Where is the love? Dale Earnhardt Jr. asks

HAMPTON, Ga. - Poor ol’ Dale Earnhardt Jr. Bless his heart, he’s just not getting enough attention.

“When we blow a motor and fall out of the race, the story is who won and how exciting the race was,” Earnhardt Jr. said this weekend at Atlanta Motor Speedway. “We're lost in the back of the newspaper somewhere and we get no credit for how good we've been.”

Gosh, that’s awful. How could the dazzling success of a team that’s done what Earnhardt Jr. has done all year be overlooked?

I mean, for goodness sakes. The No. 8 car has finished in the top 10 twice in the past seven weeks. It has led 59 whole laps in the past two months. And the team got all the way up to 11th in the points for one whole week early this year, and clings tenaciously to 13th in the current standings.

“As far as handling and running up front, I've never ran up front as often as I have this year,” Earnhardt Jr. said. “I never have. This year I've been going to the race track and been in the top five 95 percent of the races and I've never been that way before and it's a shame we won't be able to get the credit or the ‘attaboy’ for it."

You know, looking back on how we’ve covered the sport this year, suddenly it becomes apparent that all of us in this business just have not given Earnhardt Jr. enough publicity this year. After all, you hardly ever read anything about him in the paper.

Just to be clear, I do understand his point. Too many times this year, Earnhardt Jr.’s day has started off with great promise only to come to a bad end. Last week at Martinsville, for instance, he ran among the leaders all day until his troubled engine finally gave way on the final restart.

He finished 23rd, and that’s really been the story all year. Despite the fact he’s run well at times, Earnhardt Jr. and his team have not closed the deal. The No. 8 Chevrolet hasn’t won a race since May 6, 2006, at Richmond, and he’s had as many did-not-finishes (seven) as he’s had top-five finishes this year.

“We feel we missed a great opportunity this year with a great chance of winning the championship and challenging for it,” Earnhardt Jr. said of what will be his final season at Dale Earnhardt Inc. “We’re really ticked off about that. ...We feel like we're a top-five team. We've run in the top five every week. I don't think anybody even realizes.”

Earnhardt Jr. seems to have a fast car for Sunday’s Pep Boys Auto 500 at Atlanta Motor Speedway. He’s won here before, and he’s won at Texas and Phoenix, too, so it’s absolutely possible that he’ll win again before moving to Hendrick Motorsports next year.

“I feel ridiculous going winless this year because we should have won,” Earnhardt Jr. said. “I feel pretty gypped.”

As for any lack of attention, though, that’s laughable.

There’s a test Monday and Tuesday at Atlanta Motor Speedway, with teams working on their car of tomorrow setups for this type of track for next season. Earnhardt Jr. will be testing with his new team, and a lot of reporters who’d normally be heading home after Sunday’s race will be hanging around at least for Monday’s test primarily because of that single fact.

Shav Glick was a gentle giant of a sportswriter

Shav Glick died early Saturday at his home in Los Angeles. He was 86 years old, but in experience years, he was more like 286.

Glick was the motorsports writer for the Los Angeles Times from 1969 until his retirement in late 2006. He had been battling cancer for the past year or so, and if I know Shav, he fought the heck out of it.

There’s very little evidence that Glick ever wanted to be anything else besides a sportswriter. Maybe that’s the reason I respected him so much.

He had his first byline in the paper in his hometown of Pasadena, Calif., in 1935 when he was just 14 years old. So for 70 years, give or take, Glick covered sports.

When he retired, he wrote a column about some of the greatest moments in his unbelievable career. He told a story about a baseball game he covered at Brookside Park, near the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, in March of 1938.

The Chicago White Sox faced a team of players from Pasadena, and that team included a young shortstop who had two hits, stole a base and played so brilliantly in the field that the White Sox manager said he’d sign the kid in a minute if he could. The thing was he couldn’t, because the shortstop was named Jackie Robinson and he was black.

Glick covered Ted Williams when Williams was still in high school in San Diego. In that retirement column, he wrote this: “You think about all the wonderful things you have seen and been privileged to write about - 35 Indianapolis 500s, Formula One races, Times Grand Prix sports car races, every Long Beach Grand Prix but one, world championship motorcycle events, midgets, spring cars and yes, even drifting. And that's only the motor sports. How about two Olympic Games, a dozen Masters and U.S. Opens, a British Open at St. Andrews, Wimbledon, the World Series, Santa Anita Handicaps and…more Rose Bowl Games than I can count.”

The remarkable thing is that Shav was quite likely was the nicest guy in the press room at just about every one of those events.

With this ring ...

MARTINSVILLE, Va. - Sometimes the smartest thing you can do is just get out of the way.

With that in mind, we present the following release about Greg Biffle's wedding this week to longtime girlfriend Nicole Lunders.

Enjoy.

At just around 6:15 p.m. on Wednesday, October 17th, Greg Biffle and his longtime girlfriend Nicole were pronounced husband and wife in a little white chapel at the Palmetto Bluff Resort in South Carolina.

The couple met in the spring of 1998 and began dating officially later that summer. Last Christmas, Greg decided it was time to propose and Nicole happily accepted. Plans were made for an autumn wedding at the southern resort located about 20 minutes from Savannah.

Greg and Nicole exchanged vows with just over 100 of their family and friends on hand for the ceremony. Katie Kenseth served as the matron of honor and Rodger Ueltschi, a childhood friend of Greg’s, served as the best man.

Also included in wedding party were Michele Lunders (sister-in-law of the bride), Kris Rondeau (friend of the bride), Amy Wilson (friend of the bride), Jeff Biffle (brother of the groom), Tony Lunders (brother of the bride) and Matt Kenseth (friend of the groom). The newlyweds also included three other family members, Foster, Gracie and Savannah (two boxers and a rescue dog), in the post-wedding photos.

The bride was escorted down the aisle by her father Russ and wore a custom backless white dress with a Chantilly lace overlay by Bonaparte NY and designer Junko Yoshioka. The bridesmaids wore lavender dresses by Vera Wang.

Following the ceremony, guests were invited to have cocktails on the lawn where the setting could well have been the backdrop for a scene in “Gone with the Wind”. Guests were treated to a six-course dinner at the Palmetto Bluff Inn and a reception with drinks and dancing followed.

The Biffles would like to extend their sincerest gratitude to everyone in the NASCAR family for their best wishes at this joyful time.

Man bites dog at Martinsville

MARTINSVILLE, Va. – Ron Hornaday and Mike Skinner came into the media center a while ago to talk about their battle for the NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series.

It’s a pretty good scrap, with Hornaday leading Skinner by 14 points. They’ve swapped the lead back and forth a handful of times in the past six weeks, too, and each has won four races this year.

Skinner led 246 of 253 laps in the race here earlier this year, but Hornaday has had the hot hand in the series lately.

So you’d think their fight for the championship with five races left would be a good topic for discussion, right?

Well, maybe not. The third question was about Jacques Villeneuve. The next two were about Dario Franchitti.

Between them, Villeneuve and Franchitti have run a grand total of one race in the Truck Series – Villeneuve ran at Talladedga. Hornaday and Skinner have run in 344, winning 56 times. Hornaday has won two championships and Skinner has one.

Now I understand a "man bites dog" story as good as anybody else. Open-wheel racers coming to NASCAR is the flavor of the month.

But good grief.

Skinner and Hornaday were as polite as they could be in answering the questions. But they were absolutely puzzled by the line of questioning. And rightly so.

To bump or not to bump

MARTINSVILLE, Va. – You know, Jimmie Johnson is in a tough spot.

