
I loved baseball. I listened to Atlanta Braves games with Milo Hamilton at night and tried to pull in games from faraway places like Cleveland and Cincinnati when the Braves had a night off. I took the Sporting News for the box scores and read the paper, keeping up with the standings of the major leagues. My uncle Tam – his real name was Talmadge – took me along when he took his sons Ricky, Glenn, Greg and Joey to see the Gastonia Pirates play at Sims Legion Park. We saw Bob Robertson and Bob Moose and Fred Patek and Al Oliver and Frank Taveras and dozens of other
players who made it to the show, and guys like Zelman Jack and Frank
Brosseau who never quite did.

My dad had two things working against him when it came to baseball.
First, he grew up on a farm and worked all his life as a boy. He never got to play baseball that much. Second, he worked two jobs trying to keep a roof over my head. So he never got to watch much baseball, either.

When it came time for me to play the game in youth baseball, I had
plenty of desire and very little ability. Coach Hanna worked with me and got all there was to get out of me as a player, but it still wasn’t a whole lot. Ultimately, that didn’t matter. Good grief, did we have fun.

Powers Roland and Jerry Reese and Dewey Moses and dozens of guys just like them were more than just my friends. They were my teammates, and Coach Hanna made us understand that meant something.
We thought he was teaching us baseball. Thumbs up was the steal sign. I never got that one. A closed fist was the take sign. I did get that one, but not as much as I would have if winning was all that mattered.

He kept on me about stepping out toward third base as I swung – putting my foot in the bucket, he called it. We learned to get in front of the ball, to hit the cutoff man and to always, in every circumstance, “run it in.”

What we didn’t know, at least not at the time, that baseball was only a small portion of what we were learning. Coach Hanna taught us to hustle – not in the gambling sense, of course, but in the sense of doing things with efficiency. He taught us to back each other up. He taught us to “chatter,” so we could encourage our
teammates to do their best and keep our own minds in the game. He taught us to respect the rules of the game and its code, too, the unwritten rules that mark the difference between the right and wrong ways to play the game.

We learned how to act like winners, whether we won or lost, and to
compete as hard as we could as long as we could. Coach Hanna and Coach Bennie Cunningham would have rather won a game against the other than breathe, I believe, but they both also knew that it takes a gentleman to be a good sport, and vice versa.

It took me a long time, probably too long for Coach Hanna’s liking, to understand how those lessons transferred from the diamonds of our youth to the world outside those white lines.

Coach Hanna helped me get my first summer job, keeping score for the
same leagues I’d once played in, and many nights he hung through another game after his team’s game until I was through with another one so he could drive me home. He gave me my second job, cutting the grass around the city’s electrical substations.

When I got out of college and got into the sports department of the
newspaper business, I found myself dealing with a lot of coaches. I
respected them all, I think, because I respected Coach Hanna. Anybody who had earned the title of “Coach” had, in my book, earned a measure of nobility.

My father and Coach Hanna both spent their final days in a world I
couldn’t penetrate to reach them, to tell them one more time how much they both meant to me. When my father died, I felt like in some ways that brought him back to me. I believe he knows now how much I miss him.

Now Coach Hanna does, too.

Kurt Busch went too far

Let's hope NASCAR puts its regulatory muscle where its mouth is this week.
It doesn't matter what happened on the track between Tony Stewart and Kurt Busch during Monday's Autism Speaks 400.
I don't care whether you believe the wreck that put Busch into the wall and also damaged Stewart's car was Busch's fault, Stewart's fault or equally stubborn behavior on both their parts.
Silly stuff like that happens in NASCAR racing. Two guys get angry with each other and start banging sheet metal until at least one of them winds up tangential to his intended path. They get mad, pop off after climbing out of their cars, and then the next week reporters ask them if they've "talked it out."
NASCAR doesn't need to get overly active in officiating this stuff. It usually takes care of itself and the people doing it inflict their own penalties on each other. Sometimes there are innocent parties involved, and when that happens the sanctioning body might have to take a few punitive measures.
But when a driver goes onto pit road and pulls the kind of stunt Busch did on Monday, NASCAR needs to act -- swiftly and effectively.
Busch pulled alongside Stewart's Chevrolet on pit road and forced one of Stewart's crew members to literally jump out of the way. Now if that crew member hadn't seen Busch coming, you'd like to think that Busch wouldn't have gone ahead and nudged up against Stewart's car anyway, sandwiching a human being in as "collateral damage." But you're not sure, are you?
NASCAR, correctly, parked Busch's No. 2 Dodge for the remainder of Monday's race.
That's a start. Busch will be fined, undoubtedly. But I'm not sure NASCAR will dock him any points. The officials could say that putting Busch in the garage and dooming him to a 42nd-place finish at Dover effectively acts as a points penalty in and of itself.
But NASCAR talks all it can about safety. It requires crew members to wear fire suits and protective helmets on pit road, but those offer scant protection from a guy coming at them with A CAR!
Parked would be a good place for Busch's car again this weekend at Pocono. NASCAR hasn't seemed willing to send a cheater's car home, but maybe it will finally draw a line when the issue is safety and not the rule book.

Kenny Mayne ought to be ashamed of himself

Goodness knows too many people make mountains out of molehills in our society today.

But sometimes, you hear something and it just makes you so blasted mad you can’t just let it go.

Sunday night as I was trying to drift off to sleep, I had the TV set on the “sleep” mode and ESPN’s SportsCenter was playing. They did their usual 15 minutes on the latest biggest baseball game ever between the Yankees and Red Sox and a couple of other things, then Kenny Mayne got to the story about Sunday’s Nextel Cup race at Dover being rained out.

