No one was trying to make anyone mad

Final notes, thoughts and observations from the NASCAR Sprint Media Tour hosted by Lowe’s Motor Speedway:

I swear I had no intention of making anybody from Ford mad Thursday afternoon at the final stop on the media tour. Too bad, because that’s not how things worked out.

Part of the story from 2007 was that Ford’s teams, especially those at Roush Fenway Racing, fell behind early in the season because they were not aggressively testing the car of tomorrow.

Jack Roush said all along that’s because he understood the purpose of a tire-leasing program that NASCAR had introduced was to keep teams from going to other tracks aside from the ones NASCAR had picked out for testing.

What I never could figure out, though, was that Roush had to know other teams were testing their cars on tires they’d either saved from earlier years or bought from somebody other than Goodyear. If he knew that, he had to know his teams might be falling behind. Why did he continue to refrain?

It’s my fault that I didn’t ask him that question before Thursday. But when the topic came back up again I did ask it. I don’t really know if Roush was mad at me for asking it – maybe I asked it so poorly that he felt like I was accusing him of not paying attention or something. He may have not been mad at all, but he sure got exercised in his reply.

“I thought that they (NASCAR) were serious,” Roush said. “I thought that they were going to stop testing. They said they were going to control the testing and we were all going to test at the same place. I figured it was a matter of time until the guillotine fell on the people who were testing the cars.

“I wasn’t going to create a scenario where they said, ‘Everybody’s doing it.’ Everybody wasn’t doing it. We weren’t doing it. …I thought it was going to be real bad for the people who were. I was wrong. I misread NASCAR.”

Dan Davis, director of Ford Racing Technology, got fired up, too.

“You hear the words and music and you want to do the right thing,” Davis said.

“We are ethical at the Ford Motor Company, we want to do the right thing. So we held hands and said, ‘This is what we should be doing, this is what we have been asked to do.’ It turns out that we misunderstood or someone changed their minds. Who knows?”

Whatever happened, after Hendrick Motorsports won the first five car of tomorrow races last year and the Ford teams weren’t giving them much of a run for it, several of the Roush drivers started wondering aloud about what was going on.

Carl Edwards said that drivers just started going into offices one day asking what they were going to do about getting beat up so badly. Before long, they’d worked up a full-blown meeting and the decision was made to start testing aggressively.

As reporters sat there Thursday listening to Roush and Davis talk, we could hear something that sounded like springs creaking. They said the seven-post shaker rig was in an adjacent building and you could tell people were working right on through our little visit.

Edsel Ford, the great-grandson of Ford founder Henry Ford, was there and he’d sternly advised reporters “Don’t underestimate our resolve.”

Davis echoed that in even stronger terms when Roush paused to take a breath.

“The past six months we’ve been really pushing it hard,” Davis said of efforts to catch up on the new car. “We’re testing everywhere we can go and we’re testing all kinds of vehicles. I feel like we’ve caught up.

“Sometimes I feel like you need to be a little bit behind and a little bit embarrassed to get your (expletive) together. That’s kind of where we are. It’s together, so look out this year.”

Wheeler weighs in

The Ford guys weren’t the only ones who had their jaws set Thursday.

Lowe’s Motor Speedway president H.A. “Humpy” Wheeler always gets up at the final media tour stop and says a few words. He thanks his tireless staff for the work they do on the tour, thanks reporters for coming and asks for feedback on how to make it better.

When Wheeler got up there Thursday, though, he had something else to say, too.

“Maybe nobody else has said it this week, but ticket sales are flat or down and television ratings are down,” Wheeler said. “We need to make this car of today work so we can get back to the kind of racing where we’re putting those black doughnuts on the doors and not making a felony out of it.”

Wheeler said he thought the most important thing said on the tour all week came at the first stop on Monday when NASCAR chairman Brian France said that the sport needs to get “back to basics” and work on its bonds with its long-time fans.

“I think that’s a turning point,” Wheeler said. “I am glad that was admitted and that we are talking about it.”

There's a schedule and there's a guy

Bruton Smith can be quite the motivational speaker.

At the news conference announcing the new drag strip at Lowe’s Motor Speedway, Smith was asked if he can get it built in time to host the inaugural National Hot Rod Association Carolina Nationals on Sept. 11-14 as scheduled.

Smith looked down in the front row where the person who’ll be heading up the project was seated.

“Stand up,” Smith said. “This is him, so if it’s not done in time, now you will know what he looked like.”

That’s looked. As in past tense.

Have Humpy call Dumbo

Speaking of Bruton Smith, he has an idea for a prerace show that shows you just how big he thinks – or maybe how close to insanity he actually is.

I promise you I am not making this up.

“I want to train a couple of small elephants to roller skate,” he said.

“And then, I would take them up and let the jump out of an airplane with controlled parachutes to guide them down on the track. Then you’d let them roller skate around the track and give the winner a bag of peanuts.

"You’d remember that, but we haven’t done that yet. We’re working on that one. The problem is finding a trainer to train the elephants.”

Oh, so that’s the problem.

A fair representation, maybe better

The media tour’s home base this week was the Embassy Suites on Speedway Boulevard, and the people who run that place did Charlotte and Concord proud.

I don’t know how they could have done a better job of setting up the various meeting rooms and meals and hospitality suites over the week. The folks from Lowe’s Motor Speedway and the sponsors and teams and the people who set up all the audio and other logistical stuff didn’t miss a trick that I saw.

If those folks do that kind of job with every meeting or convention that comes in there, they’re representing this area in a first-class manner and they deserve at least this much praise for the job they do.