Think about it. Earlier this year, Johnson was leading the race at Martinsville Speedway and his Hendrick Motorsports teammate Jeff Gordon rapped on his rear bumper about 20 times trying to move Johnson out of the way to win the race.

Johnson held on and Gordon finished second. There was a lot of discussion afterward about the relative propriety of how they raced each other, and that has been renewed in advance of Sunday’s Subway 500 at this .526-mile track.

The accepted wisdom now seems to be that it’s more difficult to move somebody out of the way with the car of tomorrow, although Johnson says it doesn’t take these guys long to figure how to do what they need to do.

So there’s a level at which a higher degree of contact seems to somehow be more acceptable here. That sort of "do what it takes" attitude is, for some reason, easier to justify now than it might have been before.

For everybody but Johnson, that is.

Think about it. If Johnson is running second behind Gordon in the final laps on Sunday, he’s in a no-win situation.

If Johnson bumps Gordon hard enough to get him out of the way and goes on to win the race, all Gordon has to do is cry foul. Since Gordon didn’t "take" a win from Johnson in that way, Johnson would be in position to take some heat if he did that to Gordon.

If Johnson doesn’t bump Gordon at all, fans will be all over him for not trying hard enough to beat his teammate or for not trying hard enough to win because of the Chase for the Nextel Cup.

To bump or not to bump? Either way, I think Johnson is in a tricky spot. Or at least could be.

Ray Cooper will be sorely missed

For some reason, Ray Cooper always seemed like he was being asked to walk through life going uphill into a strong headwind.

Things rarely seemed to go easily for him. Sometimes he'd run into obstacles and every once in while he'd drag a few of them into his own path.

But the thing about Ray was that, no matter what, he always kept going. No matter how steep the hill got, no matter how strong the wind blew, he kept getting after it. And most of the time, he did it with a smile on his face.

So early this summer, when he started feeling bad, for a while he just kept plugging. Finally, though, he had to go to the doctor. And the news he got wasn't at all good.

Coop almost always found ways to beat whatever you threw at him. If you sat with him at the poker table, you knew that even if he had nothing in his hand there was a better than fair chance he'd find a way to at least split the pot with the guy who did.

After winning all kinds of awards as a racing writer, he went to work as a manfacturer's public relations rep. That means he'd go to as many drivers and teams with Chevrolet or Dodge -- he worked for both since I met him -- and record what they were saying in interviews. He'd then transcribe that and put it out for the rest of the reporters who might not have been right there at the time.

Sometimes, a driver or crew chief will say something that the people who wrote Coop's paycheck might not have wanted reporters to see. In most instances, though, Ray didn't care.

He felt that it was his job to help people like me do ours, and since he'd done our job before, he knew what we really needed to get from him. So that's what he did, and sometimes that didn't make him the employee of the month. But it made him somebody we could trust and appreciate.

Coop's doctors tried what they could. While all of that was going on, Ray tried to keep working. He came to Bristol, with a lot of effort, just to see everybody because he missed being around us. We sat there that Saturday afternoon and laughed and told stories, and when I walked away it made my heart hurt even more because that's something we'd become accustomed to doing every week with him.

When the doctors said there wasn't a whole lot more they could do, Ray decied that he might as well go on back to work then. And he tried, too. But cancer just doesn't play fair.

Ray died early Saturday. I really can't come up with anything more profound to say about that than it really, truly stinks that he's gone.

How far can Smith vs. Concord go?

This business about Bruton Smith thinking about building a new track to replace Lowe's Motor Speedway interests me on a lot of levels.

First, it's great theater. Smith has a lot of showman in his soul, and he certainly got racing and his facility on the front page of my newspaper with this week's public relations gambit.

But I think it's crazy for people to think Smith is just trying to sell tickets for the Bank of America 500. I don't see how that works. Are fans sitting around saying, "Gosh, we'd better go see the race at Charlotte next week before they close the track?" I doubt that.

Is Smith already trying to creat a "buzz" about the drag strip he wants to build near the current track? Maybe, but there would be a "newness" to drag racing in Charlotte the first few years and I think drag racing has enough fans to fill up the stands for a National Hot Rod Association event next September if that comes off.

What I keep wondering is what happened? Smith told me this week that he had a meeting in his office six weeks ago where he showed economic development officials connected with the city of Concord his plans for the drag strip that started all of this. He read their names to me off the business cards he collected at the meeting.

The folks in Concord say they had no idea Smith had started moving dirt, though. That's entirely possible, since talking about doing something and actually doing it are two different things. But the people in Concord have been doing business with Smith for years and they have to know that Smith isn't the kind to ease into a project.

But somewhere, somehow, somebody convinced the mayor and the city of Concord to call a special meeting last Monday night and change the zoning rules to speficially prohibit Smith from building a drag strip.

Was it a simple matter of Concord being upset about Smith going headlong into action without signing off on everything with them, or was it because there are people who've built homes near the track in the past few years who have enough clout, for some reason, to back Concord into a corner where it had to take some kind of stand against Smith that now has blown up into the current mess?

Here's where we are now. If Smith builds a drag strip at the current location of Lowe's Motor Speedway, it's going to look like he made Concord back down. If Concord doesn't cave, Smith might be forced to show that he's willing to back up the talk he's done about taking his racing franchise elsewhere in the Charlotte market.

When it gets to that point, egos are a factor. Smith has a huge one, there's no question about that. But don't make the mistake of thinking the people on the other side of this don't have at lot a stake in this, too.

It takes two sides to have an argument, and each side is always going to be convinced that it's the other one that's being stubborn.

The scary thing is that sometimes both sides dig in so far that nobody can really afford to give ground. But eventually, something has got to give.

Time is a fleeting thing, on the track and in real life

I am sitting here on a Friday afternoon, piddling away at stuff with Nextel Cup practice from Talladega on the television, and somehow I got to thinking about how funny time is.

I'll be heading to Talladega early Saturday morning to cover qualifying for Sunday's UAW-Ford 500 at the 2.66-mile track. When that starts, the 16 guys fighting for the eight spots available to those not in the top 35 in Nextel Cup owner points will be fighting for every tenth of a second they can get.

I would guess that the fastest eight in that group will be among the fastest 12 or so cars overall in the qualifying sessions. The 35 exempt cars worked mainly on racing setups Friday, but the other were trying to squeeze out every possible bit of speed from their cars.

A second on a race track like Talladega is forever. But sometimes forever can seem like a second, too. In a couple of hours, I am going to my 30th high school reunion. Good grief, I swear it was like three or four days ago I was sitting in Mrs. Geraldine Johnston's English class trying not to choke while taking a test on whatever we had been reading that week.

They sent us a list of people who're planning to be there Friday night, and as I read through it I saw names of a bunch of people that I went through 12 years - Rhyne Elementary, Highland Junior High and Hunter Huss High School - with. I can't say for sure, but I think there are a handful of them that were in at least one class with me every day from the time I was 6 until the time I went to college.

Somebody asked me how long it had been since I saw some of those folks, and it stunned me to have to say I imagined I hadn't seen them since we graduate in June of 1977. It sure doesn't seem like that.

The reunion is Friday night and Saturday night, but I am only playing hooky from the race track for one night. They'll have to tell lies about me rather than to me at Saturday's gathering.

The other reason I didn't go to Alabama on Thursday, as I normally would have, was that we had Eli's first birthday party Thursday night. His birthday was Wednesday, but it worked out better for everybody to do it a day late, and I was lucky I got to be there to see him.