I can’t quote exactly what Mayne said because I only heard it once and don’t plan on listening to it again to get my dander back up. But the gist of it was something like “If a lot of people named Cleetus…call in to work sick on Monday, it may be because the NASCAR race was rained out on Sunday.”

Mayne used “Cleetus” and another Southern-sounding name, then added “Susan” because “NASCAR has women who are fans, too.”

OK, first, it wasn’t funny. Mayne is better than that.

But the main point is that it’s yet another example that, first, people who work in the national media think that everybody who watches a NASCAR race is a tobacco-spitting, overall-wearing, barefoot-going rube. And, second, that people who aren’t tobacco-spitting, overall-wearing, barefoot-going rubes are inherently better people than those who are.

I get SO tired of trying to make this point, but I can’t help myself.

Suppose Kenny Mayne had been introducing a story about NBA fans having to wait until Thursday night until the final series between Cleveland and San Antonio begins. What if he had said, “All of the Leroys and Darnells (or any other stereotypical names for black people) you know will spend the next few days waiting for Thursday night ...”

Or suppose Mayne had said, “It’s going to be hard to get a hair appointment or schedule a session with your interior designer next week because there’s a big figure skating competition coming up.”

Reckon Mayne could have gotten either those stereotypical remarks past the people at ESPN who ought to be making sure things like that don’t happen? I doubt it.

Keep in mind, now, that in less than two months ESPN becomes the network that carries Nextel Cup races on a weekly basis. There’s no law that says everybody who works at ESPN has to like racing to stay on the payroll, but the idea that the fans of any given sport can be described by using terms like “Cleetus” is absurd.

I guess Mayne thought “Bubba” would be a cliché.

Is this a big deal? No. The world’s not going to wobble off its axis because of a bad throwaway line on an ESPN broadcast.

But I grew up in the South and I still live here. My dad’s father had a farm and so did several of my uncles and great uncles. My mother’s father worked in a textile mill, and then my mother worked in another mill pretty much until she wasn’t able to work any more. Some of them liked NASCAR and some of them didn’t know what a race car was.

Everyone of them, though, did have one thing in common. Every one of them was every bit as good as Kenny Mayne will ever be, no matter how many suits he has and how many times he smirks at you on TV.

Eldora event serves a good cause, but the fun has to be a factor, too

This week’s Prelude to the Dream at Eldora Speedway, the legendary dirt track near Rossburg, Ohio, sounds like it will be a blast. Two dozen or so Nextel Cup stars gathering at the track Tony Stewart now owns to play in the dirt.

The event has grown exponentially in just its third year, and since the proceeds of the event go to a great charity like the Victory Junction Gang Camp it’s a very good thing.

This year’s event, set for Wednesday night, will be shown nationally via HBO pay per view. Proceeds from that go to the charity, too.

You do worry a little bit that this thing might be growing too fast. They’ll try to cram around 20,000 fans into Eldora, and I’ve been there. That’s probably 10 times more people than live within a 25-mile radius of the track itself.

You wonder if all of the fans who’re lucky enough to be there will come away happy, just because of the logistics of handling all that many people.

I know the people who’re putting the event on are going to try to make sure everyone has a good time. But I do know they’re working especially hard to make it an enjoyable evening for the drivers who come to participate. That means all of the media and maybe some autograph-seeking fans who attend might not come away totally happy.

In this case, I think that’s OK. I think the priority of an occasional event like this should be to make sure it’s fun for the people who’re putting on the show.

When Nextel Cup crew chiefs raced each other in thunder roadster cars before the NASCAR Nextel All-Star Challenge, it was a mess. There might have been 10 decent laps of actual racing in both heats and the feature put together. But it didn’t matter that much. Everybody had a great time and that’s what the event should have been all about in the first place.

Being in the Nextel Cup business is a hard way to live. Yes, the money is great at the top level. But these guys absolutely work their fingers to a collective nub.

They’re in the sport because they love it, but every once in a while it’s nice to see them have a chance just to do something for nothing but fun.

That’s what the race at Eldora this week should be for the drivers. A chance to have fun.

You know they’ll get out there and want to compete, and that’s because they’re who they are. But this is not a championship event. Some of the drivers have raced on dirt before and some of them haven’t. And that’s OK. Nobody’s going to be handing out style points.

Somebody will count the laps and they’ll keep score about who’s first and who’s last. And there will be a count on the money that’s raised.

But the only things that really should count at Eldora on Wednesday are the smiles around the pits. For one night, racing will be fun again, and that’s plenty enough reason for this event to go right on happening.

It would take that perfect storm to take NASCAR down a notch

Ed Hinton might not always be right, but he’s never in doubt.

In his column from Indianapolis posted elsewhere on thatsracin.com Saturday, you can see Ed in top form, speaking in the kind of absolutes that he lives by.

“If Danica Patrick becomes the first female winner of the (Indianapolis) 500, Indy might gain only a tie for international headlines. Six hours earlier because of the trans-Atlantic time difference, England’s Lewis Hamilton could become first black driver to win Monaco – or any major motor race, anywhere.

“Should either or both happen, nothing NASCAR could do could make the 600 more than it was until a decade ago: a Memorial Day afterthought.”

I don’t have any argument against that. (As an aside, you’ll also notice how Ed loves to translate obvious foreign words – like “grand prix” into great prize – for his readers. I can do that, too. For example, LaJoie is French for “the joie.”)

Well, maybe I do have one.

No matter who wins the Formula One race at Monaco Sunday, America won’t care.

