Click Baldwin's spirit made him a legend

Click Baldwin lived a legendary life.

Baldwin, owner of the Carolina Harley-Davidson Buell motorcycle dealership in Gastonia, died Tuesday night from injuries he suffered when he crashed his motorcycle near Lolo, Montana.

Baldwin was riding with a group of friends from the Hamsters USA motorcycle club on the way to the 68th annual Sturgis Rally in South Dakota. As he pulled out to pass a 1999 Honda Civic the car turned left and Baldwin hit it with his 2009 Harley. He was taken to a hospital in Missoula for emergency surgery, but did not survive.

Baldwin was born in Salisbury, but he grew up in the little Gaston County town of Belmont. He, his wife, Diane, and their family built their motorcycle dealership into one of the top operations in the Southeast, and Baldwin was well known in motorcycle circles as an outstanding builder of custom bikes.

But what made the 54-year-old Baldwin truly legendary was his spirit.

He and NASCAR driver Kyle Petty were long-time friends, and Baldwin was part of the small group that helped inspire Petty's annual charity motorcycle ride across America.

"Back in 1995, he and I, along with a few other close friends, were just a group of guys that wanted to ride our motorcycles across the country," Petty said. "We found out that we could raise some money for charity while doing it and the Kyle Petty Charity Ride was born. While it had my name on it, Click was a driving force behind the ride."

Baldwin, whose actual first name was Clifton, took part in every one of the Petty rides, including one that wound up recently in Savannah, Ga. He did far more than ride in them, he helped organize them and worked tirelessly on them. He helped line up motorcycles for riders and pretty much did everything he could to make sure the rides were a success.

"Words cannot describe what Click Baldwin has meant to me, my family and the Victory Junction Gang Camp," Petty said. "There has never been a more giving human being. He was more than a friend, he was like a brother to me."

Baldwin had many friends in the NASCAR community. He sold them motorcycles and helped whenever and however he could in the causes they supported. He sponsored "poker runs" and other charity events for causes such as the Holy Angels nursery in his hometown of Belmont and gave freely of his time, his energy and his money when any of those things were needed.

Petty said it as good as anybody ever could.

"We've lost a great one," Petty said.

Race will provide answers about tire decisions

INDIANAPOLIS - Let me say a couple of quick things about the whole tire issue before today's Allstate 400 at the Brickyard gets started.

If this race turns into a debacle, NASCAR and Goodyear will have to deal with that. The story may not pan out to be a big deal at all. The track conditions may improve and the Pocono tires that have been brought in as a backup plan may not be needed.

But right now, there are two things that should be said.

Given the circumstance that exist before the green flag falls, it seems to me that NASCAR and Goodyear and the Indianapolis Motor Speedway have dealt with this about as well as they could.

They've all worked together and made a back-up plan. They've got a plan to try to make things as fair for everybody as is possible given the cards the conditions are dealing them and that's about the best they can do.

On the other hand, the question is whether enough has been done to keep the situation from developing the way it has.

It's easy to say now that NASCAR should have brought the car of tomorrow here for a full-blown test to see if the new car would create different challenges. NASCAR and Goodyear did to a tire test here, and nothing apparently jumped out at them or you'd think they would have reacted then. If 45 or 50 teams had come to test and there had been more signs of excessive tire wear, maybe things would have been different. But who knows?

In an abstract sense, you can say that NASCAR is too big of a deal to leave things like this to guesswork. And you can say that Goodyear's job is to bring a tire that works to every track. That latter is clearly more easily said than done.

Goodyear has to walk a fine line between providing tires that will last and tires that can be raced on, and sometimes that line is a moving target. To get things right here, the tire has to work for how the track is going to be at the end of today's race. That target might be missed here today.

The way things are in our world these days, people want to know who's to blame when anything goes wrong. If this were talk radio, I am sure I would have an answer on that for you - talk radio always knows who to blame. (Usually, by the way, that's the liberal media.)

But basically in this deal I think everybody what they thought they ought to do, and we're just about to find out if they got it right or not.

Officials in Kannapolis rush to defend removal of 'worn and dirty' flags

Not long after my previous blog about the “Dale Trail” banners being yanked down in Kannapolis got posted, I got an e-mail from John Cox, the president and chief executive officer of the Cabarrus Regional Partnership.

