The pace car pandemonium shall pass

I get asked all the time why NASCAR won't sell its Sprint Cup rulebook to anybody who wants a copy.

I think part of the reason is that NASCAR knows its fans would sit there with the rulebook every Sunday and try to read every line on every page and find someway to claim that somebody is getting unfair treatment or an unfair advantage. Golf fans do that to the point of nausea - some poor guy kneels under a tree to hit a shot and puts a towel down to keep from ruining his pants and 200 nerds call the USGA to say he's "building a stance!"

This is relevant today because of what happened near the end of Sunday's LifeLock 400 at Michigan International Speedway. Dale Earnhardt Jr., trying to save fuel in his Chevrolet, was hitting the accelerator to build up a little speed and then cutting off his engine to coast as far as he could.

In doing that, he surged ahead of the pace car that had the field in tow behind it. And people lost their minds.

I do not know the specific language in the rulebook about passing the pace car because, to be brutally honest, I have somehow managed to misplace the rulebook I got at the start of the season. It's here somewhere, but you know how that goes.

But I do know there's a rule that says you can't pass the pace car. I also know, though, why that rule is there. It's to keep somebody from making up a lap he doesn't deserve. Let's say a guy comes off pit road just a little bit late and is pretty much alongside the pace car. He could speed up and pass the pace car to try to stay on the lead lap.

That's why the rule is there. It's not there to set some imaginary force field through which no car shall pass.

If Earnhardt Jr. had been running ninth and doing the same thing to try to save fuel, he would have pulled to the apron and done the same thing. He might have passed two or three cars in front of him momentarily, and there's a rule against that, too, at least technically. But if he goes right back to his spot when he's done coasting, there's no advantage gained.

I've been known to be a stickler for rules and someone who believes penalties for violations should be clear and, to some, harsh. For the most part, that's true.

But if you read carefully what I've said on the topic, you'll realize that in almost all cases I've talked about NASCAR dropping the hammer only after a violation has been called.

NASCAR officiates the sport. Where they get in trouble with me is how they penalize people after finding violations. I've never said NASCAR doesn't have the job of calling the violation, and part of that is deciding how certain things are called.

In baseball, a shortstop doesn't always have the ball in his hand when he tags second on a double play. Heck, sometimes he doesn't even tag the base. But consistently that "phantom tag" is called as an out. If umpires one day just started calling that the other way with no explanation or warning, that'd be wrong.

Last year at Kansas, Greg Biffle was fighting fuel issues while leading the race late and some fans didn't like how NASCAR officiated that. They freaked out then, too, to be honest.

But NASCAR reacted the same way there as they did Sunday. NASCAR did not determine the winner of a race based on some literal, overly technical reading of a rule, and I still think that was the right no-call. I feel the same way about what happened Sunday at Michigan.

Accentuate the positive - or else

BROOKLYN, Mich. - There’s a great phrase in the Southern vernacular that you have to be careful about using. It might rub some people the wrong way, but that doesn’t mean it’s still not perfect to describe what happened here Friday morning.

Whenever someone is called on the carpet or brought in to have his attitude adjusted, people where I’m from sometimes refer to that as a “Come to Jesus meeting.”

The phrase refers to the fervor with which a preacher might make his altar call at the close of a service. It’s not meant to be sacrilegious. When you go to such a meeting, you don’t get advice. You get admonition.

NASCAR president Mike Helton, in this instance, delivered the message. He told the drivers in the Sprint Cup Series, by what few accounts we were able to get throughout the rest of the day, that NASCAR is getting fairly tired of hearing complaints about the new car those drivers are racing this year.

There are various ways you could take that.

It doesn’t exactly send the right signal to your fans if the people who’re competing in your sport get out of the car and talk about how bad the racing is, how much they hate their race cars and how frustrated they are at what’s going on.

One of the points apparently made at the meeting and reinforced after it by other NASCAR officials was that fans are paying $4 a gallon for gas on top of what they have to pay for their tickets and hotel rooms to come to a race these days. If people stop coming or don’t watch on TV, sponsors stop paying the bills and drivers don’t make millions doing what they love to do.

All of that is true, to a point. On the other hand, however, it comes off as pretty heavy-handed for the drivers to be told, basically, to shut up and race.

NASCAR officials said the meeting was something they do from time to time, but nobody remembers the last time the drivers showed up for a day’s work and were summoned to a meeting. Drivers were told the meeting would happen at 11 a.m. and practice opened at 11:30, so it was clear that it wasn’t going to be the kind of meeting where there was a free-flowing exchange of ideas.

Naturally, word of the meeting spread quickly to the media. It lasted less than 10 minutes and drivers walked out declining to comment. The signal was they’d been told more about what not to say.

NASCAR spokesman Jim Hunter afterward encouraged the media to talk to the drivers about what was said, but after the practice ended at 1 p.m. some of the drivers clearly felt like the less they said the better off they’d be.

So it comes off that NASCAR’s message was “We make the rules, we’re not going to change the rules and we don’t want to hear you complaining about them or talking about how the racing needs to be improved.”

What that implies, though, is that there are things that need to be changed but that NASCAR isn’t going to change them because the drivers haven’t toed the line and kept their mouths shut.

Drivers weren’t the only people who got a talking to Friday. I was told that similar messages were delivered to the sport’s television and radio “partners.”

NASCAR has a problem handling criticism. I know this from personal experience. A lot of the people very high up in that company believe anything that’s not positive is meant to tear down the sport.

What NASCAR doesn’t realize is that the very fans they’re trying to “protect” know when they’re being fed a line of malarkey. They don’t like being told by a TV announcer that the racing is great when it’s half a mile from the first-place car to the second-place car. They know that it’s phoney baloney when guys sit around on a stage and talk about how wonderful things are.

They’ll notice when a driver swallows his tongue for fear of being called to the NASCAR hauler instead of voicing a complaint or criticism that the driver quite likely means to be constructive in hopes of making things better.

After Friday’s meeting, they’ll know if for sure.

Cup effort and team should come first

What Kyle Busch did over the weekend in NASCAR's three national touring series was unprecedented. If you ask me, it should have stayed that way.

Let me say right up front that I know I don't run the 23-year-old driver's life or career. I also understand that the folks at Joe Gibbs Racing signed on off Busch driving in the Truck race Friday at Texas Motor Speedway and the Nationwide Series race Saturday at Nashville Superspeedway before running in Sunday's Pocono 500 in the Sprint Cup Series.

The Gibbs folks have a lot more at stake than I do, and if they were OK with it then maybe I don't have a right not to be. But I think I do have a right to an opinion about running three races in three states in less than three days.

I'm against it.

I know Busch loves to compete, and that's a big reason he's having such a tremendous year. I also would have felt the same way I do right now if Busch had finished in the top five - or even if he had won - all three races.

If you're looking for a pattern, you could argue that since Busch finished second on Friday, 32nd on Saturday and 43rd on Sunday the"triple" wore him down. I don't know that's true.

Circumstances are different in every race and Busch came out on the wrong side of them in the Nationwide and Cup races. He may well have wrecked his primary car in practice at Pocono, started from the back of the field in a backup car and then wrecked in the race and finished last even if he hadn't run at Texas and Nashville, or even at Texas or Nashville.

I am not a proponent of a Cup driver running for the Nationwide Series title, no matter who that Cup driver is or where he is in the Cup standings. During this portion of the season, running the Nationwide and Cup races at different tracks on the same weekend requires a lot of back-and-forth travel that just seems awfully unnecessary to me.

I really have no patience with the explanation these drivers usually make, saying that they're 100 percent focused on their Cup effort. That's just untrue on the face of it. All of the logistics are worked out so the driver can leave the track where the Cup team is to go to the track where the Nationwide cars are. The effort goes into making the secondary race happen, not the first.

Busch, however, went a step further. He added a Truck race into the mix at yet a third track. Even though he had backup drivers in place at Texas and Nashville for practices and qualifying runs, Busch traveled and raced at three different places in about 48 hours.

If the order had been reversed, maybe I'd have no problem with it. If Busch had run the Cup race on Friday and then followed it up withNationwide and Truck events, that would have been different. But Busch's primary job is to compete for this year's Sprint Cup championship, and he has by any objective measure a real shot at winning that. The members of the No. 18 team are committed to that effort.

If a member of the over-the-wall crew decides to run a marathon on Saturday and then comes up a step or two slow when he comes to the track on Sunday, is that fair to the rest of the team? I don't think so, and I think the driver should be held to the same standard.

Maybe it was good for the Nationwide and Truck series to have Busch try to make it to and compete in all three races in the same weekend. I am not convinced that's true.

Ron Hornaday won the Truck race and Brad Keselowski won the Nationwide race. But in some quarters, it's a bigger deal that Busch didn't win either. How does that help those two series?

Having Busch in the Truck certainly was good for Billy Ballew's team, and I am sure Braun Racing was happy to have one of the sport's top stars in its Nationwide Series car, too. But Busch is a star primarily because of how he's performing in the JGR car in Cup races this year.

That's the team that deserves not just 100 percent of the effort Busch has left at the end of a busy weekend, but 100 percent of the talent he can bring to a race car when he's 100 percent at his best.

Culture shock is sending cheaters home

The hardest thing in the world to change is culture. That doesn’t mean that it’s sometimes worth the effort.

After 12-plus years of covering NASCAR, I believe that the sport of stock-car racing badly needs a culture change. And there’s really one way to make it happen.