Eli is my grandson, and he's growing up like a weed. There are million things I could say about him, but it'd just be the kind of paw-paw bragging that nobody really wants to hear.

What amazes me most about him, though, is the sense of wonder he still seems to have about everything you put in front of him. A puppy, a bicycle, a toy with a few flashing lights - anything that catches his eye makes those same eyes light up and dance.

I am guessing, and hoping, there will a lot of that same light in some of the slightly older eyes among my old friends and classmates when we get together Friday night. There were a lot of pretty cool people who graduated with me in 1977, even though when I looked back today at the list of songs that were atop the charts that year I have to admit I was pretty disappointed.

Surely we knew better than that.

Anyway, tomorrow I'll go back to thinking about and writing about the tiny little snippets of time that make such a big difference in the sport I now cover.

Until then, though, I think I am going to see how slow I can make time go. I look forward to seeing what kind of young man Eli will be one day, but I have to admit he's pretty remarkable the way he is right now.

As for my old high school buddies, maybe we'll manage to spend as much time talking about how remarkable things have been in the years since we left each other as we will about how much fun we had back and Hunter Huss.

I sure hope so.

All hail the potty-mouth police - NOT!

I don’t know if NASCAR will do anything to punish Tony Stewart for using an expletive that aired during a Saturday morning practice session from Kansas Speedway.

And, to be totally honest with you, I absolutely do not care. I know there will be people who get their knickers in a bunch over it. Plenty of folks sitting around me in the media center got all worked up, running to tattle to NASCAR after hearing about the four-letter word from their respective networks of nervous Nellys.

A couple of hours later, I saw a knot of about a dozen of them camped behind the NASCAR trailer, apparently waiting to see if some official was going to come out and say that Stewart would be drawn and quartered, or flogged in the courthouse square.

I know Dale Earnhardt Jr. got penalized 25 points three years ago when he used a four-letter word in a victory lane interview. And I know that earlier this year, Juan Pablo Montoya got in trouble for making a gesture toward a cameraman when he didn’t know the camera was being used to send out a live picture.

But I also understand that this whole thing has gotten so far out of hand it’s not even funny any more. What you have now are a bunch of people sitting around their TVs looking for things to call in about. It’s getting to be as bad as golf, where people with nothing better to do than research obscure rules decisions looking for a way to get somebody slapped with a two-shot penalty.

If a NASCAR driver is looking dead into a camera with a reporter standing alongside of him asking him questions, the driver should be smart enough to know that he’s being interviewed and that he should watch his mouth. I really don’t know if points penalties are appropriate for that, but that’s the standard that has been set.

Now, though, the potty-mouth police are trying to extend their jurisdiction. Let a driver say “hell” or “damn” during an interview and my email box fills up with people asking why that’s not worth 25 points, even though it never has been. There are also times when a driver or crew chief has no way of knowing what he’s saying is being broadcast, but some fans still think anything these competitors say should be punishable. I say…well…I say a word that would probably hack off those prigs.

You can argue that Stewart shouldn’t use words like the one he used Saturday morning at all, and that’s fine. But I don’t think you can argue that he should be responsible for figuring out when a camera that’s on him is going out live or not. I thought the penalty against Montoya earlier this year was a travesty, too, because it’s not up to the competitor to look for the little red light.

NASCAR doesn’t want its race broadcasts to be “R-rated,” and I understand that. By and large, its competitors get that. But that doesn’t mean they should be held responsible if a microphone picks up something the competitor said without fair warning that it was being broadcast.

What it comes down to these days is a silly little game of “gotcha.” I, for one, am just through playing it.

Drag strip too much for speedway and airport neighbors

KANSAS CITY, Kansas - As I was leaving Kansas Speedway Friday afternoon, I drove out of the tunnel and took a left to go up a block to stop by the Arthrur Bryant's barbecue restaurant to pick up some supper.

It's hard for me to pass up Arthur Bryant's when I come here, but if I'd wanted to eat somewhere else I probably had about 30 choices within a 360-degree scan of the horizon from the top row of the race track.

As I drove through the area, past the Cabela's and the Nebraska Furniture and the whole "Village West" area that's grown up around the track here since it opened, I couldn't help but be reminded of a place a little closer to home.

The first time I went to Lowe's Motor Speedway, it was still called Charlotte Motor Speedway. And for several miles in any direction, that's just about all that was there.

Now, within a couple of miles, there's a golf course, a new resort hotel, a handful of new and used car lots, 25 to 30 restaurants of all shapes and sizes and one of those mega-malls that we're always told ranks among North Carolina's top "tourist attractions" each year.

Charlotte has grown in a lot of directions, and while technically the speedway area has been annexed by the nearby city of Concord - in what largely is a marriage of convenience concocted to work around my home state's convoluted laws governing alcohol sales - some of the growth in that area was inevitable.

But some of it, undoubtedly, was spurred by the presence of the track, too.

People also live out that way, and sometimes living near a place that brings in crowds of more than 150,000 brings with it challenges.

But the track has been in the same place since 1960, and what few people who've been there since then no doubt have largely made peace with all of that by now.

There is, however, a storm brewing that involves some folks who haven't been around quite as long as the speedway has.

There are folks, some of whom built or moved into their houses as recently as last year, who vow to fight LMS owner Bruton Smith on his desire to build a drag strip on the speedway's property. Some of the leaders from the city of Concord appear to be inclined to side with those who have concerns, too, and this does not sit well with Smith, who very much likes to get his way.

As of late this week, the permits and paperwork involved in undertaking such a project had been wrapped up. But Smith already had people moving dirt on the site where the $60 million drag strip facility would be built. The National Hot Rod Association has already saved Smith a slot on its 2008 schedule, Sept. 11-14, and in Smith's mind he could have the new place ready in plenty of time for that.

I sort of wonder about people who'd buy a house located between a major private aviation airport and an oval track that has cars on it maybe 200 days a year, adjacent to a major interstate and within just a few miles of every kind of shop, store or service one could imagine and still think a drag strip would interrupt their quiet, serene bucolic lifestyle.

The residents who oppose a drag strip at Lowe's Motor Speedway have every right to make those feelings known, and the people elected to serve those citizens apparently have some tough decisions to make in the next few weeks.

But if there's one thing I've learned in the 11 years I've been doing what I do, it's that the people who build places like Lowe's Motor Speedway and Kansas Speedway aren't the kind of people who usually sit still or who think small.

And once they get a ball rolling, it's awfully hard to stop it.

How Dale Jr. got No. 88

DALLAS – So we now have a pretty good idea of how this whole Dale Earnhardt Jr. deal with Hendrick Motorsports and his new car number and sponsors went down.

Based on the conversations and interviews done at Wednesday’s news conference at the Dallas Convention Center, the leading number in the clubhouse was, for quite a while, the 81.

Somewhere along the way, though, as trademarks and things like that were being researched, it was discovered that there’s an apparel company called Company 81 that sells a lot of the same kind of shirts and things you’d sell to race fans with a car number on it.

Hendrick Motorsports could have trademarked a particular design of an 81, but there’s nothing that could have been done to stop that company from putting out its own shirts with that number on it. That would have caused a type of confusion in the marketplace nobody wants any part of.

(There also was the fact that "81" is a number sometimes associated with the Hell’s Angels motorcycle group. Supposedly, members of that group sometimes have that number tattooed on them because the "H" is the eighth letter of the alphabet and the "A" is the first, so "81" also can stand for "HA." Team owner Rick Hendrick, though, said that wasn’t a factor in the decision to move away from the 81.)

Earnhardt Jr. and Hendrick and everyone involved wanted a number with an "8" in it. They never thought much about the 88, figuring that number is already taken by Robert Yates Racing.