Cox sent along a copy of an e-mail sent by Kannapolis city manager Mike Legg in which Legg says banners honoring the late Dale Earnhardt aren’t coming down because David Murdock wants to show his North Carolina Research Center to some “important” visitor this weekend and doesn’t think NASCAR-themed banners are a good match for the new science research park project.

Legg called a story about the banners in The Salisbury Post and other reports about the matter “inaccurate or incomplete.” Cox sent a copy of an e-mail Legg sent to a Kannapolis citizen trying to clear things up.

“Let me assure you, the City of Kannapolis has absolutely no desire or plans to change our ongoing commitment to honoring Dale Earnhardt and his legacy,” Legg wrote. He said the city council put $25,000 in this year’s budget to enhance the plaza where a statue honoring Earnhardt stands.

Legg said that the “Dale Trail” banners were removed “because they were worn and dirty and the CVB (Cabarrus Convention and Visitors Bureau) believed that they needed a fresh look.”

Legg said there are plans to “enhance” the Dale Trail in Cabarrus County and Kannapolis.

“Thoughts are to include a driving CD taking people to all the points of interest along the Dale Trail,” he wrote. “Also thoughts are being discussed of installing attractive informational markers at key interest points (Ralph Earnhardt's grave, the D.E. Plaza, etc.). There is also the possibility or a new Dale/NASCAR banners being created to honor the sport and the legacy of Dale. This notion of the banners being removed permanently is simply false information.”

I told Cox that it seems like a convenient coincidence that the decision was made to “freshen” the banners right after emails exchanged this week about the banners in relation to Murdock’s weekend plans.

And if Earnhardt’s hometown is going to honor his memory with new banners, maybe next time Kannapolis shouldn’t let them get so “worn and dirty” they need to be taken down all at once.

Maybe the new research center can someday develop a fabric that won’t get worn and dirty as quickly and everybody will have a nice synergy to talk about.

“Even though we are certainly proud of the changes going on in the City of Kannapolis and our new and exciting future, we are in no way abandoning our history and heritage,” Legg wrote.

“On the contrary, we continue to search for ways to enhance the preservation of our past as well as improve our future.”

Duh-huh! That 'best face' has egg all over it

It looks like we've had another outbreak of idiocy.

According to The Salisbury Post, Kannapolis is taking down banners relating to the late Dale Earnhardt apparently because billionaire David Murdock is bringing an important guest to town this weekend and he wants to see the town put on "it's best face."

The rumbling is that Murdock is bringing Oprah Winfrey in to look at the North Carolina Research Center, the science research park that Murdock's company, Castle & Cooke, is developing on the site of the former Cannon Mills.

Apparently there have been some e-mails exchanged among city officials in Kannapolis and members of the Cabarrus Convention and Visitors Bureau that "Dale Trail" banners celebrating the fact that Kannapolis is the birthplace of one of NASCAR's greatest drivers doesn't jibe with the efforts to turn the city into a home for science.

You know, because anybody who likes NASCAR is stoopid.

Good grief.

First, in case you haven't noticed, there's a pretty fair concentration of smart people who work in the NASCAR shops and live in homes in Cabarrus and surrounding counties. NASCAR teams have dozens of engineers and highly trained experts in things like fluid dynamics. A brand-new, state-of-the-art, rolling road wind tunnel just opened in the county a week ago and race teams from all over the world are signing up to bring their cars here for high-tech research.

Second, if Cabarrus County wants to be the "home of science" then why doesn't it tell its hotels and restaurants not to serve those "NASCAR people" who come in not only when there are races in town but all year round to see things like the Dale Earnhardt statue that's in downtown Kannapolis.

Surely these nitwits with the up-turned noses don't want the dumbed down dollars from race fans to taint those collected from all the "smart" people who come into for Murdock's new deal.

Third, if Murdock thinks Oprah Winfrey or whoever he's bringing to town this weekend is going to make decisions about a community about what kind of banners might be hung up on the poles along the street, that's even more insulting to the intelligence of that person than it is to the good people of Kannapolis and to the good race fans who ought to feel fairly well insulted by this whole silly mess.

Confessions of a back-slidden blogger

I know I have been recalcitrant on updating the old blog this week, but I do have a legitimate excuse.

