The starting point of reference
The motorsports media breathed a collective sigh of relief this week when http://www.racing-reference.com/ got back online.
It was down Sunday, and the first thing I thought of was that NASCAR had somehow managed to find a way to shut it down. I am a little embarrassed to admit that, since my first thought SHOULD have been, “Gee, I hope Alan Boodman is OK.”
Boodman is the guy who put the site together, and I did call to check on when I got back from California. When he got back to me he said he was fine but there had been a problem with his webhost’s server.
Whatever that means.
If you’re a NASCAR fan and you’ve never seen this website, I urge you to take a look at it. I don’t owe Boodman any money and he’s not paying me to give him a plug. Best I can tell, he doesn’t make money on the site anyhow.
I ran across it a couple of years ago doing research for my book on Tim Richmond when I was trying to find a definitive source for Richmond’s Busch Series records statistics.
The more I looked at it, the more interesting it was. It’s a database of EVERY Nextel Cup, Busch, Truck and International Race of Champions race. You can look up any driver’s career record. You can look up records by car owner. By season. By track. You can check a driver’s record at any track.
Go to the “driver vs. driver” section and type in the names of any two drivers in history. Within a second, you’ll know how many times they raced against each other what their comparative results were in those races.
For example, Jeff Gordon and Jimmie Johnson have both been in 163 races. Johnson has won 21 of them and Gordon 16. Johnson has finished ahead of Gordon 89 times and behind Gordon 74 times in those races.
You can also go to the “driver rankings” page and get a list of, say, the drivers who’ve been running at the finish of the most races from 1996 until right now. Mark Martin tops that list, at 479 races, followed by Dale Jarrett, Ken Schrader and Sterling Marlin.
Now why would you want to know such a thing? Well, who knows? But if you did, it’s there.
I’ve been using http://www.racing-reference.com/ for a couple of years now and have almost become its press agent. I’ve showed it to dozens of my colleagues and they use it now, too. Once you figure out what all is there, it’s incredibly easy to use and so far I haven’t found a single error on it.
Boodman lives in Pennsylvania and worked with databases for a living. He got interested in NASCAR and decided he wanted to do this, so he started building his records with history books and other such information.
If you’re really a fan, you should check it out. You can thank me later.

F1 -- The soccer of motorsports

Since we’re about to head toward the traditional Fourth of July weekend’s visit to Daytona, it seems that a few words about how Americans like their sports are in order.
We’ll use Formula One major domo Bernie Ecclestone’s words in a recent article in The Times of London as a jumping-off point. If you didn’t see what His Bernieness said, here’s a quick review.
“It does not matter to Formula One if there is no grand prix in the U.S.,” Ecclestone said. “What do we get from America? Aggravation, that’s about all. If you say ‘good morning’ over there and it’s five past 12, you end up with a lawsuit.”
That’s an outstanding line, but after the ridiculous debacle that was the 2005 U.S. Grand Prix at Indianapolis – in which just six cars actually raced following after a dispute over tires and safety and politics and egos and fun stuff like that – you would think Ecclestone would be a little less strident.
The contract for the U.S. Grand Prix is up after next weekend’s event, and Ecclestone appears to be in no mood to give the folks at Indianapolis Motor Speedway any kind of break on the $20 million price tag for hosting an F1 event.
“Why do we need to worry so much about America?” Ecclestone said. “America has never really taken to open-wheel racing. We have never got any sponsors out there. The television has never taken off. We have more viewers in Malta than over there.”
Clearly, Malta could beat our red, white and blue backsides in soccer (more on that in a minute), but if Ecclestone really doesn’t think the U.S. market is more important to his sport than Malta, then he’s just a dolt.
Having said that, I believe that the United States needs F1 no more than Ecclestone feels F1 needs us. The F1 series is, without any question, the world’s most popular motorsports series. But until is has at least one competitive American driver, it’s just not going to matter much in this country.
American sports fans pull for Americans. It’s not any more complicated than that.
That’s why the World Cup soccer tournament is the biggest thing in the world but struggles to find traction here.
This just in – on an international level we stink at soccer. Ghana knocked us out of the World Cup the other day.
Ghana!
That county has a total population of about 21 million people. There are nearly that many people in Texas. Are you telling me that a team of the best players in ANY sport from all of the other 49 states – even football – shouldn’t be able to beat a team of the best players from Texas? I know Ghana’s very best athletes all play soccer, while our best athletes are getting rich in other sports. But how can we get beat in anything that matters by Ghana?
We did, though. And that’s why no matter how much ESPN tries to hype it and no matter how much the “experts” try to force the World Cup down our collective throats, this country is not going to care about international soccer until we can beat people at it. I’m not saying that’s how it ought to be. But I am saying that’s how it is.
That gets us back to F1.
I know that American Scott Speed has a ride this year and will be competing next weekend at Indy. But until Speed and his team move way up the competitive ladder – or until Dale Earnhardt Jr. decides he wants to go F1 racing – nobody in this country is going to get terribly excited about that series.
Whether it races at Indianapolis or in Malta.

Is it next year yet?

It’s about time for the 2007 Nextel Cup schedule to become the object of much speculation among NASCAR beat writers.
What happens is that a few tracks start sending out ticket renewal forms to fans and word starts to leak out about what’s going to happen when. People then start trying to fill in the blanks from there and before you know it all kind of rumors are going around.
What has apparently set things off this year is a ticket letter that folks have gotten from New Hampshire International Speedway indicating that next year’s July race there will be held on July 1.
That’s two weekends earlier than this year. More significantly, it’s in the slot where the Pepsi 400 has traditionally been run – the weekend before July 4th.
To let you in on how some minds work, there are those who’re leaping to the conclusion that means a huge shakeup in the schedule is coming, one that might include moving the summer Daytona race back into the Chase somewhere.
That could happen, I guess, but it seems to me that it’s more about the calendar than anything else.
Daytona’s summer race is barely a July race this year – it’s on July 1. Most people who get time off for that holiday will still be working that Friday night – their vacation would be the next week. Next year, the Saturday night that weekend would be June 30. That’s not July. Daytona would rather have July 7 as its Pepsi 400 date, so it would in effect move back a week. That’d push Chicagoland back a week, too. But then you’d get right back on the same routine as this year with Pocono on July 22 and a open date on July 29.
One important thing to do when looking ahead at 2007 is to remember that Easter is always a factor. Next year, it falls on April 8, one weekend earlier than this year. You always have to fit Texas and Martinsville around that date. This year Martinsville was on April 2 and Texas on April 9. Things could stay in that order in 2007, but it’s also possible that Texas might be April 1 and Martinsville April 15.
The Daytona 500 will be on Feb. 18, but there is a question about what happens after that. The past two years it has been California-off weekend-Las Vegas with the Busch Series in Mexico that off week. But if the Busch Series goes to Montreal, as is expected, will it also go to Mexico City again? If it doesn’t, will that early off weekend for Cup be moved to later in the season somehow?
If I had to bet right now, I’d say things stay like they are. California on Feb. 25, off week, then Las Vegas on March 11 followed by Atlanta, then Bristol. Then you’d have either Texas or Martinsville, then Easter, then Texas or Martinsville followed by Phoenix and Talladega. Richmond would be May 5, then Darlington May 12, followed by the all-star race and Coca-Cola 600 to round out May.
Dover, Pocono, Michigan, Infineon, New Hampshire, Daytona, Chicagoland and Pocono would then come before the week off at the end of July – is that where the Montreal Busch race might go? Then back to the same schedule order we have now.
Kentucky wants a Cup date and Bruton Smith wants a second date for Las Vegas, too. Unless a track or two is sold, though, it’ll surprise me if either gets what it wants.
I don’t disagree completely with those who say too many tracks have two dates. If you were starting the Cup Series right now, not as many tracks would have a second date. You’d go to Kentucky, and maybe to Nashville or Gateway or the new track in Iowa. And you’d leave room for tracks down the road in Washington state and New York.
Here’s how. You’d set up a 26- or 27-race “regular season” and give each track one points race. Then, you’d have the 10 Chase races and you’d let each track bid on how much it’s willing to pay in terms of total purse for the right to host one of those events. No track gets more than one of those final 10.