Hamilton is, by all accounts, a remarkable talent who takes the lead in the F1 standings into Sunday’s event. But he’s not an American, and American sports fans simply don’t get worked up about any sport where Americans aren’t a factor.

Yes, there is an American driver in F1. His name is Scott Speed and I am sure his parents are proud of him. But he is not a competitive factor in that series, and until he is Americans aren’t going to connect with F1 just because Speed is marked “present” when the series takes roll.

A victory by Hamilton Sunday would be important in the grand scheme of motorsports, of course, and it would up the already keen pressure on NASCAR to find people of color to compete at its highest levels.

Internationally it would be a big story, too. World Cup soccer is a big deal internationally, but in the United States it never will be until our team has a shot to win it. I’m not saying that’s right, but I am saying that’s the way it is.

A Danica Patrick victory at Indianapolis, of course, is a whole other deal.

Patrick is already the only story anybody cares about in American open-wheel racing, which is a sad but nonetheless true state of affairs for that discipline. If she’s the one drinking milk in victory lane after 500 miles Sunday, she’ll be on the front page of virtually every newspaper in America on Monday.

But while Hinton is right in saying that if Patrick wins at Indy and Hamilton wins in Monaco, the Coca-Cola 600 will get only third billing around the world, what he doesn’t say is that unless all of that falls into place things will be right like they’ve been for the past 10 years or so.

If you’re a Formula One fan in this country, chances are it’s because you’re one of those people who gets pleasure out of knowing things about something obscure, like those people who listen only to bands who’ve not yet become commercially successful.

You get up at the crack of dawn on Sunday to watch races from all over the world on Speed, and knowing that not very many people are doing that makes you feel special.

As for Indianapolis, the fact that the Indy Racing League had that race on its schedule is the reason Ed Hinton is back there this May. If the Championship Auto Racing Teams faction in the open-wheel split had Indy, then the IRL might be as irrelevant as the ChampCar World Series, the direct CART descendant, is today.

Unless there’s the perfect scenario Hinton talks about, with Patrick and/or Hamilton winning Sunday, far more people who read the papers Ed works for will care who wins at Lowe’s Motor Speedway than about who wins at Indy and Monaco combined.

And I have no doubt about that.

Power list an inexact science

Naming the most powerful people in NASCAR might be the most interesting thing I do all year. It’s absolutely one of the most maddening.
The list that appears in newspapers and on thatsracin.com today is our 10th annual listing of the sport’s movers and shakers, and every year things change a little bit.
Last year, for example, I sent out emails to about 50 of my colleagues in the media and asked them how they’d do the same list. This year, I’ve gone back and forth with several industry people who’ve offered suggestions and criticism and I’ve put the list together.
For a couple of years, I also ranked the most powerful companies in the sport. Last year, we went from the 25 most powerful to a list of 43, matching the number of cars in a Nextel Cup starting lineup.
Some of the people I talk to about the list each year don’t like it that I sometimes list more than one person in a given position. I can understand that, and I’ll admit that I probably allow myself to use that “cheat” a little too much. But this year, for instance, how would I separate Dale Earnhardt Jr. from his sister, Kelley Elledge, who are an unbreakable team when it comes to determining where Earnhardt Jr. is going to race next year?
I will tell you that this year’s list looked very different every time I messed with it. I moved people in, moved some out. I moved some up and dropped some down – sometimes several positions at one whack.
If I looked at it 100 more times, I’d probably still make changes. You find yourself comparing people who wind up close to one another, trying to figure out how you can justify putting this guy ahead of that guy but behind a third guy. At some point, you just have to throw up your hands and say that’s about as good as it’s going to get.
I will plead guilty up front to perhaps assigning too much power to people in the television business. I wrote about sports on television before I started covering racing and maybe that makes me lean that way. But there’s no question television plays a critical role in what happens in racing today, so maybe I am not that far off base.
Power, of course, is a fleeting thing. One thing you worry about is that in the time between you have to turn this list and the time it actually runs something major is going to happen. If, for instance, Earnhardt Jr. got his deal done before the list went public, the car owner who signed him would automatically be too low on the list.
It’s also very hard to decide which drivers to list where.
Beyond Earnhardt Jr., whose influence is obvious right now, the list includes Jeff Gordon, Tony Stewart and Jeff Burton. Mark Martin certainly has been and continues to be an influence on his peers, Jimmie Johnson is the reigning champion and Juan Pablo Montoya could be an emerging force. You could make arguments for at least those guys.
One thing I’ve learned in the past couple of years is that I don’t yet, even after nearly 11 years of doing this, feel comfortable that I’ve got the right people from the marketing side of the sport on this list. This year, I’ve got three lawyers and/or agents on the list and there are probably at least that many more I should be considering every year.
What I am saying is that this is a long way from an exact science. It never was meant to be. It’s aimed at making people think about a side of the sport they might not always think about.

Can't we all just get along?

One thing my brethren and sistren in the television business need to understand (at least better than they apparently do) is that the broadcast rights fees their networks pay don’t “buy” them a bit more right to be at the track than any other reporter.

Over the all-star weekend, I stated in this blog that the “TV pestilence” was spreading at an alarming rate at NASCAR tracks.

According to dictionary.com, “pestilence” means “a pernicious, evil influence or agent” or “something that is considered harmful, destructive or evil.” Evil might be just a tick strong, but otherwise that definition sounds about right.

The television compound continues to gobble up more room week after week. At Darlington they actually blocked off one road outside the track and another one inside the track to “accommodate the TV partners.” At Charlotte, what used to be the media’s press box parking lot has now been completely swallowed up by TV trucks and their annoying offspring, golf carts.