Actually, I have THE legitimate excuse.

We’re moving.

I pick that tense with significant remorse since it is an on-going enterprise. The movers, God love them, came Wednesday and stuffed so much stuff in their truck that it’s a wonder it could still roll. But we’ve still got enough leftover at the old abode that I am spending my “off” Saturday driving a significantly smaller but still rented truck filled with the stuff we’ve still got to catch up on.

Moving is like going to the dentist, only more expensive.

Why, you might ask, would we put ourselves through this? My wife’s dogs, which aren’t terribly bright to start with, are having significant difficulty figuring out the answer to that. They’ve been confused all week.

The answer is quite simple, actually. His name is Eli.

The wife, Katy, and I have a grandson who’ll turn 2 in October. He lives in Oakboro, N.C. and we lived in Gastonia. It was about a 60-mile drive, each way, to see Eli and that was just entirely too far.

We’ve picked up and traipsed off to Stanfield, which I like to tell people is located in suburban Locust. We were west of Charlotte. Now we’re east and just a smidge south.

If you go to the end of our street and hang a right, you go past Stanfield Elementary School and swing a right through downtown Stanfield. No, there are no stop lights. Stay on that road a while and it becomes – I swear – Big Lick Road. One more right and a left or two and within about 15 minutes we can be at Eli’s. Or he can be here.

Eli has his own room at the new house, and as he gets a little older I hope he uses it a lot.

He’s the quintessential little boy. He’s got one of the best climbing gears I’ve ever seen. He runs just about everywhere he goes with a little sideways gait that makes it look like he needs to have his wheels aligned and balanced. He loves tractors and says that word as well as any other word he says with the possible exception of “paw paw” (which drives Katy a little nuts, to be honest with you).

We took him over to see the Kyle Petty Charity Ride stop in Charlotte the other night and the sight of a couple hundred motorcycles was the kind of sensory overload I love giving him.

One of these days, I’ll take him to a baseball game in Atlanta or to see the Carolina Panthers or the North Carolina Tar Heels play. (There are some N.C. State fans in the weeds of his side of the family, but I think Eli’s smart enough to see the light on that one.) And yes, I am quite sure he’ll be adding “race car” to his vocabulary soon.

Things will get back to “normal” some time next week. I head up to Indianapolis Thursday for one of my favorite race weekends of the year, and I am sure a lot of stuff will be going on there.

For now, though, I’ve got boxes to pack.
And move.
And unpack.

No room for selective enforcement

Saturday night, just before the LifeLock.com 400 at Chicagoland Speedway, a NASCAR official stood in the way of J.J. Yeley's No. 96 Toyota preventing him from joining the field for the start of the race.

As the field was taking its pace laps, Yeley was allowed to join the back of the pack. But just after the green, the team was ordered to bring the car in for a stop-and-go penalty. Then, on its first pit stop, the team got a speeding penalty.

The word from NASCAR, as the race was starting, was that Yeley's team had made a suspicious switch of the container holding Yeley's drinking water. One of the old stock-car tricks in the books is to put lead inside a water container to be used when the car is going through inspection. Once the car is weighed and cleared, the real water bottle is put in and the car is a little bit lighter.

NASCAR apparently thought Yeley's team was up to something like that. So NASCAR showed the Hall of Fame team who was boss. It applied the kind of "justice" that some people still think is colorful, if a bit heavy-handed.

The problem was, Yeley's team wasn't "up" to much of anything. Somebody changed the water container after inspection because they wanted the water Yeley would drink to actually be cold -- or at least cool -- during the race.

Now if the NASCAR procedure is for an official to be there for any such switch so he or she can be sure there's no hanky-panky, and if the team made the switch without an official present, the team was wrong. Procedures should be followed. But procedures also should have penalties associated with them, and those penalties should be such that it's not about NASCAR officials acting on some punitive whim.

At Infineon, another race team changed an engine after a practice and then told NASCAR it had done so. Part of the single-engine per event rule is that the team tells NASCAR first, then NASCAR looks to make sure the engine being changed actually has a problem and isn't just one the team doesn't like having in its car.