But since the number 28 isn’t being used right now, and since Earnhardt Jr. is keen on the sport’s history, that was the next target.

Kelley Earnhardt Elledge called Yates to ask about the 28 or, if Yates wanted to bring back the 28, maybe getting the 38. Yates said the 28 meant so much to him, because it was Davey Allison’s number and the number Yates started his team with, he’d rather keep that and bring it back himself. (That means you can figure the two cars Doug Yates will own next year will probably be the 28 and the 38.)

Robert Yates suggested the idea of giving the 88 to Earnhardt Jr.
That was fine with Earnhardt Jr. and Elledge and Hendrick. The number has a legacy in the sport, with 65 victories. Dale Jarrett is a driver Earnhardt Jr. respects, and he had the most recent success with it. Darrell Waltrip also won 25 races in that number, and DW also won championships driving in the Mountain Dew sponsored car.
So that all worked out nicely.

"Robert said ‘two eights are better than one,’" Elledge said.
To try to keep reporters guessing, Hendrick said the team put in trademark applications for several numbers it had no intention of using. He also said there were decals of other car numbers, figuring that information would get out and lead people to jump to conclusions. Some did.

Earnhardt Jr. said he had fun "playing the game" with reporters about the number and sponsor all summer. Hendrick was laughing, too, about the efforts to throw reporters off the scent.

But the whole thing just drove Elledge about half crazy, she said.

"I wish people could have just waited until we had it all to show everybody," she said. "There were times when I felt like I was in the middle of a big gossip ring."

Of course, if nobody cared enough to keep asking the questions, then Wednesday’s press conference wouldn’t have been carried live on several cable channels, including a home shopping channel. And a plane load of media from Charlotte wouldn’t have traveled halfway across country to see two paint jobs, either.

Plenty of room for racing

LOUDON, N.H. - There's a story going around up this way that New Hampshire International Speedway is for sale. I've been coming here 11 years now, and that sentence could have been written virtually every time I've been here.

Bob Bahre not only owns this track, it's like he's part of it. You see him around the garage and several other places all the time, far more than you ever see any other track owner unless you happen to be hob-nobbing in some corporate suite.

(That might not be totally fair. Dr. Joe Mattioli at Pocono is around a lot, too. But he and Bahre are certainly 1 and 1A in that department.)

Every time I'm here, I go into the little diner/snack bar next door to the media center for lunch on Friday. The food's good and the prices (yes, I pay) are very reasonable.

Every time, there's a big table in a corner with Bahre sitting there talking to NASCAR's top officials, usually including Mike Helton, Robin Pemberton and John Darby or at least some combination of the above.

There's a social element to the gathering, and of course there's lunch, too. But Bahre is also asking the NASCAR brass if there are any problems that need to be attended to as well. If something comes up, he'll take care of it. He won't disptach a minion to do it, either.

Bahre is 81 years old. He goes like he's half that age, but one of these days he's not going to want to put up with doing all he has to do to run a big-time race track. He's got a son, Gary, but Gary has apparently made it abundantly clear that he doesn't have this place in his blood the way his father has.

So with Nextel Cup dates worth their weight in dollar bills, the fact that ownership of this track might one day change hands stirs great interest.

Bahre has talked to International Speedway Corp. and to Speedway Motorsports Inc. (and its owner Bruton Smith), and the latest story is he has talked to John Henry, the man whose Fenway Sports Group bought into Roush Racing earlier this year.

That would be a perfect marriage, between the Boston Red Sox and this track.

You can't swing a rope around your head here without hitting someone in a Red Sox hat, and while the rest of the country this week has been paying a lot of attention to the New England Patriots' "spygate" affair the folks up here are obsessing over every pitch of a weekend series at Fenway Park with the New York Yankees.

There's absolutely no question that the Sox own this region. The Patriots might be a dynasty, but I once was at a Super Bowl where the Pats played the Carolina Panthers and all the Boston media could talk about was the latest developments on the baseball team's pitching staff.

That having been said, these folks also love racing. It rained all morning Saturday and it took until the start of the Truck Series race at 3 p.m. to get anything on the track.

The weather cleared and the Trucks raced, then the Whelen Modified cars took the track. As the sun went down behind the grandstands, the wind picked up and it was beginning to get a little chilly (by my standards, at least). But there were still plenty of people in the grandstands watching that race.

When this track is sold one day, the new owner might have plans to take one of the Cup dates away. That'd be wrong. The fans here fill this place up. They've done nothing to warrant losing a race. They support this track and support racing on all levels.

If selling it to John Henry and the Fenway group, maybe that means the New England roots will hold and those fans won't face that fate. Baseball might be king in New England, but there's plenty of room for racing here, too.

Dale Jr., Kahne announcements coming soon

Next week is shaping up to be big week for NASCAR and the beverage business, with two major sponsorship announcements scheduled.
First, on Tuesday, Gillett Evernham Motorsports has set a 10. a.m. news conference at the team's shop near Statesville to announce the primary sponsor for Kasey Kahne’s Dodges for 2008.
Numerous sources and published reports have said that Budweiser will be that sponsor, moving to Kahne’s team after being on Dale Earnhardt Jr.’s No.. 8 Chevrolets.
Earnhardt Jr., of course, is moving from Dale Earnhardt Inc. to Hendrick Motorsports next year, and the final pieces of that puzzle will come together the next day in Dallas, Texas.
The Hendrick team has schedule a news conference for 1:30. p.m. on Wednesday to announce Earnhardt Jr.’s primary sponsor and to reveal the car number and paint scheme.
Why Dallas? ESPN.com reported Thursday that there is a major meeting of Pepsi Cola Company executives there on Wednesday. That would jibe with sources who have told the Observer that Pepsi-owned Mountain Dew and Amp, an energy drink affiliated with the Mountain Dew brand, will be featured on Earnhardt Jr.’s cars.
As for the number, as of now that remains a question.
Hendrick Motorsports has applied for trademarks on several numbers, most recently the No.. 28 adding that to a list that includes the 38, 51, 58, 81 and 82.
Team owner Rick Hendrick said last week in Richmond that the new number would "likely have an 8 in it."
The 88, currently used by Robert Yates Racing, also can’t be ruled out. Driver Ricky Rudd is retiring at the end of the year and Travis Kvapil, who will take over that ride in 2008, said earlier this week he doesn’t know what his number will be.

NFL following NASCAR's lead

Somehow it's fitting that NASCAR is going to New England this weekend, isn't it?

All of a sudden, fans who pull for race car drivers aren't the only ones having to fall back on the whole "everybody does it" defense when it comes to living outside the rules.

The high and mighty New England Patriots, coached by the widely proclaimed "super genius" Bill Belichick, find themselves right in the middle of what we used to call a "BOM" story when I worked on the news side a thousand years ago. "BOM" stood for "Big Ol' Mess."

During Sunday's game against the New York Jets, NFL security removed someone who worked for the Patriots because he was suspected of attempting to steal the Jets' signals. The miscreant's video cameras and tape were also seized.

This comes after the NFL specifically warned teams they would face severe penalties if they were caught videotaping other teams' signals.

If you're a NASCAR fan, doesn't this all sound familiar? NASCAR tells teams not to mess with the car of tomorrow body or we're going to hit you hard, and when the penalties come down people act like they're stunned to be getting them.

Belichick "apologized" on Wednesday and said only that he had explained to NFL commissioner Roger Goddell that the case stemmed from a "interpretation" of the league's rules. The only thing he didn't say -- or at least I haven't heard it -- was anything about gray areas, working outside the box or pushing the envelope, but it's the same principle.