“You know how you get a good parking spot at the track?” one TV person told me after hearing me gripe. “Pay $4 billion for the right to be there. How much does the Observer pay for you to be at the track?”

That’s typical.

It’s also wrong-headed.

Television networks are invited to bid for NASCAR broadcast rights. The networks elect to do so because those rights grant them the opportunity to produce programming to air over said network. In return, the networks also have the right to sell advertising on the broadcasts. They also can use the NASCAR programming to promote other shows on the network, hoping to increase viewership through those promotional opportunities.

If a network didn’t think it could get more out of covering NASCAR than it is putting into it, why would it bid on the rights? Television rights fees are an opportunity to MAKE money, not an excuse to SPEND it.

It certainly costs a lot for networks to produce the programming, to hire its announcers and to effectively promote that programming, but if the network doesn’t come close enough to turning a profit or at least breaking even and accepting that overall having NASCAR is helping the network, then they’re not very good at the business they’re in.

Now, every television commentator and reporter who comes to the track is issued a media credential. That credential gives them access to the garage area and pit lane and other media areas around the track.

Guess what? My credential gives me the exact same access. NASCAR credentials media to “cover” the sport, and that’s what we’re all there to do. The rights fees don’t give anybody who works for Fox or TNT or ESPN one whit more of a right to be there than I have, just like my credential doesn’t give me any more right to be there than anybody else with the same “annual” credential or one-race passes.

I know most fans don’t care about our little intramural squabbles, but it bugs me when people tell me there in a different class than I am when they’re absolutely not.

The TV compound fracture

The TV pestilence is officially out of hand.

Last weekend at Darlington Raceway, I tried to turn onto the same road I've used for years to get into the infield tunnel and there wasn't a road there anymore.

Instead, there were TV production trucks parked every which way. The television "compound" had, and this is a conservative guess, tripled in size.

When I got my credentials for Lowe's Motor Speedway, the envelope indluded a letter saying that the parking lot for those of us who work out of the press box had moved, too. We've figured this was coming because the TV compound that once took up a third of that lot had been slowly creeping outward. But this was a quantum leap in land grabs.

There's a lot more television stuff needed these days with Speed, Fox, ESPN all doing various things. But that doesn't make it any less annoying.

Friday in the media center, a cameraman for ESPN pulled a chair away from the row where I was sitting and parked in it about 8 feet away from me. For an hour, he sat there on the cell phone trying to get some kind of piece of equipment for his camera shipped to him and talking to pretty much everybody he could think of to call on his phone list.

One place where this gets totally out of hand is at New Hampshire. The TV locusts come into the media center there and literally lay around in the floor when they're not out running around doing whatever it is they do. I am talking about literally lying on their backs like they're napping, with their equipment strewn about them on the floor. Last year, I actually took them a bag of marshmallows just in case they decided to make S'mores.

Smile for the camera

Speaking of TV, the people working for ABC News who're doing a series of shows on NASCAR that will run this summer are looking for people who've traveled to Charlotte this week from long distances.

They're particularly looking for people who're fans of Regan Smith, David Stremme, Juan Pablo Montoya, Jeff Burton, Jimmie Johnson, or Mark Martin. If you're interested, you can email Alexa Danner at alexa.x.danner.-nd@abc.com .

The latest on Dale Earnhardt Jr.? It's not like we're holding back

Good heavens, it's nuts at Darlington today.

It started last night. I'm flying down the highway trying to get here after working all day on the Dale Earnhardt Jr. story when the phone rings.

"Done deal," the caller says. "Earnhardt Jr. and Richard Childress are meeting right now. They're going to announce a deal Friday at Darlington."

I get to the hotel just before 11 and by the time I get to the room, my boss is on e-mail telling me a Charlotte television station is reporting just what the guy on the phone had said.

"Do we know anything about this?" he asked.

It's one of my favorite questions. What it actually means was, "If this is true and you didn't have it first, I will feed you to pit bulls."

Actually, I wonder if my boss thinks that if I knew something I would decide just not to share it with anybody. Readers and radio listeners think that, too.

"What's the real story," they ask me. Hey, if I know it, I write it. That's my job.

So I start calling and e-mailing people. Finally, about 11:45, I get a response. It goes something like this: "All I can tell you is Dale Jr. is signed with any other team."

Read that again, carefully. Either there's a "NOT" missing there or I've got a big story.

Actually, it was a denial of the TV reports. Dale Jr. is NOT signed with any other team. So I went to bed.

Buy 7 am, when the Sirius NASCAR Radio morning show started in the Darlington Media Center, my email was full of people asking me when the Richard Childress Racing press conference announcing Dale Jr.'s signing would be held.

"Three weeks?" I guessed.

First, it was 9:30. Then 10. Then 10:15. In the media center. In the garage.

There was no press conference. It was Childress holding one interview session so he could say nothing one time instead of holding 100 interviews to say it 100 times.

I've had people e-mail me with more scenarios than you could shake a stick at. Some people

STILL believe Earnhardt Jr. is going BACK to DEI!

Sorry, would love to write more. But Dale Jr. is having his "media availability" in the garage in three minutes. Can't miss that.

It's not like he answered 400 QUESTIONS just 24 hours ago or anything.

The facts about Junior-DEI split? Truth is, they're still evolving

At about 3:15 p.m. Wednesday, I sat down in a chair at MediaComm in south Charlotte to talk to ESPN in Bristol, Conn., for a segment on spotters on its "Outside the Lines" show.

As we were getting set up, a producer there asked a question that changed my day instantly.