Again, if the team violated the procedure it deserves to be sanctioned for that. Maybe it loses practice time at the next race. Or maybe it's penalized a lap or two at the start of the race. Whatever, but the penalty should be set forth in simple terms.

What actually happened, though, was that NASCAR officials were angered by that team's temerity. So after the race at Infineon, that team was the "random" team selected for postrace inspection. (After each race, the top five plus one team chosen at "random" go through postrace teardown.)

After the next race at Loudon, oddly, the same team was the postrace "random" pick. And again, after the race at Daytona, the same team got picked again by "random."

NASCAR showed them, right?

Well yeah, but is that right and is that fair? Is that the way things should be officiated? I don't think so.

There's a scene in "Days of Thunder" where the man playing the Bill France character tells rival car owners about an inspection process on shipping docks where produce is allowed to rot before inspectors who would clear it ever even look at it. The stuff never failed inspection, it was just ruined before anybody ever touched it. The owners in the movie were being warned that's the kind of treatment they might get if they didn't toe the line.

It's common for a team that somehow feels it has somehow crossed NASCAR to fear that it's going to get a handful of speeding penalties in a subsequent race. That's not officiating, that intimidating. And it has no room in a truly professional sport.

What if Stewart switch were reversed?

Any time a driver of Tony Stewart's stature switches race teams, there are a lot of aspects to the story that sometimes get lost in the swirl.

In this particular case, though, there's one I can't help but keep coming back to. What if the manufacturer roles in this saga, which is finally unfolding this week, had been reversed?

What would the fan reaction be if Joe Gibbs Racing had still been running Chevrolets and Toyota came in and culled Stewart from that team to set him up with his own Toyota operation?

My guess is that reaction would be apoplectic.

Remember when Toyota was coming into NASCAR and everyone was talking about how that manufacturer was going to upset the entire business model of the Cup garage? Toyota would throw money around and make everybody pay more to keep drivers and top crew members instead of losing them to the new "menace?"

Yes, Toyota did get the Gibbs team to move from Chevrolet to Toyota. But that was at the end of the Gibbs contract with General Motors, at a time in which the team was free to take a deal from Ford or Dodge, too, if those manufacturers had stepped up.

Now, in the first year of that deal, Stewart is going back to the Chevrolet camp. And I don't care what anybody says today at the news conference at Chicagoland Speedway announcing that he's going to own part of Haas CNC Racing, GM's fingerprints are all over this deal.

Stewart has sprint car teams affiliated with General Motors and the Gibbs team's move to Toyota put him with one foot in each camp. I am not saying it doesn't make perfect sense for Chevrolet to want him to pick a side, or for Stewart to have loyalties to the people who're already working with him in those other series.

Stewart had another year on his contract, but apparently that didn't stop somebody from GM from suggesting that there might be opportunities for him if he could jump ship. Maybe Stewart sought out those opportunities, but either way it's clear that Chevrolet's racing folks have been working with a driver who had a contract for a Toyota team for 2009 on another option for that season.

I have no question in my mind that fans would be howling with outrage if Toyota did the exact same thing to a top-tier Chevrolet, Ford or Dodge driver in the same circumstance.

I stay on NASCAR pretty hard about being consistent, so it's only fair to ask the fans to not to have their own double standards, too.

This idea may sound shady but it beats my weather forecast

DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. - OK, so I was wrong when I said it would rain Friday at Daytona. All that means is I am now fully qualified to be a television weatherman.

* * *

I've been thinking about it all day and I still can't figure out why there are people who begrudge Mark Martin the right to change his mind and come back to run a full season in Sprint Cup in 2009. Apparently some people believe that every decision a driver makes in his NASCAR career must be final.

Some folks get upset when a driver decides he needs to go somewhere else or change his schedule to do what's right for him, for his career and for his family. Certainly there have been some drivers who've stayed too long toward the end of their careers. But I don't know if you could find a single soul in the garage who doesn't believe Martin can still get the job done.

Is it likely that Martin will win a championship in 2009 before going back to a part-time schedule the following year? No. It's not likely. But Martin is good enough that you can't say it's impossible, even in the face of overwhelming statistics to the contrary.

Martin will be 50 when he begins the 2009 season in the No. 5 Chevrolets at Hendrick Motorsports. Only three drivers in Cup history have won races after their 50th birthdays - Harry Gant won eight and Bobby Allison and Morgan Shepherd one each.