Anybody who has paid the slightest bit of attention to me when it comes to penalties in NASCAR knows that I have little tolerance for the "if you ain't cheatin', you ain't trying" attitude. If you can't play by the rules, you don't get to play.

Well, don't expect me to be different when it comes to the Patriots and Belichick.

Take away draft picks? That's even more importent than NASCAR fining people money and points. Suspending Belichick for one game or more? That works for me -- I like the idea of a four-game sit down, matching what the NFL does to players who don't play by the substance abuse rules.

But there should be more. The Patriots won a game they didn't play fair in. I don't care if they won 130-0, if they cheated the win shouldn't count. Maybe you don't give the Jets the win, either, but no way should the Patriots get to count that victory.

As news days go, Friday was another big one

Good grief.

Every once in a while you have a slow news day when you're covering NASCAR racing. Friday was not one of those days.

There's something about this race track in Richmond. Every time we come here, all heck breaks loose.

Maybe it's just the time of the year. In early May, the season has been going long enough for stuff to start shaking out. In late September, we're about to start the Chase and some teams are starting to turn the page on next year.

But it's strange. When they announced the settlement of the Texas lawsuit that led to "modernizing tradition" with changes to the schedule, that was announced here.

When they announced they were going to put restrictor plates on cars for a race at New Hampshire, that came out here. Dale Earnhardt held court about that in his hauler that day for more than an hour, but only about 10 minutes worth of what he said was printable.

Early Friday morning, DEI confirmed what everybody had been zeroed in on in saying that Mark Martin and Aric Almirola will drive the No. 8 and Regan Smith will get into what's now the No. 01.

A little while later, we noticed people scurrying about around the No. 31 Chevrolet. AT&T logos were being brought back out and slapped on the car. Something was afoot, and we later learned there had been a settlement in that legal battle involving NASCAR and Sprint Nextel along with AT&T and Richard Childress Racing.

Oh yeah, it looks like Dario Franchitti is coming to NASCAR to replace David Stremme at United Nations Racing...er...Chip Ganassi Racing with Felix Sabates. That's big - Ashley Judd in the Cup garage!

Jimmie Johnson won the pole for Saturday night's race and hardly anybody noticed. But as everybody tried to wind up their day, an e-mail blast announced that Robert Yates is retiring, selling his team to his son, Doug, canceling the announced partnership with
Newman/Haas/Lanigan and naming Travis Kvapil to replace Ricky Rudd in the No. 88 next year.

Other than that, as an old friend of mine once said, ain't much happening.

The fun of being a NASCAR fan

One thing I don't understand about sports fans is how - or why - they keep trying to draw boundaries around the whole concept of "fandom."

In NASCAR, for instance, I get fans telling me that they can't understand why anybody would follow a driver when he switches from one team to another. I get just as many fans who tell me they can't understand how you can be a fan of a driver and NOT follow him when he goes to a new team.

The same goes for manufacturers. A long time ago in stock-car racing, people pulled for Ford or Chevrolet or Plymouth, not for the drivers who were in those cars. Over the past 20 years or so, however, that has changed dramatically. In recent years, it's all about the drivers.

But that pendulum may be swinging back a little bit. A lot of fans have complained to me this year that Chevrolet has been too dominant in NASCAR, too successful for the overall good of the sport. I think it does matter, on the grand scale, that more than one type of car is a threat to win.

That's one of the reasons I think it's good, in that whole big picture way, that Joe Gibbs Racing is going to swap to Toyota for 2008 and beyond.

I am in favor of anything that creates potential rivalries in NASCAR, whether it's driver vs. driver or team vs. team or whatever. If you look at the driver lineups for next year, Tony Stewart-Denny Hamlin-Kyle Busch (at Gibbs) vs. Jeff Gordon-Jimmie Johnson-Dale Earnhardt Jr.-Casey Mears (at Hendrick) is good stuff. The fact that they will now be in different types of cars makes it that much better, I think.

If a fan who has been behind Tony Stewart for his whole career decides he or she can't pull for him in a Toyota, that fan has every right to feel that way. If an Earnhardt Jr. fan can bring himself to pull for a driver at Hendrick Motorsports, that's OK, too.

The whole point I am trying to make is that I don't think it's my place to tell anybody why he should or shouldn't like or dislike anybody or anything there is about sports.

Don't tell me that just because I live near Charlotte the Dallas Cowboys can't be my favorite NFL team. Don't tell me I can't pull for a team because a guy I liked 20 years ago played there, but also don't tell me I can't completely lose interest in a team if my favorite player retires or goes somewhere else.

A fan can be as illogical and as irrational as he or she wants to be in deciding who or what to pull for or to pull against. That's why the whole thing is so much fun.

Hollywood? Nope, and certainly not Darlington

It has been a while since I’ve engaged in much idle speculation about changes to the NASCAR Cup schedule that aren’t going to happen, but being in California on Labor Day weekend always sort of puts me in that mood.

There’s just no good reason for us to be here this weekend. Everybody knows that, and I think that even includes the people all the way to the top in NASCAR. This is the fourth time the Cup series has raced here on this weekend, and the experiment has just completely failed.

Yeah, it’s laughably hot here this weekend. Actually, it’s probably not that funny since there’s a very real hazard that fans who brave the 105-degree (or more) heat to come to the track are going to have to be careful about things like heat stroke as they wait for the green flags. Almost nobody came to the track for qualifying on Friday, but it’s hard to find fault with fans for that. It was just too hot to enjoy anything about being here.

It’s usually hot in Darlington, S.C., on this weekend, too, and every once in a while a hurricane might be menacing that area around the first of September. That’s where I think we still ought to be going on this weekend every year, but it’s actually kind of unfair to advocate that solely on the basis of weather.

The Southern 500 began on Labor Day weekend in 1950 and for 50 years that’s what race fans did on this weekend. The people in the Pee Dee region of South Carolina embraced the event and made it part of their summer-ending holiday traditions, too.

It took a while for the race to take root, and maybe California Speedway hasn’t had enough time to create the same situation here. But there’s absolutely no sign it ever will.

Friday night after qualifying, the “fan zone” outside the track was a ghost town, locked up and shut down. One reason is that the track doesn’t allow people to camp outside the track. The only overnight guests allowed must be in the track’s infield, and that’s a very different approach from the one other tracks take.

There’s also a real dunderheadedness about how this track markets itself. Wednesday night, it brought in some drivers and some celebrities and held a $2,500 per ticket fund-raising “Hollywood party” about 50 miles away at a Los Angeles club.

Aside from the charity angle, who was that for?

People who hang out on the Sunset Strip are never, no matter how badly NASCAR desires it, going to be in stock-car racing’s demographic.

The folks who live around Fontana and the many cities north and east, aren’t stars. They’re hardworking people who endure the weather and other challenges of living in the Inland Empire year-round.

But when the track hires 43 model-actress wannabes to act as “ambassadors” and pitches its entire marketing approach around low-rent celebrities and around having a Wolfgang Puck restaurant in the fan zone, it seems like those people are being told the track isn’t particularly looking to do business with them.

I think California Speedway needs two races a year.

It’s easy for me to say this track should add variable banking to make the racing better, but it also hosts open-wheel events and that has to be considered, too. Pushing this track’s second date back into Chase for the Nextel Cup seems like an obvious idea, both because of the weather and because the interest level might ramp up.

The simple fix would be to swap this track with New Hampshire’s second date. New Hampshire would likely have better weather this time of the year, for one thing. But that doesn’t address the Darlington issue and it also would further skew the track mix in the Chase toward the intermediate style track.