"Have you heard anything about a news conference at JR Motorsports tomorrow?" he said.
I had not, but from that moment on it was pretty much the only thing on the radar in the NASCAR world.

At the beginning, the first thing was to simply find out if a press conference was actually going to happen. The first round of calls that Jim Utter and I made got us nowhere. Nobody was answering the phone. Which is, often, a clue in itself.

At some point, we found out that a company that helps assemble and set up sound systems for NASCAR-related press events had a full crew on site at JR Motorsports setting up for an "event" on Thursday.

OK, that means you're not chasing a ghost. Something actually is going on. Now, the question becomes what's going on.

That's where things got off the track, a little bit, I think.

For the next couple of hours, just about anybody we could get on the phone who knew anything or who we thought knew anything were saying that Earnhardt Jr. and Martin Truex Jr. would leave Dale Earnahrdt to drive Cup cars at JR Motorsports next year.

Kelley Elledge said a month ago that JR Motorsports, which fields Busch and late model cars, isn't ready to be a Cup team. And it frankly would make no sense for Earnhardt Jr. to leave DEI for a start-up team that he'd own when the whole stated purpose of the contract talks has been to get him into a situation where he can win races and contend for championships.

Still, at that point in the late afternoon, that's what just about everyone was saying would be announced. As soon as we got official word that there would be a news conference at 11 a.m., I was also talking to people at Sirius NASCAR Radio about trying to arrange for me to be up there in Mooresville for the announcement and for Sirius to somehow cover it live.

Dave Moody was also on the air at that time on his Sirius show, and I also knew we needed to get something up on thatsracin.com. On the web, we put up the fact that a news conference was scheduled and that was about it. Moody, meanwhile, was hearing some of the same stuff from his "people" and started talking about the speculation and conjecturing about what might happen if that turned out to be the case.

Before long, other people were reporting the same thing. Some, were even citing Moody as their source, which shows that nobody else was getting their phone calls returned, either.

Meanwhile, Jim Utter and I were still talking trying to get people who actually know what's going on to tell us something. As the Truex/JR Motorsports/Hendrick story got out there, some folks started calling back to tell us that was not accurate.

By the time the deadline for the newspaper arrived, the story I had was that Earnhardt Jr. would announce he's leaving DEI and won't say where he's will go. Others had different information, and they wrote what they thought they knew. I wrote what Jim and I had.

That's how this business works. Sometimes it gets a little confusing, and the last thing you want to do is confuse readers, listeners and viewers. But sometimes, the information actually changes and with the 24-7 news cycle we have, it takes a while for the right stuff to catch up.

Tinkering with rules a tricky business now

Rick Hendrick's teams have won seven of this year's 10 races and all four of the "car of tomorrow" races. Chevrolets have won nine of 10 races. And a bunch of drivers are finding it difficult to even make races.

Should NASCAR "do" something?

Where you stand on that likely depends on who you pull for. Hendrick fans, for instance, think Jimmie Johnson, Jeff Gordon and Kyle Busch have won races and are all in the top six in points because they have good teams. Hendrick haters are convinced NASCAR is somehow stacking the deck.

Ford and Dodge fans have good reason to be unhappy about how things have gone this season. Nobody enjoys getting whipped. It's easier to believe that's happening because something fishy is going on than it is to say, "Hey, our guys need to suck it up and get better."

The folks on the down side of this debate can certainly point to places in the NASCAR timeline when, if things were this out of whack in terms of results, the sanctioning body would have stepped in to alter the rules to move things back toward a balance.

But that's not what has happened in the past few years. Even before the COT was introduced, the cars are so much more alike than they've ever been NASCAR is limited on what it can do. The new cars, regardless of make, are all measured under the exact same massive template set that looks like "Skeletor." How does NASCAR change that to benefit one make or take the advantage away from one that has it?

Let's say NASCAR could take 10 percent of something away from the Hendrick cars. Well, wouldn't that also take 10 percent from Joe Gibbs Racing and Richard Childress Racing? How would that make a difference on the track?

It is true, on the other hand, that it seems to be Toyota and Ford teams that find themselves struggling most just to make races. But when Johnny Benson qualifies to run a Toyota at Richmond for a team that doesn't run full-time in the Cup Series, how do you make the point that Michael Waltrip and Dale Jarrett and Jeremy Mayfield need help? Brian Vickers missed Richmond, too, but A.J. Allmendinger qualified 13th in cars built by the same team. How do you figure that?

Back when NASCAR did change the rules, it seemed, every six weeks or so, fans clamored against that. Set the rules before the season and live with then, many fans said. Usually, they were fans of the team or make that was winning.

Now that NASCAR is doing precisely that, it's not working for some fans, either.

What should NASCAR do? In my opinion, nothing.

If you're getting beaten, whether it's in qualifying or on race day, there is really only one thing you can do about. Go faster. Race better. Beat somebody.

The more teams that do that, the better off they -- and the sport -- will be.

Watching from a far

My newspaper has me helping with coverage of the PGA Tour event in Charlotte this week, so I am not at Richmond for the Jim Stewart 400.
It's always interesting to cover another sport that's out of your regular element. For one thing, you get asked a lot why you're not where people are convinced you're supposed to be. But I will be back at the track next weekend at Darlington.
Just wanted you guys to know I haven't fallen off the face of the earth or anything.

Time for Tony Stewart to do his job

Tony Stewart lost the Subway 500 Saturday night at Phoenix International Raceway.

Stewart finished second to Jeff Gordon, so he didn’t win. He has not yet won this year. He’s been wrecked. He’s had fuel pumps go bad. He’s caught bad breaks with caution flags. In other words, he lost, he lost, he lost.