But to criticize Martin for "flip-flopping" on his decision to retire from racing misses one important point. Martin never said he was retiring. The fact of the matter is he has for the past two years almost always corrected anybody who said he said he was. He scaled back to a limited schedule and had no plans to change from that until, he said Friday, he got an offer from Hendrick that was so good he was scared he'd regret it if he didn't say yes.

Martin has every right to decide not to live with those regrets.

* * *

Here's a sobering thought for you. Morgan Shepherd is 66 years old. James Hylton is 73 years old. Kerry Earnhardt hasn't driven a race car in a year. All three of those drivers were cleared by NASCAR to compete in Friday night's Nationwide Series race at Daytona International Speedway.

Joey Logano just turned 18 and has already won a Nationwide Series race. It looks likely that he will be driving a Sprint Cup car for one of the series' top teams next season. Logano was not approved to race Friday at Daytona.

Hmmmmmmm.

* * *

I might have had this idea before, I can't remember. Either way, it's still a good one. They should let people into the infield "Fan Zone" at Daytona for free for the July race. But they should sell shade to those fans for $10 per square foot.

* * *

This is not a gripe, it's just a little window into life on the road. I got back to my hotel room Thursday night and I had clean towels and everything looked just fine except for one thing. My bed had not been made.

No big deal - I wouldn't have made it if I had been at home. I just thought it was curious. So I come in tonight and the bed is made. There are new towels, again, but the used towels are still in the floor where they were when I left. And the trashcans haven't been emptied.

My guess is that tomorrow night I will have no towels, old or new, and there will be a used vacuum bag stuffed in my closet.

Weather forecasts and failed inspections

DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. - It's noon in Daytona and it isn't raining. Yet.

Friday's schedule calls for qualifying to run from 1:05 for the Nationwide Series pretty much straight through until 6:30 or 6:45 when Cup qualifying would end.

I say would end because the chances of us making it 5 1/2 hours without a thunderstorm are tiny. It's Florida in July.

The schedule here makes no sense this weekend. Qualifying should have started at 9 a.m. Friday for Nationwide cars, followed around noon by Cup cars. That would at least increase chances for people to get a shot at qualifying for the race.

* * *

If Martin Truex Jr. gets a 150-point penalty for the car that NASCAR took from his team here on Thursday, it would put him 221 points behind the cutoff for the Chase. That would be a critical blow.

You know what I think - the team shouldn't be here the rest of this weekend. As it stands right now, in fact, the team hasn't had its car on the track and that's how it should stay.

But that's not going to happen. The team hasn't practiced its backup No. 1 Chevrolet, but even if it doesn't get to qualify later Friday it's guranteed a starting spot.

Every other car that came here this weekend managed to build a roof that got through inspection. The No. 1 team, in fact, had a backup car on its truck that got through tech.

I guess you could say that shows that what happened on the impounded car could be an honest mistake. I never have bought that explanation, but I am also telling you it shouldn't matter. If you can't get a car to the track that passes inspection, you don't race.

In a perfect world, that is.

* * *

How fitting is it that Jesse Helms, the former U.S. senator from my home state of North Carolina, died on July 4?

There may not be a man in history with whom I disagreed politically more often and more strongly. Regardless of that, a man who devoted so much of his life to public service should be honored.

Helms spent his lifetime fighting passionately for the things that he believed would make America better. One thing that's wrong with us as a country today is that we don't honor that as the definition of patriotism, regardless of what side of the issues an American might be on.

Tony Stewart was absolutely a pro postrace

LOUDON, N.H. -- In the immediate aftermath of the Lenox 301 at New Hampshire Motor Speedway, it needs to be pointed out that Tony Stewart handled what happened to him Sunday about as well as any human being could have done it.

Those of us in the media are criticized, sometimes fairly, for piling on a driver when he handles himself poorly after a race. So when somebody does it right, we should note that, too.

Stewart sat in his car before the race was finally called because of rain and talked about having led until he made a final pit stop and then never got a chance to try to rally back from that misfortune.

Stewart probably couldn't have come back to win after restarting 14th with 22 laps to go. But he should get credit for driving his backside off to keep Jimmie Johnson behind him before that last pit stop.