Mears, Vickers just doing what they need to do

It often amazes me how people react to things.
Just about everybody seems to believe that Casey Mears is going to wind up driving the No. 25 Chevrolets for Hendrick Motorsports next year, and that certainly jibes with everything I’m hearing, too. The rumor mill also has Brian Vickers, who’s getting out of that ride, going over to Team Red Bull to drive a Toyota.
The basic reactions to both presumed moves have me a little puzzled.
For starters, there seems to be a little bit of a backlash against Mears in some circles because a couple of weeks ago he was saying that he was trying to work out a way to stay with Chip Ganassi Racing with Felix Sabates. And now, as soon as a job comes open at Hendrick Motorsports, he’s changing that tune.
Well, I wasn’t party to his negotiations and, in fact, I’ve yet to actually speak to Mears myself since all of this happened. But what, exactly, is he supposed to have done that’s wrong?
Mears has a contract with Ganassi that’s up at season’s end. The reality that is NASCAR these days is that any driver whose contract is up can’t wait much longer than this far into the final year of his deal to get something locked down for his future. So Mears has undoubtedly been talking to other people in addition to Ganassi to make sure he does what he has every right to do – find the best possible opportunity for himself to succeed at the Nextel Cup level.
If he said a few weeks ago that his first option was to stay where he is, maybe that was before somebody at Hendrick passed the word that a slot could be coming open.
Or, perhaps, Mears didn’t want to say anything about having that possibility in mind because he didn’t want to put Vickers and his team in the rumor mill jackpot. That’s precisely what would have happened, of course, if Mears had even hinted that he might be looking at moving to Rick Hendrick’s team.
I do feel for Donnie Wingo, the crew chief on the No. 42 Dodge team who lost Jamie McMurray last year and now will lose Mears after this season. That’s tough sledding for a crew chief and his guys, to keep having to adjust to a new driver.
But let’s be honest about all of this. Last year at Watkins Glen, I watched Mears sit through a press conference where it was announced that he was going to be shuffled to a fourth team that Ganassi planned to begin and be asked to start the 2006 season without having the points he’d amassed in the No. 41 Dodges.
Remember that? McMurray was still going to be in the 42, David Stremme had the 40 and Reed Sorenson the 41. Mears was going to be shuffled to a car sponsored by Home 123. That all changed when Ganassi agreed to let McMurray go to Roush Racing for this year, but Mears wasn’t exactly treated like he was the pick of the litter.
Hey, I don’t blame Ganassi for doing what he needed to do, just like I don’t blame Mears for doing the same thing.
No, Mears has not won a Cup race yet. He probably would have at Homestead last year had it not been for a phantom debris caution from NASCAR, but that stuff happens.
Vickers hasn’t won in a Cup car yet, either. But that doesn’t mean Team Red Bull or any other team looking at him should ignore the fact that Vickers is still young and has a lot of ability. If he drives a Toyota in 2007 and beyond, it may take a couple more years for him to get that win, who knows. And it may never happen.
Personally, I think the Toyota teams are going to get ripped by some fans no matter what they do. What if Team Red Bull went out and “stole” a top-name driver with a bunch of wins on his resume from an existing team? That’d be another example of Toyota trying to “ruin” the sport, wouldn’t it? But if the Toyota teams hire drivers who haven’t had tons of Cup-level success, some critics are going to talk about how they’re giving ridiculous money to drivers who haven’t done enough to deserve it.
There is not a “driver shortage” in NASCAR right now. There is, however, an imagination shortage. There are few obvious choices to fill the various openings that exist or will exist in the Cup ranks. In the absence of these, fans and media perceive that mean good choices don’t exist.
But they do. And the owners who successfully navigate their way through the changes that are coming are the ones who’ll be successful down the road. That’s going to involve having the ability to recognize potential and provide opportunities for that to take root and grow.

-30-

It's more than a numbers game to some of us

I absolutely plead guilty to being too fascinated by numbers. It goes way back.
My relatives tell me, and it certainly fits in with the way I remember things, that I pretty much taught myself how to do division by figuring baseball batting averages.
I vividly remember when I was about 8 having one of those "eureka" moments when I finally grasped how a pitcher's earned run average was determined.
Statistics in sports have always been interesting to me. It's difficult to compare eras in sports, but statistics are often the best - and always the most dispassionate - way to try.
So about two-thirds through Sunday's Neighborhood 400 at Dover International Speedway, Jeff Burton was leading and I looked up how many races it had been since his most recent victory. I knew it was around 150, and the actual number was 160.
If Burton won, it would have made a good chart to list the most number of races between two wins in a Cup driver's career.
But that's not a list that, as far as I could tell at the time, anybody had handy.
Never fear, I said to myself, I can figure this out before the race is over. Back a few years ago, I wanted to know how old the top winners in the sport were when they won their races. So I spent a pretty good while making a list of people who'd won 20 or more races, looking up their birthdays and the dates of races, then doing a spreadsheet of how old they were at the time of each win.
By the time I was done, I realized that I was well on my way to having a list of ALL of the races in Cup history. So that winter, between the end of one season and the beginning of the next, I finished that list off.
It's on a spreadsheet in my laptop (backed up on discs and flash drives six ways to Sunday) and it has the number of the race, the race date, the track name, the track site, the winning driver, the driver's birthday, his age at that win and the car owner's name.
Off that list, I can create lists of wins by driver, by track, by owner and by age.
And with the list by driver, Sunday at Dover I started going down the list looking for big gaps between victories by the same driver.
About the time that Burton no longer had the lead, I thought I had a pretty good handle on the list. The complicating factor was that there were some really big gaps that are misleading.
There is, for instance, a span of 417 races between Paul Goldsmith victories on the Daytona beach course in 1958 and on the Daytona International Speedway track in 1966. But Goldsmith actually ran in only 24 of those 418. So it was a little too complicated to have any shot at getting right on the fly like that.
Had Burton won, or even Jamie McMurray, who could have broken a 124-race drought of his own, it would have been something I would have spent time Sunday night figuring up for a Tuesday follow story. But once it was on my mind, there's no way I could walk away from it.
My friend Monte Dutton, who covers NASCAR for the Gaston (N.C) Gazette, rightly accuses me of being a "wonk" when it comes to such things. So, after getting back home Monday, I sat down with my list of races and found what I think to be the list of long streaks between wins.
Goldsmith's 417-race streak is the longest in terms of the total number of races held, but in terms of races started between victories the longest all-time streak is held by...somebody whose name will appear at the top of a chart you'll be able to find in the Charlotte Observer and on thatsracin.com when Burton or McMurray or anybody else with more than 100 wins between their most recent victories goes to victory lane.
Hey, I might be obsessed and therefore compelled to do all that research But I ain't stupid enough to give it away for free.

Don't look for 'side-by-side' advertising on a NASCAR telecast

OK, before you guys start...
Item No. 1 - No, the "side-by-side" thing ABC did for the Indianapolis 500 isn't likely to come to NASCAR on that or any other network.
Frankly, I don't think the split screen is all that great to start with. But I can see how fans would rather see racing on part of a screen than be missing it all together.
Still, you have to remember that the rights fee the IndyCar Series gets for its races is a pittance compared with what the networks are paying for Nextel Cup and Busch races.
Whatever fraction that is, that same fraction is what the network can charge for commercial time.
If you're paying (and these are made up numbers) $10,000 for a commercial on an Indy race, you might be willing to take half the screen for that. But if that same spot costs you $100,000 on a Cup race, you want the entire screen.
I will say it surprised me that ABC stuck with the "side-by-side" for the Indianapolis 500, the one open-wheel race in this country that still has any real significance. The overnight TV ratings showed Indy with a 5.2 and the Coca-Cola 600 with a 4.7. Both were down some from last year, when Indy also won that battle.
I guess if Firestone and Target and all those other sponsors are going to settle for half of a screen for all the other IRL races, they figure they can do it for Indy, too. But I am going to be very surprised if you ever see anything like that on a Cup race any time soon.
Item No. 2 - No, the fact that Tony Stewart is banged up after crashing in the Busch and Cup races back to back at Lowe's Motor Speedway does not mean that drivers in the Cup series are going to think harder about running in Busch races for fear of getting hurt.
First, to get into one of these things you have to have a large capacity for deluding yourself into believing that you're not going to get hurt driving a race car.
Second, in the minds of a racer the financial and competitive benefits of seat time in a Busch car outweigh the risks involved.
And third, you can't ask guys who do this for a living to run around being scared of their shadows. These guys race. Remember the wrecks Stewart was in at the Chili Bowl in January. If he'd missed Cup races because of that it would have seemed stupid for him to be running sprint cars indoors in the winter time, but one of the things that makes Stewart as good as he is that
he competes all the time at everything he does.
Finally, sometimes people get hurt. Elliott Sadler, for instance, could have broken his leg - or his dang neck - with that "stage dive" stunt he tried to pull at the end of "Trackside." No, it wasn't the smartest thing anybody's ever done. But race fans don't want drivers who sit around getting pedicures between practice sessions, either. These guys are real human beings, and
sometimes they bump into things.
Item No. 3 - No, the media didn't "cover up" the fact that Jeremy Mayfield's car failed postrace inspection after the Coca-Cola 600.
Here's the way it works. After the race, reporters are working on their stories. Usually, somebody wanders out into the garage to check on inspection and see if any problems have been found, and almost always they're not done yet. So we finish our stories and, at some point, somebody from NASCAR comes in and says, "Everybody's cleared inspection," or "We've got an issue, somebody will be in to talk about it."
After night races, reporters usually leave a little sooner after the race because deadlines are tighter. Still, if inspection's not done and something comes up NASCAR's PR folks have always called a handful of regulars - somebody from The Observer, from NASCAR Scene, from The Associated Press and from the local paper near a given track, for example - and said there's a
problem.
None of that happened Sunday night. It was Tuesday, at the car of tomorrow test at Lowe's Motor Speedway, before anybody said anything.
Rest assured that there will be plenty of discussion about that breakdown at Dover this weekend.