I think the answer is Kansas Speedway. Put this race where Kansas is. Put Kansas where Dover is, the first week in June, and move Dover’s first race to the first weekend in May.

Slide Richmond back from that weekend to Mother’s Day Saturday night, and move Darlington back to Labor Day. You also leave Dover out of it and just put Kansas in the early May slot.

That leaves the mix of tracks in the Chase relatively unchanged – you actually get slightly more variety since you’re taking about a 1.5-mile track and putting in a 2-mile. It takes away Kansas’ value of having a race in the Chase, but a race in early May or early June in Kansas doesn’t ring any other obvious alarms in my head.

If you really want to get creative and put the open weekend that many people believe we need right before the Chase starts, I can make that work, too.

New Hampshire comes to Labor Day. There’s the open week, then Richmond opens the Chase.

California goes to where Kansas is. Kansas moves to Dover’s slot in June. Dover moves to where Richmond is now, and Richmond moves to the open date in April that will exist next year because NASCAR is eliminating the open date after the season’s second race here in February.

Getting Darlington back to Labor Day is more complicated in that scenario, and maybe that ship has sailed. Darlington’s doing pretty good on Mother’s Day weekend now, and if the trade-off for leaving it alone is a commitment that the track is going to get the money it needs to make the right improvements and the support it needs to keep that May race flourishing, then I am OK with that. Especially if it creates the kind of break at the end of the regular season that all of the rain we had at Michigan showed is needed.

Planes, emotional drains and automobiles: The saga continues

ONTANA, Calif. – Apparently, I was wrong.

The "band," and I use that term in the broadest since possible, knew quite a few songs. Perhaps even more than the Grateful Dead. Its songs, however, all sounded the same, very much like what you might hear from a calliope or an old-timey merry-go-round, especially after the accordion player joined for the second show.

If you’re walking into this movie in the middle, sorry. Thursday night, I wrote a blog as I sat out a "weather delay" in the Atlanta airport on my trip toward California Speedway. I wanted to pay that off right quick for the few of you who might either care or take some sort of perverse pleasure in the travel travails of others.

We did leave Atlanta on Thursday, beating that deadline by about 45 minutes.

When I left off in the story, we were waiting for flight attendants who’d been diverted to Charleston, S.C., for refueling.

Their plane finally arrived in Atlanta around 9 p.m. They arrived at Gate A27 and we were at E28, so they were only about two Zip codes from us at that point. Which was progress.

We finally got loaded up, at least upstairs in the passenger portion of the plane, around 10. But we just kept sitting there, and when the Jet-way was wheeled back to the entry door I knew that wasn’t good.

Apparently, the plane that had been sitting there on the tarmac for nearly four hours while we waited on personnel had a mechanical issue with its cargo door that went neither discovered nor addressed in that interim.

What’s fascinating, of course, is that the airline kept apologizing to us about the delays but explaining that since it was weather related there was really nothing they could have done about it. I guess the cargo door must have swelled up in the heat, or contracted due to the rain?

Anyway, we arrived about the time I figured we would, at 15 minutes after Friday, local time.

That was 15 minutes after the car rental counter closed, of course, so I took a cab to my hotel and was in the bed at 2 a.m., 5 a.m. "body clock" time.

The radio show I was supposed to do two hours after that had been waved off late Thursday night. I had no confidence I was even going to get until sometime today, so we had to make a call on that and Sirius went to its bullpen.

But I’m at the track now, finally. Got another cab back to the airport this morning and got a car, then arrived here at 10 a.m. I was apparently moments too late to hear Kyle Busch basically confirm everything that’s being reported about Joe Gibbs Racing switching to Toyota, so I’ve got some catching up to do.

And just think. In only about 72 more hours, I get to climb back into the maw of the United States air travel system once again.

Can’t wait.

Weather delay

It’s 7 p.m. Do you know where your sanity is?

Sitting in the Crown Room at Atlanta’s airport, parked because there’s weather in the area.

Here’s how my luck runs. My airplane for the flight to Ontario, Calif., is here. Sitting at the gate, ready to rock and roll. The problem is that the flight attendants for our flight are not here.

Just about the time they were supposed to land, from goodness knows where, a thunderstorm rolled across the field. They circled for a while, and then for a while longer, and finally they were running low on fuel.

So that plane was sent to Charleston, S.C., to get refueled, and is supposed to get back here about 8:30.

Supposed to, of course, being the operative phrase.

That’s assuming things go perfectly for the good souls on that plane the rest of their evening. Which, most likely, ain’t happening. Best-case scenario, they get here and we’re ready to go by 9 or 9:15 Eastern, which puts us around 10:30 p.m.

I am going to set the over-under on midnight. I say that because I’ve been in this movie before. The last time I tried to get to Ontario, it was from Orlando and we got held up in Atlanta. We landed there, finally, about 11:55 p.m. Which worked out nicely, since the car rental place my company deals with closes at 12.

This is not my first rodeo.

I was sitting out at the gate for a while and I noticed this tingling sound. I thought it was in my head for a while, then I looked across the concourse and there was a lady sitting that tapping on a triangle – you know, the instrument that is to a band what right field is to Little League.

Sitting next to her, a guy had pulled out a fiddle. And he was playing, too. Within a little while, another fellow had sat down and he had a guitar. Now I am guessing they were all together, but you never know.

Any way, the problem was that I had specifically requested the "no hoe-down" section when I came into the airport. As we waited – I guess they’re on my flight, since there was no sign of any flight leaving from over there where they had set up the barn dance – they kept right on playing.

I can’t swear to it, but I think they know about four songs, and they all seem to feature some really intricate triangle playing.

So I escaped to the Crown Room, a vestige of my 2006 experiment to fly with Delta from an airport in Charlotte that is dominated by another airline. It’s pretty easy to get to Los Angeles out of Charlotte on that airline, but – at least theoretically – Ontario works out easier on Delta. And Ontario’s airport is about five or 10 minutes from the California Speedway.
That, oddly enough, is where I am supposed to be at 3:30 a.m. Pacific time on Friday to get ready to do the Sirius Satellite Radio show I do, which begins at 7 a.m. Eastern.

Right now, at 7:16 p.m., I would say the odds of me getting to California by then are not better than fair. My wife, Katy, accuses me of borrowing trouble by worrying too much, but I don’t see it was worry. I see it as stark realism.

First, my question is this. The plane coming here that got diverted was almost certainly going to be flying somewhere else after it got here, right? OK, somewhere in this airport the crew that was going to work that flight is doing the same thing I am doing – waiting. Why can’t they get on our plane and we’ll be on our way?

I know, that puts them out of place and causes a big ol’ mess. But that’s what we’ve get here anyway.

Here’s my guess as to what’s getting ready to happen.
About 9:30, the flight attendants on the plane diverted to Charleston will roll in here and the regulations about "crew rest" will kick in, saying they can’t work a full four-hour flight to California tonight. Delta will exhaustively search for an alternate crew, and we’ll get out of here along about 10 or 10:30.

Friday morning, that is.

What went wrong at Bristol?

After watching Friday night’s Busch Series race at the new Bristol, I very nearly wrote a blog Saturday predicting that I was getting ready to see one of the best Nextel Cup races I’d seen in the nearly 11 seasons that I’ve been doing this.

I was certain that the Sharpie 500 was going to be memorable, given the prospect of having cars race two- and three-wide for 500 laps at my favorite NASCAR track.