Strategy wasn't going to work in his favor anyway, but for Stewart to walk away with a 13th-place finish was simply unjust. But it's not the first time this year he's had impossibly bad luck.

He had the Coca-Cola 600 all but won before having a flat tire with less than four laps left. He was on his way to a certain top-five finish last week at Infineon Raceway before getting hit by a car that ricocheted off another.

Stewart answered TNT reporter Ralph Shaheen's questions patiently and eloquently. Clearly he was frustrated, and he expressed that frustration in an entirely professional manner. He got it 100 percent right, in my view, and it's worth taking a moment immediately afterward to acknowledge that.

Fans want to know and Tony Stewart wants it to stop

LOUDON, N.H. – Tony Stewart was back at work Friday at New Hampshire Motor Speedway, telling the media how to do our job. You’d think he’s an expert or something.

Stewart actually is an ad hoc member of the racing media, since he hosts a weekly radio show on Sirius. But the driver of the No. 20 Toyota would probably rather be called any other name than you can think of than “media.”

Last weekend he chastised a television reporter during a live interview. This, of course, made him eligible for sainthood in some fans’ eyes.

Friday, he told another gathering of media that he’s tired of being asked about where he’ll drive next year. He said it’s like having kids in the backseat on a long car trip constantly asking “are we there yet” When he gets there, Stewart said, he’ll let us know.

Sorry, bud, but that ain’t how this works.

Stewart apparently holds the perception that reporters should work with him – or even for him. That’s not the deal, unless of course you’re Matt Yocum.

Reporters work for their respective outlets, but our primary purpose is to represent the fans. We’re here to find out the answers to questions the fans are asking. I do four hours of live radio on Sirius each weekday, so believe me when I tell you that fans want to know what Stewart is going to be doing next season.

The fact that fans do want to know is the reason Stewart has the opportunity to do whatever it is he’ll be doing next year. Stewart is one of the best drivers who has ever been in any kind of car, and a lot of fans care about where he’s going to race. That fact gives Stewart the very bargaining power he’s using – as he absolutely should – to cut what he thinks is the best deal for him and his future.

That and the fact that Stewart’s decision is the critical domino in up to a half-dozen drivers’ decisions about their futures, makes the weekly questions to the two-time champion entirely appropriate and relevant.

Not all reporting, of course, is going to break new ground.

“STEWART NEGOTIATING WITH SPONSORS!” one online report screamed this week. Well, duh. If he’s going to leave Joe Gibbs Racing to become a driver and at least partial owner with another team, such as Haas CNC Racing, Stewart is going to need sponsors. Even if Stewart decides to stay where he is for another 10 years, the process of considering his future is going to involve talks with potential sponsors.

Clearly, most signs point to Stewart leaving the Gibbs team even though he’s got a contract for 2009. Everybody keeps talking about that contract, but those things rarely seem to offer any real entanglement. That’s especially true when the team a driver wants to leave has options, and the Gibbs team certainly has those.

Here on Saturday, young phenom Joey Logano said all the right things about how it’s up to Joe Gibbs and J.D. Gibbs when Logano will move up to Cup.

Then, I asked Logano a question. (Oddly, Logano didn’t tell me it was none of my business. But he’s young. He’ll get the hang of it.) I asked Logano what he’d do if it was all up to him. Would he rather have a full season in the Nationwide Series, or would he just as soon move on up now?

“Let her rip,” Logano said.

Is Logano ready to drive the No. 20 Toyotas if Stewart leaves? There’s really only way to answer that question for sure, and we’ll see if that’s what winds up happening.

Meanwhile, we now know for sure that Greg Biffle is staying at Roush Fenway and that Clint Bowyer has a new deal with Richard Childress Racing.

We also know, for sure as of Friday, that Casey Mears is not coming back to the No. 5 Chevrolets at Hendrick Motorsports next year. Stewart, when he wasn’t teaching journalism class, did say Friday that opening might complicate his thought process since any driver would have to at least look at an opening at Hendrick. But team ownership seems to be such a big part of Stewart’s thoughts about leaving Gibbs, it’s hard to believe simply moving to another team as a driver really appeals to him.

Anyway, we think we know that it will be Mark Martin taking Mears’ spot. One person in the garage told me Friday that Martin had offers to run a full schedule in 2009 for as many as four different teams.