Here’s the problem. Cheating is more than accepted in the sport, it’s revered. People who’ve spent a big part of their careers trying to outflank the rule book are held up as the great examples, the heroes who should be emulated.

I have never, ever understood that.

Smokey Yunick, for example, was without question a total genius in what he could do with an automobile. He did so many things that advanced the science of the race car and the automobile itself. But all you ever hear about him is how he drove a race car from Daytona International Speedway to his shop in Holly Hill with the fuel tank pulled out of the car.

Why is that?

Why celebrate those who waste – and that is precisely the word I want to use – their time, effort and money working on things that aren’t legal? Why revere those who decide to take paths outside the rules to try to get ahead of those who have the integrity to play by the rules?

I am not against innovators. In fact, I am standing up for them. The true innovators are those who find new ways to do things that are legal, that do get approved through proper channels and who don’t have to live their lives worrying about what an inspector might see.

I have said this before, but the example still holds. The engines in a stock car are, by a huge multiplier, more powerful and more durable than they were 20 years ago. But how many times in the past 20 years have engine builders been suspended and/or fined for breaking the rules?

Not many. The engine departments have worked to find better ways to do things and generate more power that lasts longer. They’ve done it, in 99 percent of all cases, within the rules and within the processes that have been established for bringing new ideas into the sport.

So why shouldn’t people who work on suspension elements or the cars’ bodies be held to the same standards?

If you’re messing with the rear-wing mounts, as NASCAR said the Haas CNC Racing teams that got penalized this week were, even if you completely get away with it and race with for 100 straight races what have you truly accomplished?

Where’s the pride in that? There wouldn’t be any if integrity and honor were cherished as much in stock-car racing as they should be.

That’s the part of the culture that I think is off-kilter. But I think it could be changed, and I don’t think it would take a whole lot of time.

How?

Simple. Start sending cheaters home.

If you come to the race track with a car that doesn’t pass inspection to the point that NASCAR rules it will not be allowed on the track, that team does not race. Period.

At any point now where NASCAR would impound the car and force the team to use a backup car, that team should just be told to pack it up and leave.

Send home a couple of teams for not playing by the rules and you begin to change the way that kind of foolishness is regarded inside the garage.

Until that happens, you’re never going to change the culture. And that’s where it all needs to start.

Tall men and smaller ones in traffic on race day

A few observations while waiting for the Coca-Cola 600 to begin:

• Yao Ming is a very tall man. I know that's not exactly breaking news, but until you see a man who really is 7 feet, 6 inches tall or whatever size the Houston Rockets star is, it's hard to completely grasp the concept. Ming, at the track as part of Coca-Cola promotion for this summer's Olympics, was walking through the garage and his head, shoulders and pretty much entire upper torso towered above those around him. He could not have got lost if he tried.

• If you're one of those drivers who pulls up to the front of a long line of traffic and then forces your way in rather than waiting your turn, that doesn't mean you're smarter than the rest of us. It just means that we were raised better than you were.

• So I'm watching the driver introductions to the Indianapolis 500 on TV and Marco Andretti is wearing a Fedora and a jacket with a wide belt. His car is sponsored by the "Indiana Jones" movie and the get-up is supposed to make him look like Harrison Ford does in the films. Actually, it makes him look like he bought a Halloween costume at Wal-Mart.

• I got up in time Sunday morning to watch the final two-thirds of the Monaco Grand Prix. You don't have to be a big Formula One fan to be impressed by seeing those cars zip around that street course. Lewis Hamilton was way out in front, but they showed in-car shots of him darting up hill, downhill, through underpasses and around hairpins and it felt like you were on a roller coaster at your local theme park.

Humpy can't be replaced

I’ll tell you my favorite Humpy Wheeler story.

He was running Robinwood Speedway, in about 1961 or so. It was a dirt track in my hometown of Gastonia. Wheeler grew up over in Belmont, just a few miles down the road in Gaston County, where his dad was athletic director at Belmont Abbey College.

Like most people who ran dirt tracks back then, Wheeler did everything. He went around trying to drum up a crowd through the week and on race day he had to get the track ready for racing.

On this day, however, Wheeler had a problem. The old truck he used to water the track’s surface was broken down. It would not run. Wheeler was in a fix. To this day, Wheeler hates dust at a dirt track more than just about anything in this world.

He went to a couple of volunteer fire departments, hoping to borrow their water trucks. No luck. “It was the dry time of the year and they were afraid to let me use it,” Wheeler said. “I had reached the end.”

Wheeler had one last card to play. He had a buddy in the septic tank business, and he had a truck with a tank to hold, well, liquid.

They pumped water in and used the truck to work on the track. Wheeler went home to take a shower and get ready for a long night of racing. He got back to the track about 4 that afternoon.

“I am telling you, the smell was unbelievable,” Wheeler said. He couldn’t call off the race – tickets had been sold. As the crowd gathered, the complaining started. Wheeler had to think fast.

So he got on the public address system and apologized to his patrons. “The paper mill is at it again,” Wheeler said. It was the best he could do.

Wheeler’s retirement as president of Lowe’s Motor Speedway is official Wednesday. I don’t know for sure if he’s going to hang around through the weekend for his 33rd Coca-Cola 600 at the track in Charlotte, but I sure hope he does. A lot of people need time to tell him thank you.

He’s helped more people get their start or figure out their way through some of the travails of their careers in racing that anyone will ever know. He’s been kind to reporters who’re new at covering his sport. He’s thought more about fans than the fans will ever know and has helped build what I consider to be the template for the modern American racing facility.

I don’t know, not yet, why he’s leaving right now. But I do know he’s done enough for his sport that nobody should begrudge him the opportunity to do some things he wants to do.

I’ve heard that he has plans to write a book that I promise you I will be reading. He loves to travel and I hope that he and his wonderful wife, Pat, get the chance to do as much of that as they want to. He rides his bicycle and reads and thinks about the world in which we live in ways I wish I could.

I asked Wheeler a few years ago if he thought that when he retired anybody would be ready to step into the big shoes he’d be leaving. “Oh yes,” he said, “there’s nobody who can’t be replaced.”

I sort of laughed when he said that, and then I told him a story that applies here. I took the job as motorsports reporter for the Charlotte Observer in 1997, and the man who had that job before me was Tom Higgins. Higgins covered NASCAR for about 30 years and when he retired he received the Bill France Award for his contributions to the sport. He was – and still is, thank goodness – a legend.

I went to Daytona that year for my first race and somebody said, “So you’re replacing Higgins?”

It had never really been put to me like that before.

I thought a minute and said, “Well, not really. I’ve got the job he had, but nobody is ever going to replace Tom.”

Nor Humpy.

A lot to digest from the all-star weekend

Well, it's midnight and all-star day is over.

Kasey Kahne, Ray Evernham and Kenny Francis have just left the media center and are down on the start-finish line doing more of the silly "hat dance" photos that are part of the postrace victory duties.

Kahne did a tremendous job in winning the race. Francis, the team director, made the right call in taking no tires on the final pit stop. I never thought for a minute that any of the three cars that didn't get tires before the final segment would win the race, but I guess that shows track position is king.

I am squarely on the record as being opposed to the idea of the fan vote, which I call the "pity pass." Fans have squandered it, horribly, in past years by putting guys in the main event that had no shot at winning. In selecting Kahne this time the fans did well, and I would have said that if he hadn't won.

Still, Kahne shouldn't have been in the race. He finished fifth in the Sprint Showdown. Two cars advanced out of that race and only one of them should have - the winner. You should have to win something to make the all-star race. I would cut the exemption for past winners of this event and past Cup champions from 10 to five years, too.

But that's all water under the bridge for this year.

It will be interesting to see if Kahne's win provides any momentum for his team going forward. It's interesting that his teammate, Elliott Sadler, was really down after getting wrecked out of the Showdown. Sadler made a mistake on Lap 2 and crashed at Darlington last week, too.

Kahne's win came at a good time for Gillett-Evernham Motorsports, that's for sure.

The 25-25-25-25 format for this year's all-star race wasn't an improvement in any way that I saw. The race wasn't thrilling because there were no cautions other than the ones for the breaks between segments. The lack of any kind of field inversion didn't help, either.

In a larger sense, though, I think that if next Sunday's Coca-Cola 600 is the same kind of event -- where the leader can't be touched and track position is the be-all and end-all - I am going to have to say that NASCAR has to do something about the rules on this car.

I know fans will howl because they didn't change things last year when Hendrick Motorsports was dominating. But NASCAR can't spend this summer, with the economy like it's going to be, having races where the only place the leader gets passed is on pit road.

There are people who say the COT needs to be abandoned, but that's not going to happen. It does look like something is going to have to be done to change what's happening on the track, though.

It'll be an hour or more before I get to leave here because of the traffic. That'll put me home about 3, I would guess. I wish I could go to the drag race at Bristol tomorrow, but I have to write a second-day story and some other stuff for next week after I finally get up in the morning.

Fortunately for me I didn't use any of the good postrace stuff tonight. That's because NASCAR and Lowe's Motor Speedway again treated the print media like crap in the postrace.

I mean that literally. Think of Kahne's time after winning as food. Network television is the mouth. Network radio is the esophagus. NASCAR "partners" like Speed and ESPN are the stomach. Photographers taking staged photos that could be shot two hours after the race - as is still being done, are the pancreas. Local television is the intestines.