This is racing’s cruel reality.

Winning, even for the very best, is only a sometimes thing. Stewart has lost 263 times in the Nextel Cup Series, but his winning percentage of 9.93 percent puts him 24th best on the all-time list in the sport and third among active drivers.

Learning to lose begins at the basic level of any sport. If you’re 6 and playing T-ball, as soon as somebody starts to keep score you start learning how to lose. Nobody likes losing – no champion has ever developed that capacity. But every athlete is responsible for how he acts after a setback, and as good as Stewart is at being a race car driver he’s that bad at handling disappointment.

I know some fans want to make Stewart a hero for stomping away after the Phoenix race without talking to the media. There’s nothing gallant or heroic about it, and it seems an entire payroll of people apparently have it as part of their job description to make excuses for Stewart’s unwillingness to do that part of his job.

Monday, ESPN sent reporter Shannon Spake to try to find out why Stewart didn’t talk and how Stewart felt about finishing second at Phoenix in a close battle with Gordon. J.D. Gibbs, the president of Joe Gibbs Racing, wound up answering her questions. Here’s what that means. The president of Joe Gibbs Racing had time to deal with the media to explain away why his driver didn’t. How does that make any sense?

Stewart was so frustrated after crashing out at Texas a week earlier that he talked about how he felt like retiring. He spent the next week explaining he wasn’t serious, and some believe he didn’t speak after Phoenix for fear of saying something else he’d have to take back. But the media didn’t “goad” Stewart into anything. They asked questions and Stewart answered. On both sides of that, people were doing their jobs.

It stinks to lose. I get that.

But when Mark Martin lost the Daytona 500, under frustrating circumstances, Martin did his job. When Jeff Burton lost to Kyle Busch at Bristol, barely, Burton did his job. When Gordon lost to Jimmie Johnson at Martinsville, Gordon did his job. And in each of those cases the media did its job.

The next time Stewart wins, will reporters refuse to talk to Stewart to “pay back” the two-time champion for his snub Phoenix? Of course not. We’ll ask questions and report what Stewart says to the fans who are the people who’ve allowed Stewart to become a very wealthy man as he’s been able to live out the racing dreams he had from the first time he climbed into a go-kart back home in Indiana.

In other words, we’ll do what we’re supposed to do. That’s all anybody is asking Stewart to do. When he finishes in the top three in a Nextel Cup race, he’s supposed to talk afterward, just like everybody else who finishes in the top three is expected to do.

Do the job. Handle responsibility. Act like a grown-up. Surely the best driver in NASCAR can handle that.

Some Earnhardt fans irrational about Gordon's use of #3 flag

It's absolutely amazing how far some people will go to get ticked off.
Jeff Gordon wins at Phoenix and ties Dale Earnhardt with 76 victories on NASCAR's all-time list.

Gordon had been hung up on 75 wins for a while, so he'd had time to think about what he might do after moving even with Earnhardt in the record books. What he came up with was taking a victory lap while holding a "3" flag as a tribute to the late seven-time champion.

Pretty neat, huh?

Well, no, not if you listen to some Earnhardt fans (and, by extension, Gordon haters).

One internet "writer," whose name I refuse to use so as not to give him the attention he so pathetically seeks, summed up the irrational reaction I am talking about:

"Jeff Gordon’s arrogance never ceases to amaze. ...Gordon and crew will of course claim they were honoring a fallen hero. The argument feigns weak at best with the long-time supporters of the man in black. Dale Earnhardt, Jr. congratulated Gordon in victory lane seemingly endorsing Gordon’s parade. But to a large contingent of Dale Earnhardt fans, Gordon’s antics after his win at Phoenix were self-serving.

"HE MIGHT AS WELL DANCE ON TOP OF THE SEVEN-TIME CHAMPION'S GRAVESITE TO CELEBRATE HIS WIN. (Emphasis mine).

"The flag waving did not buy Gordon any new fans. One can well bet that long time fans of the late Dale Earnhardt would rather be boiled in oil than wear Gordon’s colors. There was and only ever be one Dale Earnhardt, and Jeff Gordon needs to come to grips with the fact that he is no Dale Earnhardt.

"Here is hoping Gordon enjoyed his little show of defiance and his moment of glory."

Lest you think this is a lone nut, the message boards and Sirius radio talk shows were filled with like-minded responses. Maybe not quite as bizarre as the dancing on the gravesite line, but pretty far out there.

Look, folks. Nobody says you have to like Jeff Gordon. Nobody says you even have to respect him for paying tribute to Earnhardt after his win at Phoenix. But don't assign your irrational feelings to Gordon and his team. That's sad.

Believe what you will -- and you will anwyay -- but here are the facts. Late last year, a member of Gordon's team thought of the idea of carrying the flag around in the postrace celebration. The team member knows Dale Earnhardt Jr. and was actually at a birthday party for Earnhardt's son. He asked Earnhardt Jr. and Kelley Elledge, Dale Jr.'s sister, what they thought of the idea and they were enthusiastically supportive.

And, of course, after the race Saturday night Earnhardt Jr. said on his radio that it was a cool, classy thing for Gordon to do. He also came over to victory lane to congratulate Gordon.

What more do Gordon's haters want in terms of "approval" of the idea from the Earnhardt side? I am sure they bought the flag, so Dale Earnhardt Inc. got its licensing money off the deal. What's the problem?

Web reports, ESPN and Earnhardts, oh my!