Got questions for David Poole? Here are some answers

You ask 'em, I answer 'em.
Q: With the "lucky dog" rule allowing drivers to get a lap back, why not double-file the restarts? There may be one car that gets a lap back from starting on the inside, but the rest just get in the way of good racing.
A: Agreed. In an earlier blog here I proposed precisely that, double-file restarts and allowing the leader to choose inside or outside, then second to choose and so on. I know for a fact that at one point last year the idea of double-file restarts with lead-lap cars up front was at least brought up for NASCAR's brass to consider. I don't believe it got very far, however.
NASCAR's practice in the past few years has been to give cars that fall a lap down every possible chance to make that up. Having more cars on the lead lap at the end of a race makes it look, at least on paper, like a more competitive race.
Q: We always hear drivers say things like "This is the same car we wrecked at Bristol." If it was wrecked and rebuilt, what makes it the same car? In other words, what is the definition of "car" in NASCAR terms. At what point is one scrapped. If part of the framework is damaged and they cut that part out and repair it, is that the same "car?"
A: When NASCAR teams refer to having the same car, they're talking about the same chassis.
hat's the basic framework, the floor pan and the tubes that make up the roll cage. Teams usually assign numbers to chassis they build or buy from a chassis company.
That chassis, over the course of its life, may have several front or rear "clips" placed on it. That's the structure that differs a bit whether the car's a Ford or Chevrolet or Dodge.
They'll also have different bodies hung on them, the sheet-metal that forms the skin of the car over the chassis structure. If a car is wrecked so badly that the basic skeletal elements are damaged, the car might be scrapped altogether or repaired and used as a "show car."
Q: I've heard Darrell Waltrip and Tony Eury Jr. and some other people call him by the nickname "Junebug." Where did that come from?
A: It was something Dale Earnhardt Sr. called him when he was a very young boy, and some people have been using it ever since.
Q: If Nextel Cup drivers can do an unlimited number of tests in their Cup cars at Kentucky and Nashville, where the Cup cars don't race, can Busch drivers do the same thing in Busch cars? For instance, could Denny Hamlin or Clint Bowyer take their Busch cars and test at Pocono or at Infineon Raceway?
A: The answer is yes, Hamlin or Bowyer or any other driver could take a Busch car and do unlimited tests at Pocono or Infineon, tracks where the Busch Series doesn't run.
The rules apply the same way in both directions.
Q: With all of the money and engineering in NASCAR, why isn't there a track cover/tarp system similar to baseball to keep the track dry (or not let it get as wet) during rain? This could really decrease the time it takes to dry a track after the rain.
A: Well, it certainly sounds like a good idea. Lowe's Motor Speedway president H.A. "Humpy" Wheeler talks about how one day he believes there will be something like this in place - some kind of heating system imbedded into the track's surface, for instance, that could be turned on to facilitate drying.
The problem is making it cost-effective. Any such system, as well as any kind of tarp system, would have to be very elaborate.
Imagine, for instance, how much tarp you'd need to cover Daytona's 2.5-mile track. You'd have to have some way to have the tarp be right beside the track so it could be deployed when needed, but still have the mechanism for storing and deploying it not get in the way of the racing.
You would have to be able to get it in place very quickly, too, because the cars often are on the track when the rain begins.
Nothing is impossible these days. The new NFL stadium being built for the Arizona Cardinals has a grass field that can be moved outside of the stadium to get sunlight and rain and then rolled back into the indoor stadium before game time.
Maybe the race track answer, at least at a place like Bristol where there are grandstands all around a relatively small track, would be a retractable fabric roof that could cover the track when the cars aren't racing and be pulled away during events.
Q: When Jimmie Johnson wins a race you guys put a big picture of him and his car on the sports page. When Dale Earnhardt Jr. won at Richmond and Greg Biffle won at Darlington, though, you didn't have them or their cars on the sports page. Why not? Why don't you give other drivers the same respect you give Johnson?
A: Because the folks who put the paper out on Sunday mornings aren't psychic. Richmond and Darlington were Saturday night races. Newspaper deadlines stink on Saturday nights and photos have to be selected long before the race is over.
Many readers, in fact, don't get stories about Saturday night races in their Sunday papers because part of the press run is done before the race ends. It stinks, but we can't stop the clock any more than we can tell who's going to win before the race is over.
In many cases, but not all, we'll run photos of a Saturday night winner with a follow-up story in the Monday paper.
But on some days more current news about other events dictates that they get more prominent play. One thing that makes working for a newspaper interesting is that you don't get the same news two days in a row.
Each day, our desk looks at what is happening and decides which stories are the biggest ones. They get the prominent play. Sometimes that's the race, sometimes it's not. Sometimes who wins has something to do with that decision, other times it does not.
If, for example, the points leader wrecks and somebody not in the Chase wins a race late in the year, the lead photo may be of the wreck and not the winner.
News happens, and sometimes it doesn't happen early enough for us to do as much as we'd like to do. (More questions? Send them to me at dpoole@charlotteobserver.com or leave them as comments to this blog.)

It would be news if Johnson didn't win at Lowe's

Jimmie Johnson might very well win his fourth straight Coca-Cola 600 on Sunday.
If he does, it would be his fourth straight victory in major Nextel Cup events at Lowe's Motor Speedway and his eighth win in 11 such events there since the start of the 2003 season.
After every one of the seven victories he's had, including Saturday night's in the NASCAR Nextel All-Star Challenge, somebody will call or write telling me that Johnson wins at the Charlotte track because his No. 48 Chevrolet is also sponsored by Lowe's. What's funny about it is that most of the people who share that opinion with me seem to believe they're the first person to whom that thought has occurred.
I imagine some of these folks are the same people who drive by a golf course and yell "FORE!" out the window as though they're the first to ever think that'd be hilarious.
I like a good conspiracy theory as much as anybody. But it at least needs to make sense. And the last thing that makes sense right now would be for anyone to "rig" it for Johnson's No. 48 car to win another race at Lowe's Motor Speedway. If NASCAR would allow it, in fact, I promise you that H.A. "Humpy" Wheeler would revert to his short-track roots and place a "bounty" on Johnson this week.
That's often done when one driver starts winning a little too often for a weekly track's promoter, who offers a little extra money to anybody who can halt the dominant driver's hot streak.
Above all else, running a race track is about selling tickets. Wheeler and his guys at Lowe's have a bunch of them to sell, with grandstands holding around 150,000 fans. They put about 125,000, maybe a little more, in there Saturday night for the all-star race and now they're trying to sell them all again eight days later for the 600.
NASCAR is popular, but that's still a very tall order. The Charlotte track works hard to sell its tickets, but no amount of effort on its part would help as much as having a thrilling and/or controversial finish to the all-star event would have.
Fans wavering on whether to come out for the race on Sunday, on whether to buy up the final 10,000 or 15,000 seats that might still be available, might have been bumped off that fence by something dramatic.
Johnson may not win again Sunday night, but it'll be news if he doesn't. You'd have to think that just about anybody who's really eager to see Johnson win a race at Charlotte has already had several opportunities to have that itch scratched.
If a race's outcome could be fixed, and if NASCAR let Wheeler pick somebody to whom "the call" would go, it would unquestionably be Dale Earnhardt Jr. Earnhardt Jr. is not only the most popular driver in the sport, he's also the hometown hero. He grew up in Mooresville and still lives there, and Earnhardt Jr. has said many times that winning at Charlotte is something he very much likes to do.
If Earnhardt Jr. had won the NASCAR Nextel All-Star Challenge this weekend, Wheeler would have instinctively called in extra staff in his ticket office for Sunday and Monday shifts. And they would have been kept busy.
Johnson's dominance at Lowe's Motor Speedway has been phenomenal. He's won seven times on basically three different racing surfaces. He has dominated races and he's come from behind.
He's had nearly perfect evenings and he's had to overcome obstacles. He's won from the pole and he's won from as far back as 37th. But if you think he's done all of that because it has all somehow been carefully arranged, you're certainly not thinking like somebody who's trying to sell tickets.
After all, it's hard to market a foregone conclusion.