And, down at the end, you know what that makes people like me, right?

Sadler out of luck and NASCAR out of patience with crab-walking cars

It's 8:30 now and A.J. Allmendinger and Sam Hornish have moved into the NASCAR Sprint All-Star Race with their top-two finishes in the Showdown.

Elliott Sadler is not exactly thrilled with Allmendinger after their early race incident. Sadler has inherited Matt Kenseth's luck lately, it seems.

I was sitting here in the press box a little while ago and John Darby walked in. We were chatting and I asked him what they were going to do about the sideways cars the teams are building these days. He said that the teams need a little bit of that to make their cars work, but that this week several of them have gone beyond the point NASCAR is going to tolerate.

One of the cars pushed to and maybe beyond the limit was Hornish's No. 77 Dodge. Several teams told me this week that if I wanted to understand what people were talking about in terms of the sideways cars I should look at the 77 as the example.

Hornish said in his interview after finishing second in the Showdown that his car is so sideways it's hard for him to actually get it into his stall in the garage without hitting the door openings.

Darby said NASCAR will likely inform the teams this week to "clean things up." Mabye next week the cars will actually roll up the ramp onto the scales without having to be crab-walked.

Sure hope it plays well in Peoria

First impression - the burnout contest needs work on the format but the concept is good. It doesn't need to be a timed event, that's for sure, at least not totally. It ought to be about who can do the most creative burnout and let the fans vote on the winner or something. But I do like the idea.

Jimmy Spencer just said that he has "hibernated" from Pennsylvania to North Carolina. Goodness gracious, I like that guy. What he meant, I think, was that he's now moved to North Carolina and he's glad about that.

Speed is trying too hard to make this a big deal. "Official" viewing parties in New York, Miami and Los Angeles? Please. Hermie Sadler screams about how the excitement is building in the garage and then "proves" that by interviewing THE GOVERNOR OF NORTH CAROLINA!!!!!

It took me about 15 minutes to get from the infield around the track and then another 15 to get through the gate because I waited in line with the fans while ticket takers were tearing little stubs off the end. Nothing like making your paying customers fight foo so they can get in the gate.

I've eaten some beef tips in the press box and I still cannot get rid of that damn cucumber after taste. Now that I am upstairs looking down at the track I find myself wondering what Tums had to pay to get about 50 banners up along pit wall down the frontstretch, and also wondering how it can be possible for every track in America to find a public address announcer that sucks as bad as every other track. There must be a school somewhere.

The fireworks are starting early. A guy one row down from me in the press box just plugged his computer in and the plug basically blew up.

Now THAT was a burnout.

Rules of the road do not apply

It's 5 p.m. and I just got back into the media center after a couple of laps of the garage.

You can't walk in the garage for the people, but that's nothing new. In the areas outside the garage itself but still in the infield, it's hard to walk for all of the golf carts running around and it's hard for the golf carts to get around for all the people.

I still don't know when the golf-cart proliferation started in this sport, but it is way yonder out of control. The thing about them is that the people driving them normally don't think rules of the road apply to them. A guy will be standing there with his hand up stopping traffic and people in golf carts will drive up to the front of the line and try to drive right past the guy holding the cars up.

Of course, there's also the rules of race track pedestrians. Anything paved is a sidewalk and people who like four-wide racing think they have to walk four-wide, too.

I just got back from an interview with Dale Earnhardt Jr. for a story for next week's Coca-Cola 600 coverage. I think it was very good. I'll give you one tidbit from it. Dale Jr. is a huge fan of the TV show "The Office." He said that he'd quit racing tomorrow if he could get a job selling paper in Scranton, Pa., for Dunder-Miflin.

I am trying to get to the press box in time for the burnout contest that's supposed to begin at 6:20 p.m. It might take me that long to get my stuff raked up in a pile and get around the track.

If I only had a golf cart.

Just trying to avoid Speed and foo

In the media center by 12:37 p.m., avoiding most of the foo one normally must fight on the way to a big race here.

I will say that the person driving the white van/SUV with the South Carolina plate who changed lanes three times and was going about 80 when he got off the exit ramp to Highways 29 and 49 must have thought the race started about 12:45 and didn't want to be late.

Here's a question that came to me over lunch. Who decided that every salad that's made these days has to have about half a pound of cheese in it? And what's the deal with hiding cumcumbers? If you want to put cukes where a man can see them and get rid of them if he wants, that's fine. But you take a forkful with a hunk of that hidden down in there and you'll be tasting cucumber for days.

I've decided that I am going to try not to watch Speed for as long as is possible today. Total resistance is futile, I know, since all of tonight's coverage will be on the network. But the longer I can avoid Speed the longer I can avoid certain elements of the network's "talent" roster - and believe me, I use that term loosely.

It's such a nice day I think I will go out and see if I can find any trouble to get into in the garage area. I think it's supposed to be open now that it's just past 1:30 and I've goofed around in here trying in vain to get this laptop to recognize the wireless network.

Only 7 1/2 hours (at least) until they start the main event.

All-star race day and chamber of commerce weather

I did this the other night at the Pit Crew Challenge, dropping a few paragraphs in here and there about what was happening.

What I wrote seemed to tick off a few people, including some of the people working for Speed. So that alone is enough reason for me to try it again.

It's 10:45 am and I am at home, on the desktop my wife and I both use some there, I just sent a bunch of stuff from the laptop over here so I could print it out and have with me at the track.

Jim Utter covered the Truck race for the paper and thatsracin.com last night, so I left about halfway through it. I was about halfway home when Kyle Busch wrecked and the race actually got going. I was sitting in my driveway as they lined up for the green-white-checkered and barely got inside in time to see the finish.

You have to be happy for Matt Crafton, who did a great job surviving all of that to win. It was a good race for the Truck Series, too. There was a whole lot of action late in the race and anybody who stayed around through Busch's early dominance was rewarded.

I've been thinking about what that means. It's clear the Toyota truck teams have their acts together, but I don't think you can say that Busch was doing what he did last night only because his truck is unfairly strong or anything like that. Once he fell out, there were eight to 10 trucks in the mix, of all makes, that looked pretty equal. Busch had by far the best truck until he fell out, but I don't think you can say it was all truck and no driver, at least not fairly.

I doesn't seem the weather is going to be any kind of a problem today. It's a chamber of commerce day right now, sunny and pleasant and it's supposed to stay that way.

All right, time to pack it up and head that way. Zaxby's for lunch because they have crushed ice!

Dancing the night away

Things at the Pit Crew Challenge have actually started to look up.

First, we're finally about to have some actual competition.

Second, and far more significantly, they brought out five or six Speed "hoochies" to dance in front of the horrifyingly bad band.

And Martin Truex Jr.'s team just broke the record again with a clean stop in 23.07 seconds, beating Juan Pablo Montoya's team badly in the first pairing.

Which made the girls dance again.

Dim lights, cheap seats and loud, loud music

OK, now it's 6:30 and there's this big group of people way up in the rafters of Time Warner Arena in some really crappy seats.

They're being allowed to ask questions of certain drivers - Kevin Harvick for a while, then Carl Edwards, then Greg Biffle and now Kyle Busch and Bobby Labonte.

That guy from Speed who might very well be the world's largest waste of protoplasm is acting as the master of ceremonies for this portion of the evening's activities. I won't mention his name here because, well, basically he annoys me as much as any person on the planet does these days.

Speaking of being annoyed, once again they've handed out Thundersticks at this event. In hell, they've got a nice, warm spot saved for the guy who invented those.

In fact, if they would let the guy from Speed bang Thundersticks in time with this garage band that's playing again really LOUD I think that'd be a fairly close approximation of eternal torment.

Only 30 minutes to go until they actually start the competition again. I went downstairs for a little while and actually tried to walk on the floor.

Fortunately, the sniper missed.

A record evening for crews and volume

I guess I am supposed to label this as a "spoiler" since the Pit Crew Challenge won't come on television until 9 p.m. on Speed, about the time the event will actually be ending live.

No, I am not going to tell you who won because it's not yet 5 p.m. as I am writing this. We've just completed the "seeding round," in which the top eight teams in the points as of March 10 (Why March 10? Who knows?) did a stop to determine how they'll be seeded for the second round.

They get first-round byes.

The individual champions of this event might already be deteremined, since the eight teams in the seeding round have already had their members post their times at the individual stations.

The doors don't open to fans for another hour or so. Why did they do the seeding round two hours before the rest of the competition starts at 7? Again, I have no clue.

There's a house band. So we've got that going for us. So far they've been quite awful. I don't imagine they're going to improve much over the next two hours. They're certainly LOUD, and I've been told that the first rule of bands is if you can't be good you should certainly be LOUD.

There are about 75 people here who're not actually competitors. Don't know why, I think they're "customers" of Sprint in some significant way.

I can tell you that the record for a stop in this event has already been broken.

Ryan Newman's team had the record at 23.35 seconds in last year's quarterfinal but Jimmie Johnson's team did better than that in the seeding round at a time somewhat faster than that.

I can't tell you what that actual time was because not only are the fans not here yet but the people who're running the timing and results for the media aren't set up yet, either. But it was pretty darn fast, I'll tell you that.

I wish I could give you the feel of the electricity on the floor itself. But I am not allowed down there. Television only on the event level.

Them and the house band.