On the surface, it appears that this weekend’s "news" about the Dale Earnhardt Jr. contract talks is directly contradictory.
It started Thursday morning with a website called MaxChevy.com reporting that a 51 percent ownership stake in Dale Earnhardt Inc. for Earnhardt Jr. had "essentially been negotiated." Glen Grissom, a guy who’s been around racing for a long time and has a lot of good contacts, was behind that report.
Hours later, as it often does, ESPN pretended it invented the story by reporting in breathless terms at the top of its "NASCAR Now" show almost exactly what Grissom had – including the idea of a board of director-type structure set up for Earnhardt Jr. to "report" to.
ESPN did call DEI and talk to Max Siegel, the president of global operations there, to confirm that before taking the story and running with it. One of its online stories quoted a "source" in fleshing out details of the story, and it was fairly apparent that Siegel himself was that source.
Why, you might ask, did your faithful correspondent (in other words, me) not make the same phone calls. Well, it just so happened that on Thursday afternoon I was scheduled to go to Mooresville to see Kelley Elledge any way at the scrapbooking store she and Wendy Childers own up there.
I am working on a story for later this year about people in the sport with talents, interests and pursuits outside the sport, and the Scrap Shack is on that list. (By the way, if you’re ever in a position to bet on how many different shades of paper you can buy to put in a scrapbook, by all means take the over.)
As we wrapped that up, I asked Elledge if there was any news on the contract front. She said the sides were talking just about every day and there had been a lot of things talked about back and forth. So I drove back home and didn’t think much more about it.
Well, after catching the screaming headlines on "NASCAR Now" I tried to touch base with Elledge once again to make sure I hadn’t simply failed to ask the right question. She sent a reply to my e-mail inquiry early Friday morning, and that’s when I wrote a story saying that she said no formal offer for 51 percent ownership has been presented to her and, by extension, her brother.
So what’s the real story?
Well, I don’t think this is necessarily a case where anybody is off base with what is being reported.
Earnhardt Jr. has said he wants control of DEI. When he was pressed on what that means at Daytona’s media day in January, someone asked him if that meant 51 percent. Earnhardt Jr. said yes. In the weeks since, that number has sort of become the key fact in some minds.
If DEI has put forth some kind of proposal that offers Earnhardt Jr. 51 percent of the company’s assets, in terms of how it might add up on paper, I don’t think that necessarily equates to "control," and it’s control that he’s looking for.
Earnhardt Jr. knows that he’s going to be defined in his career by what he does on the track, and if he believes his team isn’t getting what it needs to compete at the sport’s highest level now he wants to change that so that he is ultimately judged on what he does to make sure he has a fair chance to reach his goals. If he falls short of expectations, that way he’d at least know he gave it everything he had.
Teresa Earnhardt, on the other hand, shouldn’t be expected to merely skip away happily after ceding control of a company she helped build. She’s smart, too, and she knows that in the court of public opinion if it appears Earnhardt Jr. has been offered what he’s asked for – that 51 percent number – and he says that’s not enough that the prevailing opinions about this whole soap opera might change.
If a board of directors is created to oversee the operation of the "new" DEI, how is that board constituted. Who’s on it and, more to the point, who gets to pick who’s on it? Answer that and you’ll answer who actually would have control of the company in such a setup.
DEI has been on the public relations defensive on this story since the first time Earnhardt Jr. spoke in January in response to the comments Teresa Earnhardt made in a Wall Street Journal story in December about her stepson needing to choose between being a NASCAR driver and a rock star.
Earnhardt Jr. and his sister have been calling the dance pretty much ever since then, using the leverage of Earnhardt Jr.’s popularity successfully to frame the reaction and discussion to this story in the garage as well as in the "NASCAR nation." What has happened in the past 48 hours, in my mind, is that DEI has tried to move that ball back toward midfield a little bit.
What’s really happening is that Max Siegel and Kelley Elledge are still talking about a new deal for Earnhardt Jr. Rest assured that both of them have plenty of smart people advising them along the way, too, and that include Teresa Earnhardt on the DEI said and Earnhardt Jr. himself on that side.
My belief, and it’s nothing really more than that, is that those talks have crossed a very critical point. I don’t think they’re talking any more about whether or not they can get a deal done, I think now they’re talking about how they can best get one done.
There’s a huge difference.

Maybe Jimmy Spencer can blame the media

A lot of people were really upset at Jimmy Spencer because of some of the things he said on Speed during the prerace show before last week's race at Texas.
Spencer criticized Kelley Earnhardt Elledge for "keeping" the Earnhardt name and for being a bad negotiator on behalf of her brother, Dale Earnhardt Jr., in talks over a new contract with Dale Earnhardt Inc.
I've got no help for Spencer on the latter issue. Anybody who doesn't think Elledge has done a first-rate job on her brother's behalf isn't paying much attention.
But I will try to help Spencer out a little bit - just a little bit - on the name issue. It's probably the media's fault that Spencer got teed off about that.
Kelley Elledge doesn't sign her emails or her checks with "Earnhardt" in the middle. When she became prominent in the DEI talks, though, people like me started inserting that name in there to identify her as the driver's sister. It sort of helps tie her role in to the stories we've done on the issue.
Spencer said that Elledge was displaying "ego" by using the Earnhardt name. In my dealings with Elledge, what I've found is precisely the opposite of that. She's not looking to make herself part of this story, at all. She's in it because her brother trusts her and wants her working on his behalf, and that's it.
Of course, this whole thing begs the question of whether you think Spencer is right or wrong in objecting to a woman using her maiden name after being married. I'll let you argue that one among yourselves.
On another topic, Associated Press writer Chris Jenkins wrote a story earlier this week about baseball honoring Jackie Robinson and wondering why NASCAR couldn't do the same for Wendell Scott.
Scott is the only black man to ever win a race in what's now the Nextel Cup Series. That happened at Jacksonville's Speedway Park on Dec. 1, 1963.
As far as I know, NASCAR hasn't officially announced the dates for this year's Cup banquet in New York City. But if tradition holds, it will be on the Friday at the end of the week after Thanksgiving. That would put the banquet on Nov. 30.
With all of the big-time sponsorship folks who'll be in New York that weekend, wouldn't it be nice to have some kind of special ceremony there that Saturday on the anniversary of Scott's win? Let young drivers in NASCAR's diversity programs come to New York, on NASCAR's dime, and meet the people who control the purse strings that might one day allow one of those people to follow in Scott's footsteps.
Just an idea.