Toyota but one factor accelerating change in the business of racing

Late Saturday night, as Greg Biffle was celebrating his win at Darlington, someone in the media center was working on a sidebar.
In newspaper lingo, a sidebar is a story related to but not directly covering a particular event. Jim Utter, for instance, wrote at sidebar for The Observer Saturday night about runner-up finisher Jeff Gordon while I wrote the "lead" race story.
I was up in the press box, so I couldn't see who it was that asked Jack Roush about Toyota during the postrace interview. Undoubtedly, his sidebar regarded Dale Jarrett's signing with Michael Waltrip Racing and Toyota for 2007.
The question, however, was general enough to allow Roush to go anywhere he wanted to with it - something like "How will Toyota change the way things are done in the garage?"
Here's some of what Roush had to say in response: "..."I know there was a lot to do in the papers last week about the fact that Toyota was not spending their money on race teams and was not going to create the imbalance that would exist if one manufacturer did more than another, but they're giving their money to Michael Waltrip and to the other teams that they've got started so their fingerprints are all over what's happening. They are in fact raiding the garage and that's going to have an impact.
"...I know we've talked to Ford about it. I've talked to NASCAR about it. One of the things that has made NASCAR competition so close and so interesting to all the fans is the fact that there is parity.
"There is parity among the drivers' ability at the very top. There's parity technically among the teams and there's parity among the manufacturers with regard to what they've been able to do or willing to do with supporting the teams and with bringing technology.
"But Toyota has a chance of breaking that parity and we'll just have to see what happens."
A couple of things about that give me pause. And this is not only about what Roush had to say, because he merely voiced an opinion that we're hearing a lot of these days.
First, there's this business of "raiding" the garage. As I said in part of the Monday Darlington follow-up stuff we did in the paper, doesn't it stand to reason that anybody coming into the sport to form a new team is going to try to hire good people away from current teams? Where else do you find good people?
As Roush Racing and Hendrick Motorsports and other multicar teams grew from two to three to four and even to five teams, didn't they sometimes go to other teams to find employees for their staff additions?
You certainly can't expect Toyota team owners to populate their staffs completely with people who haven't been in the Cup garage, not if they want to be competitive any time soon.
Then there is the whole "parity" issue. Roush has a point there, in the sense that if it becomes a matter of one manufacturer subsidizing its teams to a degree that no other manufacturer can or is willing to do, the balance is going to be upset.
But couldn't it just as truthfully be argued that the exact same thing has already happened in the sport?
Substitute "team owner" for "manufacturer" in that previous paragraph and see if you don't agree.
Perhaps "subsidizing" is not the correct verb, since it's not that Roush or Rick Hendrick or other multicar team owners are spending their own millions to support their three- to five-car teams.
Sponsors provide much of that money, sponsors who want to be associated with winners and are willing to pay $15 million or $20 million to get it.
The rise of multicar teams in the sport has certainly changed the competitive balance. Single-car teams can't keep up these days, not because the people who work for them aren't good racers. The business model has changed.
A sponsor who might have to spend $15 million for 36 races on a single-car team could come to Roush and spend $10 million and be part of five cars, and get five drivers to make appearances and do commercials.
The buzz in the garage right now is that Toyota is offering "cut-rate" full-season sponsorship opportunities. Michael Waltrip, for instance, could sell a sponsor 36 races for $8-$10 million instead of up to twice that much. He'd make up the difference because Toyota is either paying him more directly or is paying indirectly by doing many of the engineering and car development functions for all three Toyota team owners instead of having each owner having to do that on his own.
I don't know if that's what is happening or not. But if it is, isn't that just another example of changing the business model?
If I am a sponsor and somebody tells me they can get the job done for 36 races for $10 million, there'd better be a good explanation as to why that wouldn't work for the team I'm currently giving $20 million to.
Roush and Hendrick and the rest of the guys who own multiple-car teams right now have worked hard to make their businesses work. But just like racing evolves, business does, too.
When the game changes, you have to adapt. If Toyota's arrival changes the way business is done in NASCAR, as so many people think it will, the teams that will be thriving five years from now will be the ones that figure out where the sport is going instead of merely resisting the forces driving it there.
And covering which teams do that and which teams fail won't be just a sidebar over the coming years. That's your lead.

It's a busy stretch, but if you've got questions, I'll look for answers

Sorry I haven't been the most faithful blog correspondent these past few days. Charlotte race weeks are too close for my mind to be anything but mush right now.
I know you guys get angry at me when I complain about my job, and I understand that. But I am just telling you that in the month of May I am like that guy in the circus who spins plates on the ends of sticks. About the time you get three or four plates going, you have to keep going back to spin them again while trying to get more in the air.
"You must enjoy sleeping in your own bed during the race weeks in Charlotte," people say. I do, but sleep is about the only thing you get to do at home for those 10-12 days.
Anyway.
One of the things I want to do with this feature is answer questions you might have about racing. There are a couple that I'll answer here before you ask, because they always come up, but if you've got questions I will try to find the answers or tell you that I can't find them at any point in this process.
I try to read every comment on each blog I post, even though I may not reply to all of them. If you've got questions you've always wanted to know the answer to, post them to me in comments to this blog or just e-mail them to me at dpoole@charlotteobserver.com.
Every so often, I'll collect 10 or so and post the answers in a blog. You can leave your name if you want to, but you don't have to.
OK, a couple of answers to questions that always come up.
1. Jeff Gordon finished 40th at Richmond and earned $110,861. Reed Sorenson finished 23rd and won $77,025. How can this be?
No question is asked with greater regularity that the one about who wins what in a Cup race.
The answer is really, really complicated. But in the most simple terms, there actually are several parts to the total purse in a race. The first part is what the track actually puts into the purse. The second part is the money the television network pays for the rights to broadcast that particular race. In both of those cases, first pays more than second, second pays more than third, third pays more than fourth and so on.
The third part of the purse comes from contingency awards. At Richmond, for instance, Dale Earnhardt Jr. won the Bank of America Card Service Mid-Race Leader, the Mobil 1 Command Performance Driver of the Race, the Sunoco Diamond Performance and the EA Sports Move of the Race awards.
Each contributed to his overall winnings of $239,166. Eligibility for those awards is based on which cars carry which stickers behind their front wheels. Some cars don't participate in some programs because of conflicts - Casey Mears' car is sponsored by Havoline, for instance, so it's not going to carry a Mobil 1 Oil sticker.
That, however, doesn't explain how Gordon won more than $33,000 more than Sorenson at Richmond. Gordon didn't win any contingency awards. But Gordon qualifies for several of the "owner's plans" that contribute money to each race's purse.
One rewards teams on a formula that weighs their performance over the past three seasons, apportioning part of the television dough. Another rewards owners for having won races in the previous year. That's where the "extra" money comes from for Gordon's team.
2. Why are races starting later these days?
Television, mainly. If a race starts at 1 p.m. on the East Coast, that's 10 a.m. in the Pacific time zone. That's pretty early to get a full audience - people in Oregon and Washington and California go to church, too.
If you start at race at, say, 2:30 pm in the East, that's 11:30 am in the West and that's a little better for the audience across the country. Local television affiliates, especially NBC affiliates, don't mind seeing races go off the air right at 6 p.m., either.
That leads into their local newscasts, and local news is a competitive business. It's nice having a NASCAR race lead into your news, especially if you're in a market where the races get good ratings.
3. What happens if a driver has to go to the bathroom during the race?
A driver loses so much fluid during a race and is concentrating so hard that, frankly, the issue doesn't come up as much as you'd think it might. But if a driver has to go to the bathroom during the race, a driver goes to the bathroom during the race.