There is just a lot to love about Darlington

DARLINGTON, S.C. - They say it's always 5 o'clock somewhere. Right now, it's 5 at Darlington Raceway. In a little more than two hours, they'll turn 43 cars loose on this glorious old race track. It looks like we'll have us another one of those spectacular sunsets that we've had a couple of times here since they've moved this race to Mother's Day weekend and then we'll have us a heck of a race - I hope.

The new pavement here is something they had to do, but based on what I've seen and heard so far this weekend tonight's race just isn't going to be what we've come to expect at Darlington.

The track's black, and that just doesn't seem right. In a few years, I reckon, the sand in the soil down this way will blast it gray again and cars will sliding all over the place like it seems like they always have here.

But I'm of the mind that a bad race at Darlington, if that's what we wind up having, is at least as good as a good race at a lot of other places.

They've been running here since 1950 and I hope they run here another 60 years or so, at least.

It's a crime they moved Darlington off Labor Day weekend, but I suppose the way things have turned out aren't too bad. They've sold the grandstands out for the fourth straight time, and in this economy that's a nice thing to have accomplished.

I am sitting in the press box that overlooks Turn 3. It's ridiculous that the press box is still on the other side of the track from pit road and the start-finish line - the TV booth is over there where it needs to be - but I know I won't get much traction with fans complaining about what the media need to be able to do the job.

The infield in front of me looks fairly well packed, which is a pleasant surprise given how much it must cost these days to fill up the tank in an RV. They've built a new tunnel that runs right through the parking area that used to be right in front of us, which is a shame because there's no longer room in there for race fans to start up the touch football game that usually devolves into a big ol' brawl right before our eyes. I guess you can't protect all the traditions.

I love this place. It's not the nicest track, in terms of fan amenities, that I go to. But they've done a pretty good job of making it at least passibly modern in the past few years. Every track doesn't need to be slick as a whistle, does it?

This is a great place to watch drivers try to race, even if they race this tough ol' track a lot more than they do each other. You have to be good, the way I see it, to win a race here. That ought to be the measure of a track, at least to some degree, and on that score Darlington is right up there.

Enjoy the race.

What if the Stewart shoe were on the other foot?

I know there are bigger fish to fry in light of the end of Saturday night's race at Richmond, and I'll be addressing the Kyle Busch-Dale Earnhardt Jr. fracas in a column or blog (depending on what my newspaper wants) later today.

But Toyota's Lee White said something this weekend to David Newton of ESPN.com that I hadn't thought about – but should have.

Here’s the quote from Newton’s notebook:

"We're not a company that gets in the middle between owners and drivers," Lee White, the general manager of Toyota Racing Development, said before Saturday's race at Richmond International Raceway. "If there is a manufacturer out there that is spearheading or brokering or promoting an activity like this, I can promise you it will not be Toyota. We don't consider that to be our role in the garage."

White is a crafty, well-spoken man. He knows how to use the language. Let me put what that quote means into plain-speak for you.

"When we came into NASCAR, a lot of people started talking about Toyota was going to come in and throw money around and 'buy' our way to Victory Lane.

"Now, one of the best drivers in sport is on a team we have a contract with. That driver, Tony Stewart, has a contract with Joe Gibbs Racing that doesn't expire until after 2009. But here we are talking about Stewart possibly going somewhere as soon as after this season, and it's widely accepted that a major impetus for that is Chevrolet's avowed interest in having Tony come back to Chevy. Where's the criticism of that?"

One thing I always try to do when examining a situation is to take it and turn it around.

Suppose Stewart had a contract with a Chevrolet team and Toyota officials were saying, "Yes, we're trying to get Tony Stewart to come to one of our teams, and we're willing to do whatever we can to make that happen. If he wants ownership of a team, we'll do that. Whatever it takes."

How loud would the anti-Toyota crowd be howling?

I think it's perfectly justified to wonder about the "sanctity" of NASCAR contracts.

Is it fair to their current teams for drivers and teams to be talking about what's going to happen 18 to 20 months away? Or is that merely a product of the complicated nature of deals these days?

But let's at least try not to have a complete double standard, shall we?

Waste not, want not and all that

It used to be that engineers were treated the same way reporters are in the NASCAR garage.

You know, like scum.

The "racers," people with grease under their fingernails and oil smudged on their shirts, would send the team's token "egghead" off to look for the left-handed tire tool or on some other kind of similar snipe hunt. Everybody would have a big laugh and completely ignore whatever "input" the college boy had to offer.

Along the way, of course, somebody started to figure out that at least some of what the "atom smashers," as one driver has long called engineers on his team, were talking about might actually make their race cars go faster.

Then, somebody won a race and decided they won it because of something somebody worked out using a computer or a simulation on it. From that moment until today, the influence of engineers and the tools they bring with them has continued to grow in stock-car racing.

Maybe that pendulum has swung too far?

Maybe now, you've got a bunch of engineers sitting around deciding how to build the best race car for a virtual world, guys with college degrees and IQs that look like lap speeds at Talladega who don't trust anything that doesn't come straight from the data.

Maybe now when somebody who knows what it's like to crawl around under a car instead of only flying over a three-dimensional representation of it on his laptop is treated with the same derision as the engineers once got.

Hey, Skippy, how about going to the warehouse and getting us a carton of those invisible printer ribbons?

I've run that theory by a few people in NASCAR recently with expected results.

People who think the concept of theoretical racing has gone too far say I'm on to something. People who claim to know what a seven-post shaker rig is supposed to do look at me as though I had three heads.

There can be no doubt that technology has reached remarkably higher levels in NASCAR's top series in recent years, and that the rate of change in that technology keeps accelerating.

But I still believe that the people who put their hands on and in actual, real-world race cars have a vitally important role in the sport, too, and that's why I believe the test that will take place Monday and Tuesday at Lowe's Motor Speedway is so important.

Not everyone agrees.

"My personal opinion is it's kind of a wasted test, a waste of money," Clint Bowyer said. "With this car, you're just so limited. There's just not that big change you're going to make to make or break your car, speed-wise. It's all fine-tuning, finding the little things and massaging what you have."

Well, yeah. That's pretty much the point. Sprint Cup race teams have a new car they're working with this year and some of the teams seem to be having trouble getting the handle on it. Most of the time they can make it go around the track, for sure, but the little things seem to be what separate the best teams from the rest of the teams.

Maybe there won't be any eureka moments at the LMS test, at which nearly 50 teams are expected. There are three sessions each day - morning, afternoon and night - and each team can choose four of the six in which to run. But if four or five teams find something that will help them run better in the Sprint All-Star Race and the Coca-Cola 600, and those teams run better and make the racing better during Charlotte's race weeks, then I will have to respectfully disagree with Bowyer's assessment of this being a "wasted" effort.

It is not really a question of loyalty

TALLADEGA, Ala. - Let's talk about loyalty a little bit.

There's already talk out there that Tony Stewart shouldn't even be thinking about leaving Joe Gibbs Racing when his contract ends after 2009 - or before. That's because, this reasoning goes, the Gibbs team has been extremely loyal to Stewart over the years.

There's no arguing that team owner Joe Gibbs has had Stewart's back any number of times when the driver has had some difficult moments in his NASCAR career.

But let's be honest here.

The relationship has certainly been mutually beneficial. Stewart is one of the best race car drivers alive today and he's helped, in a major way, the Gibbs team become one of stock-car racing's elite operations.

Let's be clear, too.

The last time Stewart's contract was coming up for a new deal, he could have signed for more money with another team. He didn't do that because he was loyal, at least not entirely.

All things considered, Stewart felt his best opportunity to continue to be successfull was right where he was, and he and the team have both enjoyed the benefits.

There are a lot of people working at Joe Gibbs Racing who've been there for a long time, and loyalty is clearly valued at that company.

But let's also not get all misty about that.

Bobby Labonte? J.J. Yeley?

When it came time to make the tough decisions that sometimes need to be made in a business, they got made.

It won't be easy for Stewart to leave Joe Gibbs Racing, if ultimately that's what he chooses to do.

But if he looks at all of the options that are going to be presented to him and chooses to go elsewhere, he won't be turning his back on anybody or anything.

A fine idea that will never happen

A guy named Jerry who listens to “The Morning Drive” on Sirius NASCAR Radio emailed Friday morning with a suggestion for the Sprint All-Star Race. His idea will never happen, but that doesn’t mean it’s not a good idea.

Here’s his suggestion. Once you have your group of eligible teams for the all-star event at Lowe’s Motor Speedway, you introduce them before the race on a stage with three doors.

Behind the first door, you line up the pit crews based on a random draw. Behind the second door, you line up the crew chiefs, again in random order. Then it’s drivers, again in the order their names are drawn by random, behind the third door.

Each door opens and you’ve got a team for that night’s race. It might be the No. 16 with Chad Knaus as the crew chief and Ryan Newman as the driver. For the all-star event, those guys work together and try to win.

It’d never work, of course, because of all of the sponsorship issues. You couldn’t have Kurt Busch driving the Budweiser car, or a Ford crew working on a Toyota during pit stops. Maybe that’s one of the things wrong with the sport these days – it’s so complicated from a business and financial standpoint that a fun idea like that has no shot.

But it sure is intriguing to think about, isn’t it?

* * *

I suppose that some might consider it my duty to inform you that voting to select the driver who will get a spot in this year’s all-star event through a fan vote is now open. Since, however, I vehemently oppose the existence of this “pity pass,” I will leave it at that.