We know, also, that RCR has a fourth car to fill for next year. We know, too, that Ryan Newman is not locked down for 2009. But Newman’s name has been mentioned as a possible for teammate for Stewart at his new home. Does that put Mears in line for the open slot at RCR? Or is there another level to this, one that involves Martin Truex Jr. if he can get out of a contract option with Dale Earnhardt Inc?

We could guess. But we get paid to go around and try to find out for sure. If we don’t ask, we get accused to making things up. When we do, we’re accused of badgering.

That’s OK. I know some of the same guys who criticize me for living at the buffet and never leaving the media center’s air conditioning are safely ensconced in their $2 million motor home playing “Guitar Hero.” But when you sometimes know you’re not going to get many straight answers, you’ve got to keep trying.

The fact that it irritates Tony Stewart is just a bonus.

Coverage and Carlin and cars

Just a few thoughts and observations:

NASCAR chairman and chief executive officer Brian France made the keynote speech at the Associated Press Sports Editors convention Thursday in Minneapolis.

A decade earlier his father had addressed the same group at a convention in Richmond. Bill France Jr. told the nation’s sports editors that they should devote more attention and space to NASCAR because its popularity was growing.

This time, Brian France had a similar message from a different perspective. A lot of newspapers did ramp up their coverage of the sport in the early part of this decade, but in this world of staff and travel cuts fewer and fewer papers are assigning reporters to a NASCAR beat.

France urged sports editors to send their reporters to more races, and he was dead right to do so.

NASCAR is supplying more statistical services and things like video highlights for use especially in the growing online coverage of the sport. But coverage generated or backed financially by the sport itself is only going to go so far.

Fans will tell you they dislike the media and a lot of them were nearly giddy when Tony Stewart went off on TNT reporter Marty Snider after last week’s race. But Marty was simply doing his job, and his job is to ask the questions fans want to know the answers to.

With more good reporters covering NASCAR in the past 10 years, fans know more about the workings of the sport than ever before. That’s not always pretty, but it does serve the fan.

As the numbers dwindle, the ones who’re left are still working hard to do the job but there will be stuff that doesn’t wind up being reported. Ultimately, that’s bad for the sport.

* * *

People who’re my age or a little older got a big jolt earlier this week when George Carlin died.

If you ever got into Carlin’s comedy, he had an impact on how you looked at the world. That’s especially true if you love the English language. Carlin had a way of taking the things people do with the language and calling them on it, and I know he made me do the same thing.

Perfect example. Thursday I flew to Boston and went to pick up a rental car to drive on up to New Hampshire. They gave me a Subaru Legacy, which is neither here nor there, but on the back it has initials identifying it as a PZEV. That stands for Partial Zero Emissions Vehicle.

Partial Zero? Good grief.

Carlin could have done five good minutes on that alone.

* * *

People laugh at me because I get worked up about why more people don’t serve crushed ice, and that’s fine. I can’t help it that I am in tune to the big ideas in life.

But that doesn’t mean I can’t be turned on to something new myself. That has happened to me recently, and I will share it with you now. I’m that kind of guy.

Ready for it? OK, here it is.

Go to Panera Bread. Get a plain or cinnamon crunch bagel, your pick. But whatever you do, get the honey walnut cream cheese.

Thank me later.

Getting back in the car while in the grasp of sorrow

Scott Kalitta was not one of the people who made a living in drag racing that I've crossed paths with in my limited crossings into that world.

I will be spending more time with the National Hot Rod Association stars later this year as the opening of the new dragstrip at Lowe's Motor Speedway approaches. But some guys I've already met, like Gary Scelzi, spoke eloquently about Kalitta on the coverage I saw Saturday afternoon after the crash that took Kalitta's life.

Scelzi told a story about getting stuck in the Charlotte airport with his son and with Kalitta, spending several hours killing time by swapping stories and generally having a great time.

So I won't try to act like I can understand the depth of the sorrow that Kalitta's fellow NHRA competitors felt as they came back Sunday to race at Englishtown. I will, however, express my empathy for how tough that must have been.

Kalitta's wreck was horrifying - anybody who has seen the video knows that. If there's anything to be learned about what happened to cause the incident or to improve the runoff areas at drag racing's major league tracks, those steps need to be taken.