'Craftsman for a Cure' ought to be on must-do list

If you live in the Charlotte area, or if you're among the thousands of fans who'll be visiting during race weeks there later this month, mark Tuesday, May 23, on your calendars.That evening, Bobby Hamilton and a few dozen friends will be at the NASCAR SpeedPark at Concord Mills, the massive shopping complex just down the street from Lowe's Motor Speedway.

The occasion will be the "Craftsman for a Cure," a charity event to raise money for the American Cancer Society's Relay for Life and the Victory Junction Gang Camp.Hamilton is at the center of the event after announcing earlier this year that he would step out of the NASCAR Truck Series to begin treatments for cancer found in his neck.

The event runs from 5 to 9 p.m. and there are several ways fans can help.For $75, a fan can get a VIP dinner with one of several drivers who'll be there to help with the event. Tickets to race against drivers on one of the tracks at the SpeedPark are $20 to $40. And tickets for access to autograph sessions with selected drivers are $15 each.Fans can order tickets by calling (866) 227-3264.

Hamilton said this week that it's been a humbling experience to help put this thing together."Victory Junction Gang has been such a huge thing that we have all tried to support whenever we could," Hamilton said. "There have been people who have been a little bit more fortunate to do more for certain things than others. I have always been one of those guys that I just do what I can.

"To be on the flip side of it...has just totally overwhelmed me. To know that I can pick up the phone and I called Jeff Gordon's people and Jimmie Johnson's people. Then I picked up the phone and I called Kasey Kahne. The man is in between practices calling me back, saying 'OK, give me some times. This is what I would like to do. I'll do an hour here, an hour there. I'm going to call you after the next practice.' And he'd run and call me back.

"Kurt Busch, Ryan Newman stepped up right off the bat. I can't even spout off half the names. A ton of our NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series guys have really stepped up as well. Jon Wood called me. The Wood family has been close to me my whole career.You really hate to throw names out there because we have so many participating.

"We have a whole field of drivers almost that could make a whole race. I cherish everything that every one of them has done. And I don't have to tell you how I feel about Ken Schrader and Michael Waltrip who have stepped up. It just goes on and on, and the people just want to keep doing more. You just can't believe what a feeling it is when you are on the other side of it."

Many of the drivers who won't be there have donated uniforms and other memorabilia for a silent auction that will run in conjuncture with the event.

Hamilton says his treatments are going on along well, but Hamilton wouldn't complain if they weren't. He's always been one of the most decent, down-to-earth guys connected to NASCAR, and the way he's dealing with this is just proving that all over again.

"Everybody is going to deal with this at some point in their life," Hamilton said. "It's such a big thing. I guarantee that just about everybody knows somebody or has had a family member go through it. It just makes you think of things different.

"I don't look at the sport that different. I look at human life different. I see people at the hospital. I talk to patients every day. I had the hospital call me and want to give me VIP treatment because they had race fans as patients talking about me.They called my house and said 'We'd like to bring you in the back door. We have a CEO room.' I said, 'I don't want you to touch me. I want to sit right out there with them. Leave me alone. I'll learn a lot. I just want to sit with the rest of the folks.'

"I think I have learned to cherish anybody's life. We're all human beings. We all have a life. Do some of us live them right? Probably not. Do all of us live them right? No. Do all of us live them halfway right? Probably so. There's so many different ways to look at it.

"You know, somebody will get mad on the highway and say, 'You blankety-blank.' That's not me anymore. I tell people all the time. Somebody will call or stop by and say, 'Is there anything we can do? We're praying for you.' And I'll say, 'That's all I need, just keep doing that.' And I'll turn around and tell them 'Don't forget to hug your wife or your kids or your grandkids tonight and tell them that you love them. Make sure you do that every night.' That's just the difference in what you learn going through something like this."

It's a good thing Southern skin grows thick

Will Ferrell was all over the place at Talladega over the weekend, promoting the movie he stars in that is going to be released Aug. 4.
The movie's called "Talladega Nights: The Legend of Ricky Bobby," and NASCAR is firmly in bed with the company that made the movie in terms of promoting it. "Ricky Bobby" merchandise went on sale at the track this weekend and the NASCAR public relations machine put Ferrell in front of the media as much as possible during the Aaron's 499 weekend.
I don't have anything against Ferrell, per se, but I took a pass on taking part in those sessions since the only possible objective of any of them was to promote his movie. All I've seen are a couple of trailers, so maybe I'm prejudging this film.
But my initial perception is that it's going to be full of the same old stereotypes about people who live in the South.
And if that's true, then I can tell you right now that I am going to hate it. It's not about being able to take a joke, because goodness knows if you're a Southerner you have to have a pretty thick skin to make it through life these days.
Funny's funny. But mean is mean, too, and frankly I am tired of having good, hard-working people made fun of just because they have a Southern accent.
Let's use Kellie Pickler as an example.
Now I know it's not cool to talk about "American Idol," but it's not the No. 1 show on television because nobody pays attention to it.
My sister-in-law, Lori, lives near Pickler's hometown of Albemarle and everybody there was pulling pretty hard for Pickler. So as the weeks went along, I began to hear and read about what people were saying about this young lady who's had a pretty tough life and was just trying to take an advantage of a big break that came her way.
And so, naturally, most of that hacked me off. The Ellie Mae Clampett stuff. The "Kellie can't possibly be that dumb"stories.
Pickler didn't know what calamari was until she went to California? Hey, take a pound of liver mush into the green room for an "American Idol" taping and see how many California natives could tell you what that was.
If you ask me, a slice of fried liver mush will kick calamari's butt in a taste test 100 times out of 100 - and I've had both.
But every week on "Idol," after Pickler sang her guts out, they'd parade her to center stage and do something or say something to make fun of her.
Simon Cowell called her a "minx" one night and Pickler didn't know what that was.
Reckon Cowell would have known what a "cooter" was if Pickler had called him that?
A couple of years ago, a guy named Jeff McGregor got himself a motor home, packed up his wife and spent a year going around in it to NASCAR races. He then wrote himself a book called "Sunday Money" about the experience.
The book was interesting, but in it McGregor kept talking about "off-ramp America."
It's actually a pretty good term to describe the sameness you can see when you travel from place to place if all you take the time to notice is what's within sight of the interstate. But what I kept thinking about when I read the book was that there's a heck of a lot more of that kind of America than there is the kind McGregor and his wife were used to as residents of New York City before they set off on their adventure.
There are a lot more people in this country who're like Kellie Pickler and the people around her hometown who pulled for and voted for her on "American Idol" that there are people who fly from New York to Los Angeles and back and think of everything in between as "flyover country."
And there are a lot more people in this country like the ones I'm betting Will Ferrell's movie will "spoof," which is an euphemism for "make fun of," than there the sycophants who followed him around Talladega all weekend telling him how hilarious his movie's going to be, too.

How the hell did he do that?