Besides, any day now some driver with access to fans via television will start some sort of cockamamie campaign to secure this spot and you’ll find out how to vote for him soon enough.

* * *

Let me go ahead and get out in front on this one.

Somebody who qualifies among the 10 fastest cars might very well miss the race next weekend at Talladega.

It’s an impound race so the go-or-go-home cars will put in qualifying set-ups and most of them will be faster for a single lap than any of the cars exempt under the top 35 rule, which all will be in race trim.

This does not mean that the top 35 rule is wrong. If there was a rule that said the fastest 43 cars made the race, there’s about a 2 percent chance anybody who’s not in the top 35 right now would be among the 25 fastest cars in a do-or-die qualifying situation.

The goal should be to have the BEST 43 cars in the race, and that’s what will happen next week at Talladega, just like every week.

* * *

You know, for years people have been suggesting that NASCAR should divide its teams into two divisions and run two races each week, one at one track and one at another. Then, at the end of the year, you’d bring the top teams from each division together for some kind of championship series.

This, of course, is a spectacularly bad idea.

Don’t think so? Tell me, then, how much sense does what’s happening in open-wheel racing this weekend make? The teams from the Indy Racing League are in Japan, racing at Honda’s home track at Motegi. Meanwhile, the teams from the soon-to-be-history Champ Car World Series are in Long Beach, racing among themselves.

Points for the re-unified open-wheel series will be paid for both races. This came about because the IRL didn’t want to disappoint Honda and Champ Car wanted one last fling at Long Beach, which was the one successful race it had left on its schedule. Next year the schedules will be worked so the two events don’t conflict.

As a one-year stopgap, the Motegi-Long Beach double-dip isn’t the worst thing in the world. But the idea of having half of your best teams one place and half in another just doesn’t make any kind of long-term sense.

It took open-wheel racing more than a decade to figure that out, and let’s hope NASCAR is never dumb enough to fall in such an obvious trap.

Baseball fans and race fans ended up angry

OK, NASCAR fans, before you even start.

Fox Sports tried to keep everybody happy Saturday afternoon and evening and wound up pleasing nobody. The people who work for the network will be the first to tell you things didn’t turn out as Fox hoped it would when a rain delay pushed the New York Yankees-Boston Red Sox baseball game back into the start of the Subway Fresh Fit 500 from Phoenix International Raceway.

Fox was actually trying to do the right thing. I know how NASCAR fans are, believing that a race – including the prerace – should take precedence over any other sport being broadcast. But that’s just not how things work in the real world.

The Yankees-Red Sox game was on in the afternoon and the Sox led 4-3 in the top of the eighth. Alex Rodriguez was coming up with a chance to tie the game or put the Yankees ahead, but the rain got there first. Two hours later, the tarp came off and the game was about to resume.

Fox had actually switched to the race at Phoenix at 7:45 p.m. Eastern, 15 minutes early, when coverage of the other baseball game it had on was complete. But word came that the Yankees and Red Sox would resume about 8:25 p.m.

NASCAR agreed to push the start of the Phoenix race back from 8:45 p.m. to 8:53 p.m. to try to allow Fox to show the conclusion of a game that a lot of people have an interest in.

Yes, it’s April and early in the baseball season. But even the most ardent NASCAR-or-nothing fan has to understand the New York-Boston baseball rivalry is special.

The game actually didn’t resume until right at 8:30. The Sox got A-Rod out and held the lead, and then were in the process of completing the win in the top of the ninth. With two outs and a 3-2 count on Robinson Cano kept fouling off Jonathan Papelbon pitches and extending the game.

Fox’s contract with NASCAR required it to show the race from the start. NASCAR tried to help, dallying until 8:55 p.m. Eastern time, but a moment after the green flag flew Fox switched from baseball to the race with cars coming up to speed on the first lap.

Now when the baseball game came back on, announcer Joe Buck told fans the game was also being shown on FX cable and that the Fox network feed would have to switch to racing at 8:53 p.m., leaving the baseball game on FX only. Two pitches after the switch was made, Cano grounded out and the baseball game ended.

Fox wanted to show the end of the baseball game and the start of the race to everybody on the network. What it wound up doing was showing neither. You could be cynical about it and say the network was trying to have the best of both worlds, hoarding as many viewers as possible for its network ratings by going for a gamble that failed.

Or, you could say Fox’s heart was in the right place as it tried to give everybody what they wanted and they just got unlucky.

Fans on both sides of the fence were irate.

The New York Daily News compared the decision to switch to NASCAR to the famous “Heidi” incident in1968 when NBC switched from a football game to show a movie version of “Heidi” only to miss a furious late-game rally.

Some NASCAR fans, typically, had zero perspective on the spot Fox found itself in. Some fans actually complained they didn’t get to see the national anthem, flyover and prerace command to fire engines. They didn’t feel baseball should be even allowed to infringe for a moment on the race telecast.

Turn that around. What if a race had started at 3 p.m. and, after a two-hour rain delay, had been resumed. Then, because of contractual obligations, a network would have had to switch away from the final two laps of a race to show the first pitch of a baseball game? Wouldn’t that have sent race fans into a tizzy? Sure it would have.

Fox’s mistake, in hindsight, was putting the baseball game back on Fox to start with. The network should have merely put a crawl across the screen saying the baseball game had resumed and was being shown on FX, and the NASCAR commentators could have mentioned that, too. It would have avoided the awkward, last-second switching that satisfied nobody.

But, to the network’s credit, the effort that was made was one of trying to serve viewers. It didn’t work out like Fox or the viewers would have wanted it to, but shouldn’t there be some credit for even trying?

Nuances and NASCAR drug policy

I think I might have finally figured something out about life. I'm within a year of my 50th birthday, so I imagine you might say that it's about time.

There's always the possibility that I could be dead wrong, but in this case I really don't think that's true. In fact, the realization that there will undoubtedly be people who think I am dead wrong is a big reason I think I am right.

I figured this out while thinking and talking about racing the other day, but I really do think it has universal application.

Here it is: The principal conflict in the human condition is the search for absolutes when balanace is the best we can ever hope to acheive.

Let's start out with some simple examples connected to NASCAR, since this is primarily a NASCAR blog.

Take the car of tomorrow. There are fans who believe it should be abandoned dead in the water because it has not proved to be an instant panacea for competitive ills. Since the car did not immediately solve the aero push issue, it is of no value and must never be used again.

On the other side, there's the argument that absolutely no changes should be made to the car because if one or two of five teams have an advantage with it they've earned it. If you pull the trigger on any changes, the fans of the team that's ahead at that moment in time feel persecuted.

Or, take drug testing. Most fans think drug testing is a no-brainer. Some think drivers ought to have to submit samples before every race or after every wreck. You're either clean or you're not.

Both issues, of course, are far more nuanced.

The new race car is no different from any car NASCAR has ever used. A perfect balance between safety and competition might never be found. Neither will any car ever make it possible for a team with $1 million to compete on a consistent basis with a multicar team that has $100 million.

ut that doesn't mean that NASCAR should not strive to make the cars safer or built in such a way that dollars aren't always a trump card in competition.

The part of drug-testing that is a no-brainer is that NASCAR needs a policy that does beyond testing at its discretion. But the idea that it's easy to decide what's in bounds and what's not is absurd.

Prescription drugs, steroids and alcohol, for starters, all create tough decisions that would have to be addressed by any coherent and effective policy.

No matter what side of the political spectrum you sit on, this same principle applies.

Whatever you think the right answer about Iraq is, for example, it's not that either that we should pull out tomorrow or that we should continue to fight there indefinitely without figuring out what's the right way to conclude that effort.

Gun control is not a yes or no question. There's no yea or nay when it comes to figuring out what should be done about health care, the housing crisis or Social Security, no matter how much we'd like for there to be.

There is room for absolutes in sports. A ball is fair or it's foul, a player is in bounds or he's out of bounds and a race car either passes inspection or it doesn't (at least, that's how it should be).

But those instances where you can draw a line and say that's it are a lot more rare than most people want them to be.

If it could happen to Earnhardt ...

FORT WORTH, Texas - Let's be clear about this. Dale Earnhardt saved Michael McDowell's life Friday.

There's no reason to parse words about what happened in Samsung 500 qualifying. When McDowell's No. 00 Toyota slammed headlong into the Turn 1 wall as he began his second qualifying lap, anybody who was paying even the slightest bit of attention had to have his or her heart go up in the throat.

The car got over on its top and started flipping, and you know that's supposed to be a good thing because it dissipates energy. Still, as you're watching it's hard to keep from cringing.

When the car finally came to rest, after what seemed like forever, you just hoped for the best.

When McDowell climbed out and walked to the ambulance, you had to be amazed, relieved and I really don't know what all at the same time.

A lot of people have worked very hard on developing and installing the steel and foam energy reducing barriers that line the walls now at NASCAR tracks. A lot of smart people have worked on improvements to the seats and other features inside the car that make drivers safer.

And NASCAR deserves credit for keeping safety as a primary focus as it developed the cars now used in Sprint Cup racing.

All of that might very well have eventually come to NASCAR's top series had Earnhardt not died in the 2001 Daytona 500, but it was Earnhardt's wreck that completely changed stock-car racing's attitude about safety.

If it could happen to Earnhardt, it could happen to anybody. Drivers might not have said that out loud - some did - but they all felt it. So safety stopped being something that "scared" drivers discussed and became a priority.