When the race was over, though, I was trying to figure out who to blame. Who ruined this race? What caused Bristol to turn into Mini Michigan? I felt like Wilford Brimley in that scene from “Absence of Malice,” when he was telling Sally Field or Paul Newman or somebody that when he left he was going to have somebody’s backside in his briefcase to take with him.

I needed somebody to blame. I know some people think I am crazy. They saw cars running side-by-side at Bristol Saturday night, and they noted that a faster driver didn’t have to knock a slower one out of the way to pass him. This is because, for some reason, they enjoy watching racing a half lap or so away from the leaders. Me? I’ve never understood that.

The drivers loved the new track, thought it was fantastic. Well, bully for them. But they get paid to race, and it shouldn’t be about what they like. I don’t know a whole lot, apparently, but I do know that the more drivers like racing at a place the less likely fans are to want to watch races there.

Racing is about winning, isn’t it? I will guarantee you nobody among the 160,000 fans in attendance sat in hours of traffic afterward talking excitedly about how great it was to see three guys battle for 19th. Fans who see a race at Bristol will go home with great memories, but Saturday night most of those memories were about the place, the hoopla and the pre-race festivities.

The race itself? Kasey Kahne led 305 laps, then Carl Edwards led 182. David Ragan wrecked three times. And that’s just about it. It was, to say the least, a letdown. I spent much of the night and the entire drive home trying to figure out who or what to blame.

The Busch race was about as good as it gets, and that race was held on the same new track and on the same supposedly hard tires that the Cup guys had to race on. The only real variable I can think of is the car of tomorrow, but it seems too easy to lay all the blame at its feet. But I do think that’s part of the problem, and it’s a problem that ought to scare NASCAR to death.

What happened at the front of the field Saturday night, pure and simple, was that while the leader had clean air on the nose of his car he was unbeatable. That’s aero push, and if it’s that bad at Bristol with the COT what’s it going to be like next year when that car runs at California? I’ve been told a thousand times that when you take away mechanical grip, aero grip is all you have. The COT takes away downforce. Harder tires take away grip, too. So when you have less grip from other sources, air winds up being the trump card.

The only time things got a little racy up front at Bristol was when a leader came up on traffic and didn’t have the good air on the nose. So it seems to me that to fix that, you need to give the car itself more grip or give the teams tires that have more of it. NASCAR controls everything about the COT, so if it doesn’t have somebody at its research and development center working day and night on getting more grip into the car, then shame on NASCAR.

I am SO tired of hearing that Goodyear had to be “conservative” with the tire because they didn’t get to test tires on Cup cars before the race at Bristol or somewhere else. Teams pay $2,000 a set for four new tires and the average team gets eight to 10 sets of tires per weekend. Do that math for 43 teams over 36 races and doesn’t it seem like Goodyear could afford to have its own testing program? If Goodyear can’t afford such a program, maybe NASCAR could help fund it, or find a tire supplier than can pay what should be that cost of doing business.

Why doesn’t NASCAR have about five or six people who either still work for Goodyear or once did and who know all there is to know about racing tires working with them on making the COT better? Maybe they already do, but if those guys are already on the job there was little evidence at Bristol that they’re making any headway.

I get a lot of feedback from race fans these days about all of the things they think are wrong with NASCAR. They complain about how much it costs to buy tickets and reserve camping spots. They gripe about the sport being too vanilla, or too politically correct. Television ratings are down, significantly, and NASCAR has all kinds of excuses about why. Fans say it’s because of when the races start, because the broadcasts have too many commercials and annoying announcers or, as happened at the end of Friday’s Busch race, somebody goofs up and turns off the satellite feed.

Frankly, I am sick of all that, too.

Not because fans don’t have the right to complain, but because they’re complaining about a bunch of little stuff that wouldn’t matter one bit if the product was what it ought to be. If a race leader got passed in the final 100 miles of race on any regular basis anymore, would people really care whether Dale Earnhardt Jr. got the No. 8? If fans felt like races were competitive tests of man and machine instead of a three-hour science class, would anybody be worked up over ESPN missing a restart by two or three seconds? I don’t think so.

So, in a way, I guess I blame myself. Apparently, I haven’t been focused on the right problems when trying to understand what’s going on in NASCAR. I still have to write and talk about whether Joe Gibbs Racing is going to Toyota and about what companies are going to sponsor Earnhardt Jr. in his number whatever car next year. But I promise you that as of Saturday night I am going to spend as much time as I can asking people if the road that NASCAR is heading down is really the road to competitive ruin.

When you mess up Bristol, things have gone entirely too far.

Hard to find any real winners in AT&T vs. NASCAR, but neither wants to be the loser

BRISTOL, Tenn. – Sometimes the right thing to do isn’t the smart thing to do, and vice versa.

The trick, I think, is not to get backed into a position to have to choose between the two too often.

That’s where I think NASCAR is right now, midday on Friday, on this whole thing with AT&T and its sponsorship of the No. 31 Chevrolets owned by Richard Childress and driven by Jeff Burton.

NASCAR, I think, has allowed itself to be cornered into a no-win public relations situation.

Burton’s No. 31 car is making laps at Bristol Motor Speedway with no sponsor logos on it, at all, and AT&T is managing to make that look like NASCAR’s fault.

It doesn’t matter that the situation is far, far more complicated than that. What matters is that NASCAR comes off looking like the bad guys, and is beginning to look a little petty, to boot.

Late this morning, a NASCAR public relations person sent an e-mail to various broadcast elements within the sport saying that "during this weekend's…coverage of the Sharpie 500 and in any on-air discussions, the Number 31 car should be referred to ONLY AS the "RCR Chevrolet."

"If you could clearly communicate this to your producers and hosts, it would be greatly appreciated."

This was "communicated" to me near the end of our show on Sirius radio. So we only had a few minutes to rip NASCAR for taking such a ridiculous stand. But we did take full advantage of it.

OK, a quick review.

The No. 31 car was sponsored by Cingular when Nextel took over as title sponsor of NASCAR’s top series. NASCAR gave the team, along with the Alltel-sponsored team for Ryan Newman, a clause saying they could keep those sponsors even though no other telecommunications deals could be made to conflict with exclusivity promised to Nextel.

Then, AT&T bought out its partners in Cingular and moved to change the name to AT&T Mobility. It wanted the No. 31 car to reflect that change, but NASCAR said that’s not what the grandfather clause allowed. Cingular was OK, AT&T was not.

AT&T sued. NASCAR countersued. In May, AT&T got an injunction allowing its logos to go on the car. Last week, an appeals court overturned that injunction. The actual case is still pending, but as the legal proceedings stand right now, NASCAR has the right to tell AT&T to take its logos off the No. 31 car.

NASCAR says it is trying to protect all of the teams in the sport by defending the title sponsor’s right to exclusivity. RCR and its fans feel NASCAR is trying to deny it the right to associate itself with a sponsor that has been in the sport for a long time and merely wants to stay.

It’s a tough spot all the way around.

NASCAR is trying to land a title sponsor for what’s now the Busch Series. If it tells a company it can guarantee exclusivity, that company could look at the Nextel-AT&T thing and wonder if that’s true. It also has to think about its major series sponsorships down the line. If AT&T has some right to challenge Nextel’s position, why couldn’t Firestone try to side-door Goodyear?

RCR wants to keep going with what used to be Cingular and feels like it should have every right to do that. Further, the appeals court decision last week basically denied that Cingular has "standing" to sue over this deal.

The aggrieved party would be RCR, the court says. That means that to show its sponsor it’s willing to fight for its rights, RCR needs to sue NASCAR. NASCAR, meanwhile, needs to show the industry it’s willing to fight by fighting in court, too.