They're having Dale Earnhardt Day on Saturday in Mooresville, marking what would have been the seven-time champion's 55th birthday.
I am sure the people who come to Dale Earnhardt Inc. headquarters, where NBC News anchor Brian Williams will be joining Teresa Earnhardt in leading the ceremony marking the occasion, will enjoy themselves. I'll be at Talladega Superspeedway, though, and when you really think about it, that's as good of a place as any to remember Earnhardt by.
It's hard to go to Daytona without thinking about Earnhardt, of course. His Daytona 500 victory there in 1998 and Jack Nicklaus' win in the 1986 Masters are the two most memorable events I've had the privilege of covering in my career.
Daytona is also where I saw Earnhardt have as much fun as I ever saw him have, running in the Rolex 24 just a couple of weeks before the crash in which he was killed in the 2001 Daytona 500.
But Talladega was a place where I got to see Earnhardt do something that amazed even Earnhardt - his victory in the 2000 Winston 500. That would turn out to be his final victory in a Cup race, which makes what happened on that October afternoon that much more memorable.
In an effort to give the drivers more throttle response with their restrictor-plate engines, NASCAR gave teams plates with 1-inch openings for that weekend's activities. But after second-round qualifying on Saturday morning, the drivers were called into a meeting and they emerged with plates featuring openings that were one-sixteenth of an inch smaller.
In practice that morning, before the swap, Bobby Labonte had turned a lap at 198.475 mph. That was too fast for NASCAR's liking, so they made the controversial move to reduce the plate openings before "happy hour" and for the race.
"I don't know who it favors," Earnhardt said after the meeting. "They made the change, that's what it's all about. It's not going to change the drivers going four wide. That's what they were talking about in the meeting. You've got to use your head."
In the race the next day, Earnhardt was 15th on a restart with just 15 laps to go. His first parry failed, and in two laps he fell back to 23rd. When he crossed the scoring line to complete Lap 183, with just five laps remaining, he was 18th.
And then it happened. Kenny Wallace had new tires on his car. He and Joe Nemechek, who then were teammates for Andy Petree's operation, hooked up and as they started toward the front Earnhardt pulled down in front of them.
"It was like I had turbos," Wallace said. Earnhardt went from 16th at the start of Lap 185 to eighth at the end of it. The next time by, he was in front of the pack chasing leaders Dale Earnhardt Jr., John Andretti and Mike Skinner and Benny Parsons, on ESPN, was screaming "Where did HE come from?"
The Earnhardt-Wallace-Nemechek train kept coming. Coming to the white flag, Earnhardt passed Skinner, who'd picked up the lead after Earnhardt Jr. bobbled when he got down on the apron off Turn 4.
After being 18th with five to go, Earnhardt spent the last lap playing defense to HOLD ONTO the lead. Which, of course, he did.
Back then, before NASCAR completely rolled over and played dead for the broadcast media in how it conducts postrace interviews, the race winner at Talladega came to the press box to be interviewed after completing victory lane ceremonies and the ridiculous photo "hat dance."
At Talladega, that required putting the winner in a van and, with a police escort, driving him around the track under the grandstands to the press box, which is just above track level there in front of pit road in the Turn 4 end of the trioval.
But the time Earnhardt got to the press box that day, a couple thousand fans had gathered on the concourse to greet him. When he climbed out of the van, it was as though he was Caesar and he'd just returned to Rome from his conquests. The chants of "EARN-HARDT! EARN-HARDT!" were so loud you could barely hear in the press box with the doors shut, and had no chance to hear anything when they were opened to let him in.
No matter what you might think, reporters aren't idiots. We all knew we'd seen Earnhardt write another chapter to his legend that day. We couldn't wait to get him to talk about it, to tell us how he did something most of us couldn't believe even though we'd just seen it. I begged the moderator of the postrace interview to call on me first that day, and that wish was granted.
Earnhardt sat down, took the microphone and grinned that little goofy grin of his at us. "The first question comes from David Poole," the moderator said. Earnhardt looked at me and I said, "Earnhardt, how in the hell did you do that?"
He had no idea.
"To think anybody could come from as far back in the field as we were and win this race is beyond me," he said. "You saw it. I couldn't believe it."
Two days later that DEI called a press conference at the team headquarters in Mooresville to announce that Earnhardt and Earnhardt Jr. would drive in the Rolex 24 at Daytona the following year.
I walked in and Earnhardt was standing there talking to someone. He motioned a couple of us over and said he'd watched the videotape and figured out some of how he'd made it from 18th to first in four laps and won that race.
As he talked, he used his hands to demonstrate each move he made and how he made it pay off.
I looked at Earnhardt and said, "Well, it's still one of the damndest things I've ever seen anybody do." And to this day, it still is.

Why shouldn't NASCAR give short-track 'choose' rule a shot?

Sometimes the best ideas are the ones you steal. I think NASCAR needs to steal something from short-track racing.
I saw this in practice Saturday when I went to the Colossal 100 at The Dirt Track @ Lowe's Motor Speedway and watched legend Scott Bloomquist win the race and a $50,000 first prize.
It's a common practice at other short tracks, too, and involves the use of a "CHOOSE" sign for restarts.
Anytime the race is slowed for a caution, a lap or two before the green flies again the field is shown the "Choose" sign. At that point, the leader must decide if he wants to line up on the inside or the outside for the double-file restart.
The second-place driver then makes the same choice - he can line up behind the leader or pull alongside to start on the outside of the front row.
If the first two guys go to the inside, the third-place guy can get behind them or go to the outside. The choosing continues right on back through the field. Sometimes this can really shake up the lineup. Drivers have to make quick decisions because once you pull into a line, that's it, and it's time for the next guy to decide.
It adds an element of strategy to the races. So the more I think about it, the more I wonder why that wouldn't be a good thing for NASCAR to take a look at for its big-time races, too.
Now I know for a fact that the idea of double-file restarts for lead-lap cars has at least been discussed at NASCAR's top levels as recently as last year.
In such a plan, cars on the lead lap would all start ahead of lapped cars. If you're going to keep the free pass for the first car a lap down, that allows one driver per caution to make up a lap lost earlier.
Besides, if you're a lap down you got that way because other cars were faster or you had a problem, and that's too bad.
As far as I know, the idea didn't get too far and those who were talking about it would have had the second-place car line up automatically beside first place and so forth like they would at the start of a race.
But how interesting would it be to see NASCAR go to two-wide restarts after all cautions and employ the "choose" rule at the same time?
There are tracks where the leader would likely pick the outside. There are tracks where second, third and even fourth might stay in a preferred line and leave the fifth-place guy a chance to move all the way up in the other lane if he was willing to take the gamble.
It would be fascinating, and it would add another element to races. You'd have to keep restarts single file in the final 10 laps the way they are now. You might even extend that to the final 25 laps, since a guy who's leading that late in the race deserves to keep that advantage that deep into an event.
If nothing else, going to a rule that puts all lead-lap cars at the front of the field ahead of the lapped cars would keep television announcers from telling us every time there's a restart that a guy who's in 14th place is really in more like 28th for restart with the lapped cars to the inside.
More than that, it would have the best cars racing each other more often in a race, and that's the kind of competition that has made NASCAR as popular as it is.
The perfect race to try this would be the NASCAR Nextel All-Star Challenge next month at Lowe's Motor Speedway.
I know that won't happen, since such a change would be too radical to happen that soon.
Maybe next year. Or maybe it could be tried out in the Truck Series at some point, just so fans and drivers could get used to the concept at the NASCAR level. Or maybe somebody can explain to me why it wouldn't work at racing's top levels, even though it seems to work just fine on hundreds of tracks all over the country every week.

Stop me if you've heard this one about racers as athletes ...

Every once in a while a story will pop up somewhere about how NASCAR is not a sport, or somebody looking for a little bit of attention will spout off about how race car drivers are not athletes.
It'll even come up every once in a while in a setting where people ought to know better. Last year, when I was doing a regular weekly NASCAR segment on ESPN's "Cold Pizza," a regular contributor on that show named Skip Bayless started in on the whole racers aren't athletes thing.
Bayless, and I am paraphrasing here, basically said that any competitor who doesn't have to run while competing is not an athlete. That, of course, is poppycock. By his definition, swimmers are not athletes. Neither are skiers, nor hockey players.
They don't "run" while competing, do they?
That's an arbitrary definition of what makes an athlete, and it just doesn't work. In countering that argument, I made this analogy - if a guy who plays guitar with incredible skill and talent cannot play the piano, does that mean he's not a musician?
There are many, many types of musical talent. Someone who plays the French horn in a symphony orchestra might not be able to play the fiddle for a country music band, but both of them have musical talent and ability.
Those guys in the "Blue Man Group" or the ones who wham on garbage cans in "Stomp" are immensely talented and skilled, but their performances hardly fit any classical definition of music. That doesn't make what they do any less entertaining for those who enjoy it.
I went to dictionary.com and looked up the word "sport." Here's the most pertinent meaning given there: "An activity involving physical exertion and skill that is governed by a set of rules or customs and often undertaken competitively."
Without question, driving a race car involves physical exertion and skill. And the definition of "athlete" fits, too.
"A person possessing the natural or acquired traits, such as strength, agility, and endurance, that are necessary for physical exercise or sports, especially those performed in competitive contexts."
The skills it takes to be a NASCAR driver are specific, in many cases, to the sport itself. But that's true of just about any sport. Each game requires its own level of things like hand-to-eye coordination, vision, concentration and, yes, physical ability.
A racer doesn't necessarily have to be able to run a mile or throw a baseball without looking uncoordinated, but he does need strength and agility and reflexes in various aspects of his job.
It's not the same skill set as a basketball player, but it's still a set of athletic skills.
Football fans should be able to understand this as well as anybody. That game has become so specialized at the highest levels, but even at its most basic football is a game where certain positions require certain skills.
A good offensive lineman can have quickness without having raw speed. Receivers must know how to catch, to run patterns, to improvise when a play breaks down and to block when that's what a play requires.
Does a defensive back need to know how to kick a 35-yard field goal to be a good football player? Of course not. So let's put this argument to rest, shall we?