In May, John Force visited the site where the new dragstrip is being built at Lowe's Motor Speedway. During a lull in that appearance, I got the chance to talk to Force about safety in his sport in light of the crash that took his young driver, Eric Medlen, last year.

From that conversation, I know Force is serious about making drag racing as safe as it can be, and I sense that everyone else in that sport shares those feelings.

I suppose there are some people who wonder how a driver can see a wreck like Kalitta's and then get back in a car that goes well over 300 mph the very next day. But anybody who asks that question probably wonders why anyone would drive a nitro-powered dragster to start with.

The drivers went back to work Sunday in part to honor their fallen brother and in part to assauge their own grief. By going back to work and doing what they do, they bring a little normalcy back to their lives right after having that normalcy shattered by Kalitta's death.

A celebration ... or choreography?

So now we’re hearing from some Dale Earnhardt Jr. fans who believe NASCAR should have allowed the team to put gas in the car following his victory in the LifeLock 400 at Michigan so Earnhardt Jr. could have done a post-race burnout.

Supposedly, these folks feel cheated in some way that they didn’t get to see Earnhardt Jr. smoke the tires or do some other form of victory celebration.

Good grief.

When I first heard about this I thought people were kidding me. The race was over and Earnhardt Jr. made his last load of fuel last to end a 76-race winless streak and some of his fans feel deprived that they didn’t get to see a burnout?

Look, I am not a fuddy-duddy about postrace celebrations. Some people don’t like them at all, the way they don’t like hitters who pose after hitting a home run or a wide receiver choreographing a post-touchdown dance.

I am in favor of any expression of elation after athletic success as long as that expression is genuine and spontaneous. I love to see people react. I am not nearly as big of a fan of seeing them perform, however.

When some kind of celebration turns into your “trademark” it doesn’t bother me either as long as it doesn’t come off as contrived. Every time Tiger Woods does a fist pump, for instance, you get the feeling that it comes from real excitement or emotion. If he stopped and put on a glove with a Nike swoosh before doing them, that’d be too much.

Carl Edwards does backflips off his car after he wins. He’s giving his fans what they want, and there’s something to be said for that. But wouldn’t the backflip, or Tony Stewart’s fence climb, mean more if it only happened when those guys REALLY got pumped up.

Stewart first climbed the fence after a win because he hadn’t won in a while and was elated that he did.

When he won at Indianapolis, finally, what he wanted to do was drive over to where his family and friends were in Turn 2 and celebrate with them. So he did. When he got back to the start-finish line, though, people wanted him to climb the fence. By that time, the joy and adrenaline were gone and what he wound up doing looked perfunctory. Perfunctory is dull.

If Edwards is going to do a backflip when he wins a Nationwide race at Milwaukee, what would he do if he won the Daytona 500 or the championship? Does he have to do a double flip, or add a twist to show he is exceptionally happy?

The late Alan Kulwicki is known for his backward victory lap, what he called the Polish Victory Lap. He didn’t do that every time he won, though. He did it after his first win and nobody knew what he was up to. It was very cool, but NASCAR flipped out. As soon as the race ended before that, cars and people started moving at race tracks to start the egress process. Kulwicki was actually going against the flow of that and it caused some anxious moments.

NASCAR asked Kulwicki not to do it again. He agreed, but added that if he won a Daytona 500 or the championship that’d be a different story. So when he clinched the 1992 title in the Hooters 500 at Atlanta, he did the backward lap again and that made it special and memorable.

Television already messes up a winner’s normal reaction. The race winner drives to victory lane and sits there until TV gets back from commercial. The winner gets a cue to climb out and then a celebration ensues. It often comes off awkwardly.

NASCAR should not be making rules telling drivers how they can and can’t celebrate. That’s the last thing I want. But the next to last thing we need is some kind of “accepted” level of postrace frivolity that would mean a driver’s team needs to refuel his car so he could meet some expected level of celebration.

When a driver wins for the first time, or when he wins for the first time in a long time, or when he wins for the ninth straight week, that driver should react in accordance with his emotions at that moment. It needs to be a reflection of that driver’s personality and his emotions.
In other words, it needs to be real.

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.