All this week, AT&T has been looking for other avenues to use the courts to get its way. As of this writing, it has failed. There’s no question that AT&T is going to the mat to fight this thing, and NASCAR isn’t all that keen on that. NASCAR likes to get its way, too.

NASCAR this week rejected a couple of alternative paint schemes submitted by the team. In response, AT&T is portraying itself as a martyr for the team and the sport.

"I can’t think of too many occasions when a sponsor has run a car without a logo or any other identifying markings," said Mark Siegel, executive director of media and industry analyst relations for AT&T, in an e-mailed statement. "That is because NASCAR left us with no choice.

"We thought (the alternative paint schemes rejected) was more than a fair compromise, given the Court of Appeals’ recent ruling. NASCAR rejected this proposed paint scheme, leaving us little choice but to go with a logo-less, brand-less approach.

"Because we love the sport, we are willing to take this approach, which literally does nothing for our brand image or identity. We don’t want to disappoint the great NASCAR fans, and we want to continue to support Jeff Burton and Richard Childress Racing."

This battle has become one that neither side wants to lose. They’re fighting for what they think is right.

What needs to happen is for both sides to find some solution that works for everybody. I think that’s what would be smart.

David Poole Max Doppler 3000 says ...

2:30 p.m. Monday -- Yeah, it's raining again at Michigan.

It's not raining hard. Not nearly as hard as it was overnight when Kasey Kahne said it was keeping him awake as he tried to sleep inhis motorhome.

But it is raining enough to discourage most of the optimism that was spreading through the garage an hour ago.

NASCAR had the teams start rolling the cars toward pit road about 2 p.m. The jet dryers were on the track and crews were setting up their war wagons on pit road.

People were talking about the "hole" opening up in the weather and how there was a "window" in which it looked like we could get at least 101 laps -- halfway plus one -- in to make it official.

All around me in the media center, people are looking at weather radar on their computers. A few minutes ago, I took two quarters out of my pocket and flipped them over to two guys sitting across from me.

"Take this," I said. "This is something I just developed. I call it David Poole Max Doppler 3000. Heads means it's going to rain. Tails means it's not. It tells you as much as anything you're looking at."

I've stopped worrying about it. I don't fly home until Wednesday now, whether they race today, tomorrow or whenever. I did enough laundry last night to tide me over until then.

I got to the track this morning about 6:30 to do the Sirius radio show, which starts at 7. The garage opened at 9, so the gates near the building where the radio rooms are were locked.

I got on a golf cart with somebody from the track to ride around the back of the garage where a gate was open. It didn't have a roof. It took us maybe 3 minutes, and I looked like a drowned rat by the time we got there. The guy who was driving me had to ride back, though, so I guess I was lucky.

The jet dryers are still working, perhaps fighting a losing battle (we'll see). From the media center, I can see a few rows of grandstands and there are race fans sitting there, waiting and hoping. You have to appreciate that.

Yesterday afternoon, when NASCAR mentioned that in a worst-case scenario we might have to come back up here the week after Thanksgiving, some of the people sitting around me started getting hotel rooms for that weekend. And people think I am a pessimist.

All I can do is wait.

While I do, I will sit here and try to think more about why all week the local newscasters in Detroit have seemed obsessed with the story of a hurricane approaching and passing Jamaica and Grand Cayman. That's a long way from here, right?

Sort of like home.

Quick thoughts from the track at Michigan:

BROOKLYN, Mich. -- The story about Dale Earnhardt Jr. and Teresa Earnhardt doesn't have anything to do with the number 8. It's all about the age of 8, which is about how old Earnhardt Jr. was when his relationship with his stepmother took shape.

The best-selling book in the history of NASCAR could be one that tells the whole story about their relationship and everything that has been said and done in their negotiations this year.

But it's a book nobody will probably ever get to write, because to do it right you'd have to have co-operation from both sides. And the minute one side finds out you've got a deal with the other side, that ends any hope of making the deal with the second side.
* * *
I keep trying to remember this when I am watching ESPN's NASCAR coverage: green air is good, yellow air is bad?

Winning is the only feeling that counts

Eight times.

I went back and counted.

Eight different times during Tuesday’s press conference announcing Kyle Busch’s deal with Joe Gibbs Racing, the same question was asked in one way or another.

Basically, it came down to this: Can Kyle Busch find a way to fit in JGR and get along with the drivers who’ll be his teammates, Tony Stewart and Denny Hamlin?

To be fair, the media didn’t start it. The entire affair kicked off with team owner Joe Gibbs doing a routine on videotape from Washington Redskins training camp.

"I got to thinking about this," Gibbs said as he addressed his son, team president J.D. Gibbs. "We’ve got Tony and the way Tony acts sometimes, and we’ve found that Denny is no piece of cake. Now we have Kyle? J.D.? ‘Good luck.’"

So that set the tone, and for the next 45 minutes or so there was a lot of collective hand-wringing about whether the 22-year-old Busch will ever grow up enough to fit in or whether his new team will let him be who he is more than he is allowed to be at the team he’ll leave at season’s end, Hendrick Motorsports.

For goodness sake.

There was a funny moment when somebody asked J.D. Gibbs if he’d be able to keep Kyle in line along with the team’s other drivers. Without missing a beat, Gibbs wondered aloud if JGR has managed to keep Stewart "in line" over his tenure at the team.

In case you’ve missed it, there have been times where having Stewart on the team has presented its challenges.

At the same time, Stewart has won three of the past four races and has to be considered a contender to win a third championship this year. He and his crew chief Greg Zipadelli have the longest driver-crew chief relationship running in Cup today, and a strong core group has been on Stewart’s No. 20 team since it first formed at JGR.

Winning goes a long, long way to smoothing over hurt feelings.

There’s not one reason in this world to think that Kyle Busch, who already has four Cup victories and could even win a championship at Hendrick Motorsports this year before he leaves that team to come to JGR, won’t be a winning driver for years to come with his new team.

That’s why when Busch became available, after Rick Hendrick made the decision to sign Dale Earnhardt Jr. instead of re-upping with Busch, there was a line of owners stretching out the door trying to sign him up.

"There were say 15 teams that really couldn’t have cared less about what Kyle Busch did off the track, around the track and to people at the track," said Jeff Dickerson, Busch’s agent. "I think that speaks volumes about where people’s priorities are. He can drive. All of the people that we wanted to talk to we were able to talk to."

Fans speak with a forked tongue on the whole issue of drivers and their personalities. They don’t want "vanilla" drivers, but let a guy they don’t like for some reason show a little bit of anger or tempestuousness and all of a sudden that guy is the devil.

"I think I've done a very good job at tricking everybody," Busch said Tuesday. "You know, I show them the bad side. I don't show them the good side. Why show the good side? Then I'd be Carl Edwards or something. Just kidding. See, there's some sense of humor. They're laughing, good. No, I'm kidding."

Carl Edwards is great for NASCAR, but the sport doesn’t need 25 of him. It doesn’t need 25 of any one type of guy.

As the press conference went on and on, Busch seemed to get worn down by the same question time and time again. He finally started talking about getting people to "help" him.

"I guess I've got a few edges here or there, but hopefully none where I can't just grind them down a little bit and soften them up some," he said.

Have there been times when Busch could have chosen his words or actions better so far in his career? Of course there have. But this business of anybody expecting him to become a different person just because he’s changing race teams or might celebrate a few more birthdays is just another indication of how absurd things get sometimes in this sport.

He is who he is, and he is one incredibly talented driver.

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.