It's time to punch in on the NASCAR media's night shift

At some point last year, I think it was in early August, a couple of us who cover NASCAR for a living were sitting around grumbling - as we're wont to do - about a difficult upcoming stretch for us.
We had the Bristol night race followed by a race that ended under the lights at California leading into the September night at Richmond.
Fans love night races, but reporters hate them. Forget about time zones, the only clock that matters is the one clicking at your newspaper's office. And when it gets to the witching hour called "deadline," that clock waits for no man or event.
Before this Algonquin roundtable of the motorsports media adjourned, we reckoned that it'd do us the most possible good if we all just set our personal watches and our body clocks to Pacific time for the duration of that stretch. We reasoned that since an 8 p.m. start at Bristol and Richmond and a 5 p.m. start in California were all exactly the same in terms of East Coast time, we'd all get a lot more sleep and have a better chance of knowing whether to order pancakes or a patty melt when we stumbled into a Denny's because it was the only place we could be reasonably sure would be open at whatever point we had the time to get something other than race track lasagna to eat.
I bring this up again after it hit me the other day that between now and the end of May there's only one true daytime Nextel Cup racing event scheduled. Aside from the Aaron's 499 at Talladega on April 30, we'll all be working the night shift for the next six weeks. Saturday's race starts around 5:25 p.m. local time in Phoenix, which is 8:30 in "the real world" as those of us with Eastern deadlines call it.
After a Sunday afternoon race at Talladega, you've got Richmond, then Darlington and then two weeks of prime-time activities at Charlotte, which when you work for the Charlotte Observer is otherwise known as "hell weeks."
I laugh when people during Charlotte weeks say, "Well, you do get to sleep in your own bed."
Sure, but that's all I do at home on those weekends. I leave the house mid-morning and get home, at the earliest, at midnight. If I see my wife and family, it's because I've woke them up or they're sick and can't sleep.
I'm skipping this week's race in Phoenix, but not because I don't want to do a night race.
My wife, Katy, is having a knee operation and I sort of felt like it'd be bad form to be 2,500 miles away when she couldn't walk.
After Talladega though, I think I might try the Pacific time thing for the May stretch. If I can just get everybody else to back their clocks up three hours, too, I'll be set.
Surely the neighbors would be willing to delay yard work until noon or so. And it'd probably be easy to get the banks to stay open until around 8 p.m. for me over those weeks. If I could just get that dang clock at the Observer's office set back three hours, I'd be golden.

Women are women and men are, well, sorry

It seemed like took Robin Pemberton a while on Wednesday to believe he actually was even being asked the question.

But after a few minutes, he realized that there are people who really did want to know if NASCAR planned to take any disciplinary action against Nicole Lunders, the girlfriend of driver Greg Biffle, for what she did Sunday at Texas Motor Speedway.

After first saying, "it's Easter, can't you give me a break?" the NASCAR vice president for competition said this: "There will be some conversations that will be had with the people that participated, and we'll make sure that this doesn't carry on and into the garage or anywhere else. You've got to remember, most everybody in the garage area are friends, and those two girls in particular have a close relationship. Tempers flare, and we'll look at that and we'll make sure it doesn't carry on any further than that."

In other words, "it's Easter, can you give me a break?"

Look, I know what I said after the Jeff Gordon-Matt Kenseth postrace shove at Bristol, about how NASCAR can't let things like that go without a fine because you never know where one shove might lead after a race when a lot of angry guys might be running around. But come on.

Actually, there is one thing that absolutely has to be done about Lunders going to Kurt Busch's pit stall to vent her anger to Eva Bryan, Kurt Busch's fiancée, about the contact from Busch's car that sent Biffle spinning.

Somebody needs to get the video clip of their confrontation, put Tammy Wynette singing "Stand By Your Man" behind it and get it on the NextelVision video screens at the track by next weekend at Phoenix.

If Lunders had gone in swinging a tire iron, then NASCAR would have had to do something about it. But if you think that's the first time the significant others of two race car drivers have ever exchanged words about an on-track incident, you're not only very single you probably don't have sisters, either.

That goes on a lot back in the motor home lot, which is the drivers' little world that those of us in the media all sort of keep our noses out of because we know better than to get in those messes.

If a woman cares about her man enough to follow him all over the country staying in a motor home - and I don't care how nice that motor home is, it still ain't the Ritz-Carlton - you know she's going to be there for him when the chips are down.

Some race fans seem a little irked, for instance, by the fact that DeLana Harvick wears a fire suit and sits on top of her husband, Kevin's, pit box. Let me tell you this, if there's ever a fight around me in the pit area, you can bet your backside that I'll know which side DeLana's on before I declare my allegiance.

A few years back, I decided it'd be a good idea to write a column advising Darrell Waltrip that it was time for him to hang up his driving helmet. I meant him no ill will, honestly, I just thought he was tarnishing his reputation by continuing.

I later recanted that article when DW ran well in a car owned by Dale Earnhardt Inc. But on the morning it ran, we were at Darlington Raceway and there were actually people who had been tasked to make sure that I didn't accidentally cross paths with Darrell's wife, Stevie, that morning.

Stevie, you see, wanted to a piece of me for that column. And I have no doubt in my mind that if she'd gotten hold of me, it would not have been pretty.

Look, here's the deal. Men are, well, men are sorry. We are. We're just plain sorry. Whenever we see two women get a little bit crossways with each other, that "c-c-c-c-cat-fight!" blood starts pumping. Don't bother denying it.

To hear some people talk about what happened Sunday at Texas, you'd think one girl snatched up a handful of another's hair and drug her into one of those little plastic swimming pools filled with lime Jell-O. Actually, that very well might have happened somewhere in the campgrounds during the weekend.

But it did not happen in Kurt Busch's pit - no matter how many times you sorry men try to imagine it did.

They call it 'control,' but there are other words for it

It pains me to say this, but Chuck Howard is absolutely right.

Howard is the sports anchor on the NBC affiliate in Charlotte, and even he'd tell you that his ego doesn't need any more stroking. But in our newspaper the other day he spelled out his objections to a new NFL policy that will remove local stations' cameras from the sidelines at the league's games, and he was on the money.

Under the new policy, your local station will be allowed to use highlights only from network telecasts or NFL Films crews. The real problem, though, goes deeper than that.

The local stations' crews won't be allowed on the sidelines to film during the games, so that means nobody who isn't writing the NFL a check will have cameras on what's happening on the field and on the sidelines during the games.

The networks have a lot of cameras at a game, and your local affiliate might have had one or two shooters working the sidelines. But those one or two guys, at least the good ones, have their eye out for local stories the networks might not be interested in.

If the Houston Texans are playing at New England, for example, the network's cameras are far more likely to be shooting a close-up of Patriots player than following what's happening on the Houston sidelines. That stinks for Texans fans.

You're probably asking yourself what it the heck I'm doing spouting off about this. Valid question. First, before I started covering NASCAR I wrote columns and television and radio sports for the Observer. Second, those of us who cover racing came up against a battle like this a few years back when NASCAR asked us all to sign what came to be known as "Article 4" in applying for our annual credentials.

Without any kind of warning or discussion, NASCAR slipped language into the form we all turn in to get our "hard cards" basically saying that anything written, said, heard, shot or basically even thought of at the track was NASCAR's "property." That February, there was a space shuttle launch that could be seen clearly from the track, and we all joked that in NASCAR's view that made the shuttle its "intellectual property."

But it was no joking matter.

