OFF-WEEK RACINDEALS

SUPPORT YOUR LOCAL GUNFIGHTERS:
Saturday night, I saw some great racing. Sunday, I watched the last 40 laps of
some mediocre racing. No, I wasn’t watching the Richmond race Saturday night, I
was at Nashville Speedway USA. I watched the last 40 laps of Richmond on Sunday
via the magic of my VCR.

I followed the progress of the Richmond
race via NASCAR.com (during the breaks between races) while I was at the track Saturday
night, so I knew that, with one car dominating the race, it was a snoozer. So
instead of wasting three hours watching Rusty Wallace stink up the show, I
figured I’d just rewind it enough to see Tony Stewart take the lead. Ho hum.

THE WRONG THING, FOR THE RIGHT
REASONS: So, NASCAR still insists on throwing a red flag at the end of
the race in order to have the race end under green. At least they acknowledge
that the fans want to see a green-flag finish.

But their reasoning for not going past the
"advertised" distance is just plain stupid. I seem to recall that race
lengths were cut by 10% during the energy crisis in the 70’s, but in
NASCAR-think, they didn’t run 450 laps, they started with lap 51 and went to lap
500.

So if NASCAR wants to play semantics with
lap counts, why not stop counting yellow flag laps when you have less than 5 or
10 laps to go? It’s just as valid as starting a race on lap 51.

TONY, TONY, TONY:
"If we’re going to make a run at the championship, then this is the
time.  We don’t have time to wait any longer." – Tony Stewart

Ok, so Tony, you want to make a run for
the championship. That’s great. So, why are you jeopardizing it by running an
IRL race on the same day as the 600 mile race at Charlotte Motor Speedway?
Didn’t you learn your lesson last time you tried it? You had a car that could
have won the Charlotte race, but you were so wiped out that you physically
weren’t able to do it.

That was a great gimmick when John
Andretti tried it the first time. But now it’s gotten a little old, and really,
there’s no reason for it, other than ego.

THE DANGER OF SPORTS:
NASCAR has taken a lot of heat over the last year (some deserved, some not)
because of the four fatalities that have occurred on the track.

What if another sport had had that many
fatalities in one year? Would it have gotten the same attention from the news
media? I guess not.

Here is an apparently little known fact:
In 1997, six high school football players died as a direct result from injuries
suffered on the field. Seven high school students were paralyzed due to football
related injuries in the same year. Seven more suffered permanently disabling
head injuries.*

That’s six deaths, and 14 disabling
injuries, all in 1997, in high school football.

In the 24 year period from 1967 to 1990,
there were a whopping 291 deaths due to injuries sustained while playing
football. That’s an average of over 12 deaths a year.*

From 1982 to 1999, there was an average of
more than 20 deaths per year in high school sports.*

"Over the past 70 years, 616 high
school and 80 college players have died as a direct result of injuries suffered
on the playing field."*

The seven year old son of one of my
co-workers died last year after a football injury. He’d been hurt, but was
cleared to play. After getting tackled, he went over to his mother, told her his
head hurt, and then collapsed into a coma from which he never recovered.

The National
Center for Catastrophic Sport Injury Research compiles all of this data, and
prepares reports each spring. It’s a real eye opener.

Where’s the same outrage for those deaths
that we’ve seen for the deaths in NASCAR? Why isn’t the Orlando paper attacking
this problem with the same zeal that they’re attacking NASCAR with? (Hint:
Pulitzer Prize).

SOMEBODY’S GETTING FX:
Here’s a question: How can a network that no one apparently gets have a telecast
that got a higher rating than the same telecast got last year on a different
network that "everyone" gets? Beats me, but the Richmond race on FX
did better numbers than the same race did last year on ESPN.

Of course, TNN’s getting the last laugh in
all of this. They had the number one and two rated shows last week. The Richmond
race on FX took third place with a 4.0 rating. What was number one and two?
Professional wrestling. Hour one of the WWF show on Monday night did a 4.7 and
hour two did a 5.2, making it the top rated show on cable.

I’LL SEE YOU IN COURT: So
says Eddie Gossage to CART. Apparently CART ignored phone calls from Texas Motor
Speedway, so TMS did the only thing they knew that would get CART’s attention.
And probably will guarantee that Speedway Motorsports will not get too many more
CART events.

TMS wonders why CART didn’t do more
testing, or more to slow the cars down once the bio-mechanical problems were
discovered. That’s a good question. Seems that CART just decided that they
couldn’t do anything and "postponed" the race. I have a feeling that
they didn’t leave many fans in Texas.

People who have criticized NASCAR on
safety are breaking their arms patting CART on the back for not racing at Texas.
I’m sure they did the only thing they thought they could do, but they had at
least 24 hours to figure out a way to slow the cars down, and they squandered
it.