One election you shouldn't be allowed to vote in

Just a few musings on a cloudy Friday at Texas Motor Speedway:

• I am philosophically opposed to the idea of allowing the fans to vote a driver into the NASCAR Nextel All-Star Challenge. If everybody else wins his way in, I don’t know why somebody should get voted in just because the fans like him.

A couple of years ago the fans voted in Kerry Earnhardt. Nice guy, but on any kind of scale of deserving recipients of such a “pass” he would have been way, way down. Last year Kyle Petty used a campaign aimed at raising money for his Victory Junction Gang Camp to get into the all-star event. Could be worse, but again it goes against the idea of a “winner’s only” race to put him in.

This year, Carl Edwards, Ricky Rudd and Juan Pablo Montoya are among those who might be voted in. I wish I could trust the fans to choose someone of that caliber, but this is me not holding my breath.

The idea is to give the fans a voice in a race that’s designed to entertain them. Fans vote for all-stars in other sports, but the all-star events in those sports aren’t as all-out competitive at the NASCAR Nextel All-Star Challenge is.

I am just not a fan of the idea of having a participant voted in. I once nicknamed this the “pity pass,” and I can’t imagine fans who hate the idea of the “lucky dog” to give a drive a lap back being able to tolerate doling out a slot in a high-profile race just on what amounts to charity.


• It’s hard to say anything about the whole Don Imus mess without opening up a can of worms. What I wonder, though, is how anybody can believe that anything has been significantly improved in any real way by what’s happened in the past 10 days? Is the world any better off? Is America any closer to having any kind of real discussion about race and class issues that really matter? If Imus has a job or doesn’t have one, does that matter in terms of the true causes that create the deep divisions in our culture? I’m going to say no, to all of the above.


• Somebody sent around an email the other day offering up six photos of the Toyota SUV that Michael Waltrip wrecked in “to the highest bidder.” As long as people like that exist, I’ll know that somebody has less of a life than I do.


• I don’t think I would be a very popular person on the racing message boards if I ran a race track. That’s because I would have an absolute ban on outside food and drink in my track.

Coolers? Have fun with them in the parking lot, but when you come in the gates if you want food or drink you have to buy it from me.

I have no problem with people who’re camping cooking or with fans tailgating. Yes, beer and hot dogs and sodas and everything are overpriced at the race track. But how much does a drink and box of popcorn cost at the movies? You can’t carry your own food in to the multiplex, can you?

How to win a NASCAR race

Greg Biffle is confused. He’s not by himself.

“I don’t know what etiquette is,” Biffle said this week when asked about the finish of the past two Nextel Cup races.

At Bristol, Jeff Burton got the nose of his car to the inside of Kyle Busch’s bumper off Turn 4 on the last lap. Burton, however, chose not to turn right to take Busch out and take the win away.

Then, at Martinsville a week ago today, Jeff Gordon rapped on teammate Jimmie Johnson’s rear bumper around a dozen times in the final five laps. But Johnson managed to keep from wrecking and held off his Hendrick Motorsports teammate to win.

Instead of offering applause for the relatively clean racing that still resulted in breathlessly dramatic finishes, however, some people have reacted with derision and accusations that Burton and Gordon displayed nothing more than a lack of willingness to do what it took to get the job done.

Such bloodlust, frankly, is not all that surprising from some NASCAR fans. Until six cars crash across the finish line upside down and on fire one day, there’s a group out there who’ll never quite be satisfied.

What’s troubling, though, is that in the past two weeks I’ve heard criticism of Burton and Gordon from people who, quite frankly, I thought knew better.

One person with a very prominent job in the sport called after the Martinsville race and suggested that I needed to write a column reminding drivers that each victory in the season’s first 26 races is now worth an extra 10 points they’ll carry forward with them into the Chase for the Nextel Cup.

The implication, of course, is that the cost of wrecking Busch and Johnson and potentially doing them actual harm needs to be weighed against the potential value of 10 extra points when a championship is on the line.

Has the sport sunk that low?

“If you can just get to his rear bumper do you just boot him and take the win?” Biffle asked. “I don’t know what we’re supposed to do. I’ll do whatever. If you can…catch him and just wreck him and go, that’s what I’ll do. But there are going to be a lot of people outraged about that, I think.”

Last year at Talladega, Brian Vickers was vilified for winning after he wrecked the two cars leading him on the final lap. Was that because it was at Talladega, a track where the cars go faster than they do at Bristol or Martinsville and therefore perceive it to be more dangerous there? Or was it because one of the cars that got wrecked was being driven by Dale Earnhardt Jr.?

There has to be a standard, one that applies no matter what track you’re at or who you’re wrecking. That standard ought to be that if you have to wreck the guy to beat him, you don’t deserve to win.

“It doesn’t take any ability to crash the guy in front of you,” Biffle said. “That takes no skill whatsoever.”

It takes no class, either.