Like the NFL this time around, NASCAR said it was merely trying to "protect" its broadcast partners' rights. In racing's case, though, NASCAR was trying to squeeze as many people out of making a buck of the sport as they could so it could get all those dollars.

That is, indeed, the NASCAR way. The media fought back on "Article 4" and largely its provisions were withdrawn. There are some parts of that debate that are valid, of course. If a network is paying millions of dollars for the rights to live broadcasts of NASCAR races or NFL games or the NCAA tournament or The Masters, those rights should be protected.

But if a station in Dallas or Fort Worth comes to Texas Motor Speedway, it should be allowed to shoot action as it sees fit as long as it uses that footage properly. A local station can't, for instance, repackage the footage it takes as a race and sell DVDs including that footage. But it can use it on its news shows to amplify and supplement the network highlights it also has the right to use.

In both the NASCAR and the NFL situations, local photographers, writers, videographers and on-air talent are there to represent their viewers and readers and to present parts of the story that might not otherwise be covered.

If the league or sanctioning body controls all of that, it by default controls what's being reported about its sport.

NASCAR would absolutely LOVE to have an arrangement like that. But as fans, trust me, you don't.

Not to complain, but this rankings thing isn't the corner piece of the cake with all the icing

Each week, usually several hours after a Nextel Cup race before I leave the track, I do the rankings of the top 40 teams in Nextel Cup for the thatsracin.com web site and the weekly syndicated page that runs in a bunch of newspapers across the country, including the Charlotte Observer.

To say this process is an inexact science would be to make a gross understatement.

I've got no idea how long we've been doing them - probably eight years, since the TR site debuted around the time of the 1998 Daytona 500. I am pretty sure we've been doing the rankings since we started the site.

However long it has been, not much has changed about how they're done. I take the previous week's rankings and change the name of the race and the track for which they were done. I update the previous week's ranking for each driver. I find the printouts of the finish of that day's race and of the updated points standings. And then I start trying to decide which teams to move up or move down and how far.

I know that sounds pretty simple. Trust me, it's not.

First, you've got to decide which team is at that moment the best in the sport. Usually, to be honest, that's pretty clear - especially when you get deep into a season. The guy leading the points is there for a reason, and unless there's a pretty compelling case to make somebody else's team No. 1, that's usually a pretty good place to start.

Not always, though.

If, for instance, a guy has won three races in a row and moved from seventh in the points to second or third, you have to think about him - especially if you think the points leader is racing defensively trying to hold on to his lead. I always try very hard to put a premium on winning races, too.

I've gone through spells where I've refused to rank drivers who haven't won a race ahead of anybody who has. Still, once we're about 20 races into a season, I am far more likely to have a guy with three wins who's 10th in the points ahead of somebody with now wins who's fifth.

This sport ought be more about who wins races than it is now. A fan who buys a ticket for this week's race at Texas Motor Speedway is coming there that day to see people try to win.

It drives me nuts to hear people talking about "the big picture" when referring to a car running in the top five. When you've got chances to win, that's what you're out there to do. The championship should not be an end-all trump card in every situation.

But before I get off on my rant about a 500-point bonus for a driver's first win and first win in the Chase, an idea I still believe in, let's get back to the rankings.

Every single week I've ever done the top 40, there comes a point in the rankings where I reach an impossible situation. Usually it falls somewhere between about 15th and 25th. That day, a driver or two has done well and scored a top-five or top-10 finish and you want to move them up.

But the drivers who've been ahead of them all season finished in the top 15, too, and you can't very well move them down. Since you can't move someone up without moving someone down, that's an impossible situation.

Most of the time when I am up against that, I try to decide that if I had to bet real money on who'd wind up ahead of whom in the points at season's end, which team would I pick? That doesn't work in every situation, but the whole point of the rankings is to rate the teams based on their season's performance and their potential for success.

Frequently I get emails from fans of a driver questioning me on where their favorite is ranked. Often, the fans find a driver or two, or six, ahead of their favorite and give me a cogent, well-reasoned argument why his guy should be ahead of them. Sometimes, I run across such situations myself, figuring out that three or four weeks in a row a guy has slid a spot or two and suddenly I've let him get too low.

So a driver might finish 13th one week and jump four or five spots. That means the fans of the drivers he jumps over are firing off emails, demanding to know why. And the cycle begins again.

It's always a humbling experience to do each year's final rankings, because I go back and put beside each driver's name where I had that team ranked in the preseason. Last year, seven of my preseason top 10 were also there at season's end, but No. 2 Greg Biffle was 12th before the season and No. 3 Carl Edwards was 18th. Rusty Wallace started the year 16th but finished 10th.
None of that, however, is anywhere nearly as bad as my biggest rankings blunder ever.

In doing the preseason rankings in 2000, I typed in all of the full-time teams and started shuffling them around, moving a couple up and a couple down. Somewhere amid that cutting and pasting, I deleted the No. 10 car driven then by Johnny Benson.

Now Benson's team, led by crew chief James Ince, was starting that year without a sponsor. Unsponsored teams don't live long in Nextel Cup, so they weren't going to be in the top 25 anyway. But there's now way I wouldn't have had that team in the top 40 unless I'd just simply deleted them and not noticed they were gone.

I got to Daytona for media day that year and Drew Brown, the team's PR rep, asked me nicely why I didn't have the team in the top 40. "Sure I do," I said. But no, I had omitted them. So all during Speedweeks, I was taking grief from Ince and Brown and even, a little bit, from the soft-spoken Benson.

And then, in the Daytona 500, with a handful of laps to go, guess who was leading? Dale Jarrett came back to win that race. Benson finished 12th and the next week, I think I put him in the top 10.

Remembering Alan Kulwicki, a guy who really did do it his way

MARTINSVILLE, Va. - When you're on the road as much as you have to be to cover the Nextel Cup circuit it gets kind of hard to keep up with things like dates.
It wasn't until mid-morning Saturday that I realized it was April 1. Which means it was the 13th anniversary of the plane crash in which Alan Kulwicki was killed.
Ironically, a couple of other writers and myself had decided last week that we'd cut out after Saturday's Truck race here and go over to South Boston Speedway to see the USAR Hooters Pro Cup series race at that historic track.
The Hooters series is backed by Bob Brooks, the owner of the Hooters restaurant chain. Brooks' company, of course, sponsored Kulwicki's No. 7 Fords in NASCAR, and his son, Mark, was one of the people who died along with Kulwicki in that crash near the Tri-Cities airport near Bristol, Johnson City and Kingsport, Tenn.
I wasn't covering NASCAR the night Kulwicki's plane went down. I was working at the Charlotte Observer, on the sports desk, though, and I remember it vividly. The phone started ringing that night with people asking if we knew anything. After about three or four calls, we all started looking at each other and saying, "Uh-oh."
Before long, there was word that a plane was indeed down. From that point on, it just became surreal.
Kulwicki's championship in 1992 had been such a remarkable story. And now, he was gone. In our paper the next morning, the story said that Kulwicki and four others had been killed in that crash.
That's because that until very late on that tragic night it was believed that a man named Tom Roberts was on the plane, but he wasn't.
Roberts was Kulwicki's public relations man, and he'd made a late decision not to attend an appearance in Knoxville that night with the driver. That's where Kulwicki and the three others were coming from when the plane went down. Tom is still working in NASCAR - he worked with Rusty Wallace for years and now is the PR guy for Kurt Busch and the No. 2 team - and right after I got on this beat he and I started talking one day about Kulwicki's championship and the 1992 Hooters 500, the final race of that year in Atlanta, and how remarkable that race was.
I wrote a story on that race, in which Kulwicki, Bill Elliott and Davey Allison battled for the championship and Richard Petty drove his final Cup event and Jeff Gordon drove his first, for the newspaper and decided there was so much more to write about it. The led to the first racing book I wrote, which is called "Race With Destiny."
The company that published it went bankrupt about the time it came out, so the book never got any distribution. I'm still proud of the book and hope one day I can somehow rescue it from the financial limbo it's stuck in and get it back on the shelves.
Hardly a weekend goes by when somebody in the NASCAR garage doesn't mention how different the sport might be today if Kulwicki, Allison, Tim Richmond and Rob Moroso had been able to realize their full potential before being cut down by tragedy.
It was 20 years ago this year when Kulwicki left Wisconsin and came south to chase his dreams. The fact that he won the championship just six years later is just one of the many amazing things about his life. There'll never be another one quite like him.