I don't think NASCAR was ever callous about safety. The early stags of the "car of tomorrow" project and "soft-wall" research began before Earnhardt died. But the death of the seven-time champion gave safety matters a priority they otherwise simply would not have had.

SAFER barriers have been up everywhere for about three years now and the more times they're hit the more the people who make them learn about how to make them better.

Everything - the wall, the car, the in-car safety features - had to work together Friday to keep McDowell from being seriously hurt.

So, quite frankly, did good fortune (or, depending on what you believe, divine intervention).

Every bit of the development and improvement and innovation that's been done since 2001 contributed to what happened - or what didn't happen - here Friday.

But Sidd Finch said it was so

Texas Motor Speedway on Tuesday announced "plans" to spend $900 million to put a 3.7 million square-foot roof over the 1.5-mile track, making it the first major domed speedway in motorsports history.

The fact that Tuesday was April 1 -- April Fool's Day -- was the most significant part of the press release.

The contractor for the "project", the release said, will be AFD Construction of Fort Worth (note the acronym). The project manager, it said, will be Sidd Finch. Those who know their April Fool's pranks recognize that name as the same as an outrageously talented New York Mets pitcher once featured in a Sports Illustrated issue dated April 1.

"The Houston Astrodome was known as the 'Eighth Wonder of the World,' so it is only fitting that Texas - and Texas Motor Speedway - will be the future home of the Ninth Wonder of the World,'" track president Eddie Gossage said. "This will be a massive undertaking."

The release said it would take crews of more than 1,000 workers more than 24 months to complete the work. The plans call for elaborate heating, air conditioning and exhaust systems to remove fumes and smoke generated by the cars.

A 1.3 million square-foot portion of the roof would be retractable. A new stadium being built -- no really, that actually is being built - for the Dallas Cowboys has a 745,800 square-foot retractable roof.

"It's only appropriate that we announce such an outlandish project like this on the first day of April," Gossage said. "We'd be foolish to think it would be possible."

Which, of course, it isn't.

Helton turned life into lessons

Darrell Waltrip was mad.

Ricky Craven had just knocked Waltrip's car into the wall during a race at North Carolina Speedway in Rockingham.

"I was livid, fit to be tied," Waltrip remembers. "I ran into the garage and snatched Ricky's window net down. I was just about to get into it with him when some of the guys grabbed me and took me back to my hauler."

Max Helton, the NASCAR chaplain who had helped Waltrip and a small group of others form Motor Racing Outreach in 1988, was at Waltrip's hauler waiting.

"He was talking to me about not being a very good witness and asking me to think about what I was doing," Waltrip says. "But the more I thought about it, the madder I got.

"I told Max, 'I can't let this go. I am going back over there right now and have this out with Ricky.'"

Helton got up and stood in the doorway of the lounge in Waltrip's transporter.

"He put his arms across the door and said, 'Here, Darrell, take it out on me. Hit me instead. That will save you from making a big mistake.' And he was serious, he wasn't saying that trying to be funny."

Waltrip laughed anyway. "I said, 'I know I am being foolish,'" he said. "And so I sat back down."

It's a great story, but it doesn't end there. What happened next shows how Helton, who passed away Sunday at the age of 67 after a seven-month battle with brain cancer, turned life into lessons.

"The very next week at Phoenix, Max asked me if I would lead the opening prayer at the chapel service after the drivers' meeting," Waltrip said. "I got up and went to the front of the room and guess who was sitting there on front row. Ricky Craven.

"I said, I can't pray because I have this guilt on me. I have something to take care of fisrt. So I asked Ricky to come up there and I put my arm around Ricky and I asked him to forgive me. Then I prayed."

Helton served as the leader of MRO from its founding in 1988 until he left to take his message of "personal evangelism" to the worldwide racing community through another ministry he founded, WorldSpan Ministries, in 2002. During those years in the NASCAR garage, it sometimes seemed like there were about 10 Max Heltons.

He had a knack for being there when people needed him. He was there when called upon, as any good minister is, but Helton somehow seemed to anticipate those needs. On the starting grid before the race, he'd stop for a brief prayer or word of encouragement to dozens of drivers. He spoke as easily with millionaire car owners as he did garage mechanics who try to remember to wipe grease and oil off their hands with a cloth before greeting Max.

Steve Green's parents were teachers at Tennessee Temple University, where Helton studied. In 1958, Green was in junior high school and played baseball. Helton became his coach, and a life-long friendship began.

"He was like a big brother I never had," said Green, who will be one of the ministers officiating at Helton's memorial service on Wednesday. "I was in on a lot of his late-night collusion meetings where he worked up pranks to play on the night watchmen and the school's dean of men."

Once, Green said, Helton conspired to have an entire car taken apart and then re-assembled inside a snack shop students visited at the college. The next morning, the shop workers came in to discover it sitting there with no idea how it got there or how to get it out.

"Max never, ever got caught and he never got in trouble," Green said. "He could talk his way out of anything."

He could also talk his way into things, too.

Green was a counselor when Helton was putting together the foundations for Motor Racing Outreach in late 1988. Green said Helton called and began talking about how he needed to hire someone to serve as a counselor to address some of the family issues being faced by people who worked in the sport.

"He said, 'Steve, I have got to find ways to love on all of these people," Green said. "I said, 'You don't know what I do for a living?' Max said he didn't, and I believe he really didn't. So I told him I was basically doing that kind of work. He said, 'Well, then you quit your job and you come down and help me.' I told him he was crazy. But he said, 'That's why God had me call you to talk about this.'"

Green said the only way he could do that would be to make an annual salary of $60,000 - a sum he doubted Helton couldn't pay him.

"He said, 'That's no problem, you come on,'" Green said. "So I went and it just felt so right. But when I got there, he said, 'OK, now you need to go raise the money to pay your salary. And anything over $60,000 you raise you can help us pay the rent with."

Early on in MRO's existence, that $60,000 figure was laughable. Waltrip tells of Helton driving to Richmond and back - five hours each way - to conduct a one-hour Bible study with drivers because Helton didn't have the money for a hotel room. Green said Helton came in one day and said the lights and phones to MRO's offices were going to be shut down that day because the group was out of money.

"We didn't know until after that how bad it was," Waltrip said. "Max just had faith it was going to work out."

And, of course, it did.

"He was just my best buddy," Green said. "He loved people, and the real presence of God in his life was effervescent."

Max Helton, 67, is survived by his wife, Jean; daughters Melanie, Elain, Crista and Becky, and nine grandchildren. The family requests that memorial donations to be made to WorldSpan Ministries, P.O. Box 681117, Charlotte, N.C., 28216.

The sway bar and the way things are

MARTINSVILLE, Va. – Jack Roush is probably getting tired of people talking about him like he’s a crazy ol’ coot over this business of Michael Waltrip Racing having one of his front sway bars from Dover in September until sometime in January.

Waltrip said Saturday that it was a mistake. The part got to his team by mistake and when somebody from Roush called to ask if they had it, Waltrip’s team looked for it, found it and returned it.

Waltrip is right when he says that stuff gets flung around in the garage area all of the time. When races end, crews pack their gear up rapidly because everyone’s trying to head for the plane or their cars to get home as fast as they can.

Supposedly this sway bar is longer than your average sway bar and wouldn’t fit in the place where sway bars normally live on a team’s tool box. This one was placed under Roush’s tool box in some manner and it seems possible that it could have literally rolled too far and been picked up by mistake by Waltrip’s team.

The way Waltrip tells it, somebody saw they had this oddly long bar painted in a different color and just put it aside figuring that there was no telling where it came from.

The way Roush tells it, though, in January a vendor called Roush Fenway Racing and said it had been contacted to see if that vendor could make pieces copying whatever it is that was special about the ends of this piece that the Roush guys had developed for the car of tomorrow.

OK, that’s where this story that so many people are joking about gets serious in my eyes.

Even if the way the part got “misplaced” was completely innocent, if somebody is trying to copy whatever makes this bar unusual then that’s a pretty sinister turn to the whole affair.

Some people have questioned what good a sway bar could do, how much better it could be and how much better it could make a car. Those are all legitimate questions, but if somebody saw what Roush Fenway Racing had done and decided it was good enough to try to copy, doesn’t that justify Roush’s contention the part had “proprietary” value?

The crux of the question, to me, is where the line is between right and wrong in the eyes of the garage area on this matter.

Roush said Friday that he’s been in the sport 22 years and never felt he’d had anything outright stolen from him or that he’d never condoned having anyone on his team steal anything from another team. Dale Earnhardt Jr. said he felt like a theft of that nature would be an egregious offense, too.

But others laughed at the idea of calling this a “theft.”

It is true that the garage area is open and teams “spy” on each other all of the time. Cars are inspected in the open. Every once in a while people stand around and watch a teardown. When a Daytona 500 winner’s car is put on display at the Daytona 500 Experience, other teams sometimes send somebody over there to take detailed pictures and even do drawings of certain parts of the winner’s car.

So are there really any parts or pieces that are “off limits” to such scrutiny?

What’s considered proper and what’s considered over the line in looking at what the other guy’s got?

That’s one of those questions that you can get 20 different answers on if you ask 20 different people.

I guess it’s also like stealing another teams signs in baseball or videotaping a rival football team’s coach when he’s signaling in plays. Some people think that’s dirty pool and others think that’s just the way the game is played. Any way you can get an advantage you get it.

If you’re walking through a hotel lobby and you see a copy of the playbook or game notes from the team you’re getting ready to play, what do you do? Do you pick it up and use it, feeling that the team that lost it should have known better? Do you just pretend you never saw it? Or do you pick it up and then call the opposing coach and tell him you’ve got it and arrange to return it?

That answer to that question, I think, depends on how much integrity you have. In racing, though, you wonder how much good integrity does you.

Cars that don’t pass postrace inspection can still win races. The garage-area mantra has always been “if you ain’t cheating, you ain’t trying.”

The rulebook is looked at as an outline of suggestions and interpreted whatever way it can be to justify whatever it is you’re trying. Where in all of that does honorable behavior fit in?

Drivers should be pros, win or lose

I didn't get to see Saturday's Nationwide Series race from Nashville because I was in Birmingham covering NCAA tournament basketball for my newspaper.

Based on what I've heard, though, some fans were a little put out by the way Kyle Busch reacted after the race in regard to a spin that took him out of the lead.

I did see Busch a week earlier at Bristol when he got wrecked in the rain-shortened Nationwide race. His car got damaged in an incident that wasn't his fault and Busch headed straight for the pedestrian tunnel taking him out of the track. An ESPN reporter -- who was doing his job -- followed Busch into the tunnel seeking a comment but got none, at least not that could be aired.

A driver who's upset after whatever happens in a NASCAR race is under no requirement to talk to the media, unless he finishes in the top three. The top three are, under NASCAR's postrace procedures, expected to go to the media center. Otherwise, a driver's participation in interviews after he's done racing is elective.

I found it illustrative to be at an NCAA basketball tournament venue over the weekend, though, because the NCAAA has pretty strict requirements for postgame interviews.

The winning team's coach and selected players come to an interview area after a 10-15 minute period in which the coach can speak to his team. Beginning when the coach and players leave to go the interview area, the team's locker room is also open. The coach and selected players from the losing team follow the winning team to the interview area, and the losing team's locker room is open, too.

Isn't it interesting that the NCAA expects its coaches and athletes, some of whom are less than a year out of high school, to be able to handle dealing with the evil media after an emotional loss in an NCAA game?

Most reporters aren't jackals, no matter what you may have seen in the movies. I don't have any idea how those people covering celebrities, chasing them up and down the roads screaming questions and snapping pictures, sleep at night, but most of us don't act that way.

When things go bad for a NASCAR driver, fans want to know what happened. When a driver suffers a heart-breaking loss, they want to see the driver talk about it on television and read about what he says the next day. That's why the media are there.

Several times already this year television reporters have been put in the uncomfortable position of talking to a driver who's led most of a race and not won, or who has let a chance to win get away from him late. No reporter wants to be in that position, certainly not on live television.

There's no way you can ask a question that sounds intelligent and compassionate at the same time. It's all pretty much some variation on "That's a tough break, how does it feel?" The driver knows what's coming, the reporter knows the driver knows what's coming and still it's an awkward moment. A driver can light the reporter up if he wants to, and in many ways the fans love that.

But in that situation, the reporter is simply doing the job he's there to do. Not every reporter handles every situation exactly right, but I will tell you right now the media's batting average in those situations is better than the drivers' typical performance.

There have been times when a driver has fallen into a pattern of acting like a 4-year-old toward the media. When that happens, someone will inevitably suggest that the next time that said driver enjoys success and WANTS to be interviewed, the media should turn its back and walk away.

But we don't. That's not our job. That's not being professional.

It would be nice if that were a two-way street, but I can only control the way I act, try to influence my colleagues to act in a respectful and professional manner and hope that as often as possible the drivers choose the same path.

Saying thanks to a champion

BRISTOL, Tenn. - When we walked into Bristol Motor Speedway Sunday morning there were people all over the backstretch grandstand laying out cards to be used in a stunt before the Food City 500.

It has the UPS logo on it, of course, since somebody had to pay the freight. But the message of the display is going to be very simple and very fitting.

It says, "Thanks Dale." Sunday's race is Dale Jarrett's final points race. I haven't written a long story about Jarrett this week because I am saving that for May when he actually drives for the last time in the Sprint All-Star race at Lowe's Motor Speedway.

My paper does a special section for the all-star race and one of my jobs is to figure out what would be a good story to put on the cover of that section.

I wasn't about to fire my Dale Jarrett "farewell" bullet on the same weekend my paper is trying to find room for the Atlantic Coast Conference men's basketball tournament that's being played in Charlotte.

Jarrett deserves a spotlight that's all his own, and that's what I've got planned for May. For now, let's just say that "thanks" is about the only thing the sport really can say to a driver like Jarrett.

Like his father, Ned, Dale has been a champion on and off the track. He has won a Cup championship and 32 races, but he's also won a ton of resepct from fans and fellow drivers as well. He's starred in some of the best sports commercials, let alone NASCAR commercials, you've ever seen. He's been a leader in the garage and he's been a stand-up guy when controversies have flared.

It's going to make it a little easier for him to walk away from the driving side of the sport now that he's got a deal to help ESPN/ABC broadcast races. His father had a tremendous career in that field, too, and nothing about what Dale has done so far indicates to me that he's not going to be just as good at it.

I don't know where Dale Jarrett will finish Sunday in his final points race. I am sure it matters to him, but I don't think it matters to anybody else.

Jarrett deserves every nice thing people have said about him leading up to this race, and every nice think they'll say about him before the all-star race in May as well.

He deserves that great big "Thanks" that's coming in the prerace show, too.

Neither is exactly a hardship assignment

BRISTOL, Tenn. – Back at the race track Friday, but I have to admit my mind is elsewhere – at least to some degree.

If you grew up in the Carolinas, you’ve got a story about sneaking out of class to watch the ACC basketball tournament or sneaking a radio into class to keep up with the afternoon games.

It’s really odd for the tournament to be in Charlotte and for me not to be there, too, but it’s also unusual for us to be at Bristol on ACC tournament weekend. The way the calendar has worked for years, we’ve been in Las Vegas for the conference tournaments. Bristol has always been the week we go from 16 down to a Final Four.

It got me to thinking about one of those “what if” questions you sometimes ponder. What if I’d been given the choice to cover the NASCAR races at Bristol or the ACC tournament? Which would I have picked?

It’s a hard question.

I grew up pretending to be Dennis Wuycik, a North Carolina basketball player few non hard-core Tar Heels would likely even remember.

I decided I wanted to be a sportswriter the day after an ACC tournament final in which South Carolina upset North Carolina on a play that made me so mad I kicked the footrest on our recliner so hard I broke it.

The story in the next day’s paper was bad, I thought, and I decided I could do better (and I think I was 11 at the time). I had no idea about deadlines and things like that, of course, but it was the beginning of a career for me nonetheless.

I was so bad I infected my family. My mom was in the hospital once and was on one of those floors where they closely monitor the patients. Mom was watching a North Carolina game on the television and it was close when the nurses all scurried in with a “crash cart” thinking she had developed a major problem.

She did have a problem. The Tar Heels were behind.

I’ve watched a lot of great college basketball in my time. Before I started covering racing, I went to a couple of ACC tournaments and covered Duke, North Carolina, N.C. State and Wake Forest – North Carolina’s so-called “Big Four” – through some great years.

I was there, in fact, for the first official function at which two new coaches appeared. N.C. State had hired Jim Valvano and Duke had hired Mike Krzyzewski, and they were at “Operation Basketball” at the Greensboro Coliseum.

Valvano put on a show.

ZZ Top was doing a concert that night in the arena. We were set up in a lobby area and about the time Valvano got up to speak the band started in with a sound check.

Valvano milked that and really put on a show. He told a joke about how the NCAA had banned off-campus recruiting in August. “I told my wife, Pam, ‘That’s great, honey! Now I will get to have sex 31 times in August,’” Valvano said.

“She said, ‘Great, put me down for two.’ ”

Krzyzewski got up last and joked about how he had figured out how the ACC worked. “They stick the Italian and the Polish guy last,” he said.

When it started raining at Bristol just before 1 p.m. Friday, clearly Bobcats Arena in Charlotte was the preferable place to be. The forecast doesn’t look good until Sunday, and a race track in the rain might be one of the worst places in the world to be.

All things being equal, though, if I had to pick between the ACC tournament and Bristol, I think I’d come to Bristol. Twenty years ago I would never even dreamed I would ever say that, but this place is just something special.

Where the rubber meets the road

What happens next?

For all of the talk about the tires Goodyear supplied last weekend at Atlanta Motor Speedway, what matters now is what comes of it.

That’s why Tony Stewart fired his salvos about the tires following the Kobalt Tools 500. Nothing he said was going to fix what happened last weekend. What he’s trying to do is have an influence on whether it happens again or not. That’s all he can do now.

Texas Motor Speedway officials put out a press release Tuesday “announcing” that Goodyear plans to bring the same tire combination used there last year to its race next month. More to the point, the statement pointed out that the same tires used at Atlanta WON’T be used at Texas.
Goodyear has to love that.

Actually, that is part of the problem. Goodyear doesn’t like criticism, not even a little bit.

I’ve been covering NASCAR for more than 11 seasons now and I am still waiting for somebody who works for Goodyear to tell me: “You know what, we think the tire that blew out on the Such-and-Such car was just a bad tire. You have that from time to time. We hate it happened.”

No, there was always debris on the track and the tire got “cut,” or the brakes were too hot and the bead melted, or the team was too aggressive with camber or tire pressure.

All of those things DO happen, and Goodyear shouldn’t be blamed for every tire that goes down. But every once in while, it is Goodyear’s fault.

It’s always going to be that way. Nobody is perfect and nobody expects Goodyear to be. What I expect Goodyear to be is better, better today than it was yesterday and better tomorrow than it is today. That needs to be the goal.

Toward that end, Stewart is exactly right when he says Goodyear needs to have a test team that goes to tracks where NASCAR’s top series are going to race and runs lap after lap after lap trying to learn how to make the tires safer and more competitive.

But the company also needs to keep having tire tests with current, active teams on a regular, rotating basis to get those teams’ input in making tires better. It’s a two-part process. Goodyear’s own tests would get them closer to having the right combinations for teams to help hone even further in their outings.

The defense of what happened last week is that Goodyear didn’t want tires blowing out and creating a dangerous situation for the drivers. That, of course, is the proper course. But Goodyear can’t get a pass for going all the way to the “safe” end of the scale.

As Dale Earnhardt Jr. said Sunday evening, there has to be a middle ground somewhere between too soft to live and too hard to race. Goodyear’s job is to find that balance, as difficult as that might be to do. If you’re or two notches toward the “safe” side, that’s better than being one or two notches off the other way. But slamming the design all the way to the conservative end of the scale isn’t doing the job right. It’s covering your corporate backside.

Wheat from chaff and fact from fiction

HAMPTON, Ga. - I had a little discussion with a caller to the Sirius NASCAR Radio morning show Friday morning about reporters like me trying to find out "the truth."

The caller admonished me or some other "investigative reporter" to go out and find out the truth on reports that dynamometer tests run earlier this year show that Toyota has a clear horsepower advantage over the other makes.

Citing numbers given to them by sources, presumably from those other manufacturers, some people have reported a 20-horsepower gap between Toyota and Chevrolet, for instance.

The caller said he wants to know the real numbers and expects people like me to get them.

My point to him was that even if I had the actual report printed out and given to NASCAR with the raw data from the test itself, I'd have no more of a chance of telling him "the truth" than the people who're reporting the numbers they've got have been able to do.

Mabye I could tell him what that test of those particular cars done on that particular dyno on that particular day under those particular conditions with those particular operators doing the testing. But what would the numbers mean?

I could show those numbers to people working for all four manufacturers and get four different interpretations. NASCAR, undoubtedly, would give me a fifth.

If I could find 40 "independent" experts, they might give me 40 different readings of the data.

Or they might tell me that data, in and of itself, really tells you nothing. Horsepower is only one part of what makes a race car go fast, you know.

The point I was trying to make became even more relevant, I think, later in the day with all the action and reaction over penalties levied against Carl Edwards' team for violations found after his win at Las Vegas.

This literally happened, word for word and step for step.

Jack Roush came to the media center to defend his team and aver that it had no culpability in the lid being off the oil reservoir containter in Edwards' Ford after the race last weekend. There was another news conference scheduled in the media center, so we followed Roush to the 99 hauler and he continued his defense.

So I spent maybe 45 minutes hearing Roush's side of what happened. I then walked out of the back of the 99 hauler and walked immediately into another team's hauler in the garage.

I hadn't even made it to the lounge in the back before somebody stopped me and told me that what the 99 team did at Vegas was one of the most blatant examples of cheating he'd ever seen.

I had drivers roll their eyes, literally, at the explanation offered by Roush Fenway Racing that a fastener "failed" because of vibration harmonics. Dale Earnhardt Jr. actually called that explanation "comedy."

NASCAR penalized the team. Some people think Edwards got the 100-point/$100,000 fine/six-week crew chief suspension version of a penalty because it came in a "car of tomorrow" and that's sort of the standard penatly.

But a NASCAR official told me this week that this is not that type of violation.

That means that if NASCAR didn't think this type of infraction was serious the team likely would have received smaller penalties.

OK, which version of "the truth" do you want me to write? Roush's version, the garage area's version or NASCAR's version?

About all I can do is lay out all three and let you make your own judgment as a reader. I can try to ask as many people as I can what they think, but everybody you talk to has a bias one way or another.

When I write columns or this blog, I can give you my opinion. That's "the truth" as best as I can figure it out, and at best that's going to have to factor in my own views on things no matter how fair I try to be in drawing my conclusions.

I certainly would be great if I could tell you "the truth" in everything I write. But in this context, the opposite of truth isn't so much lies as it is viewpoints.

"The truth" is there somewhere. I understand that.

What I would tell you, though, is to be wary of anybody who acts like they've got the franchise for handing it out. More often than not, those people wouldn't know truth if it socked them upside the head.

Rulings raise new questions about commission's role

So much for the National Stock Car Commission being a NASCAR rubber stamp. After what's happened this week, capped by Wednesday's impossible-to-decipher ruling on the Robby Gordon case, it seems more like the commission has become a runaway court.

The appeals panel's job is to decide whether NASCAR has fairly applied its rules in cases where teams or drivers have run afoul of those laws. Its job is not to rewrite the rulebook or invent its own methods for handing out penalties that are not provided for in those rules.

Yet twice earlier this week, in cases involving Nationwide Series teams, the commission shifted responsibilities for fines from a team's crew chief to the team's owner. That might not be a big deal, since in many cases the team owner pays the fines anyway. But the rulebook specifically says the crew chief is the responsible party. So the commission is simply making that process up out of thin air.

On top of that, the commission threw out one penalty and reduced a couple of others for loose lids on oil tank reservoirs in Nationwide cars. Apparently, teams started arguing about what the rule that said those lids have to be "securely fastened" actually means.

So when it came time to penalize Carl Edwards's team for its loose oil tank containter lid from Sunday's race in Las Vegas, NASCAR didn't even cite the rule about the loose oil reservoir lid. Instead, in the Edwards penalty it cited another rule that prohibits anything unapproved that allows air to pass from outside the car to the inside or vice versa.

That's what this whole thing is about. If you leave that lid loose you're basically providing a chimney for air to flow up from under the car into the cockpit. That basicially sucks the car down on the track, creating downforce that teams desperately want and need with this new race car now being used.

Roush Fenway Racing says a bolt holding the lid down vibrated to the point it failed. People who're in a position to know tell me that cover is supposed to have four bolts holding it down, and if they all shook loose the mirrors and steering wheel would shake loose, too. But what do I know?

After all, the whole "It's not my fault!" defense seemed to work OK for Gordon, who got back his 100 driver and owner points and had crew chief Frank Kerr's suspension eliminated by the suddenly rogue commission.

Gordon is going to spin that as vindication. But let's be clear about this. The part on the car was unapproved and the commission ruled that Gordon was still responsible for it being on the car. It also increased his team's fine to $150,000 - the largest ever levied in NASCAR. So Gordon was not cleared of the violation.

Instead, the commission seems suddenly to be in the business of substituting its judgment for the rulebook's. Since the points deductions really might be tougher on Gordon's team than it might be on one of Jack Roush's or Rick Hendrick's teams, the commission gave back the points and increased the fine, apparently figuring that Dodge, which screwed up by giving Gordon the wrong part, would pay it anyway.

That probably will help Gordon's team. The point, though, is that the commission has no business thinking about that.

The commission is not empaneled to keep a team in business or run it off. The commission's job is to decide if proper procedures were applied in assessing and penalizing violations.

In the eyes of the commission all drivers and all team owners should be the same, no matter who they are or how much money they have.

Spare me the blue guys and give me some good crushed ice

LAS VEGAS - So I'm sitting here about 90 minutes before the race at Las Vegas and they're getting ready to start the prerace show featuring Men with Plumbing (sorry, I just never have managed to "get" the Blue Man Group point).

I should be thinking about something pithy or prescient about today's UAW-Dodge 400, but I've got nothing. I have been in North Carolina 36 hours since Feb. 5 and on Pacific time for 12 days. I am lucky to be vertical, quite honestly.

It's windy here this morning, danged windy. It's blowing down the frontstretch toward Turn 1 and some people expect it to cause problems.

Personally, I think everybody's going to be so cautious on the track today given all that's gone on this weekend that it will be a pretty clean race. (I hereby reserve the right to edit this blog later if that last sentence turns out to be dead wrong.)

I will tell you what's on my mind right now. That's supposedly what a blog is all about, right?

I am thinking about crushed ice. OK, I know I am weird. But crushed ice has actually become something of an obsession with me lately.

Why in the name of Pete doesn't some major national fast-food chain drop cubed ice and go to crushed ice in all of its outlets. If Burger King or Wendy's wants to give people a reason not to go do McDonald's, crushed ice might be the answer.

I stopped at a place out here called Raising Caine's. If you're from my part of the world, it's a lot like Zaxby's. They serve chicken fingers and french fries and cole slaw and it's good. But they also give you crushed ice for your drink cup.

And we're talking real crushed ice. Not the little pellets, which are better than cubes but not as good as honest-to-goodness shaved ice flakes - the kind that you can just take a mouthful of and let it melt its way down the throat.

Crushed ice done properly reminds you of a sno-cone, but not quite a slushy. Once the liquid is gone from the cup, you've still got something to work with.

I promise you that if one of the major chains went to crushed ice, that would be a difference maker for some customers - at least one for sure.