Week Thirteen – Dover Downs and Ups
From one marathon to another. 400 laps at
Charlotte are strenuous, but 400 laps at Dover Downs are something else
altogether. Add in the different quality of surface, and you have the season’s
second crack at concrete.
Dover dates back to 1969 and has
traditionally been a marathon in both of its Winston Cup weekends. It ran a pair
of 300 milers, one each in 1969 and 1970, before going to 500 milers. With 500
miles eventually came cries that the distance was too long, and in September
1997 an upsurge in the sanction fee forced Dover to shorten its races to 400
miles. The change has not improved things, as the missing 100 miles historically
saw the outcome change in rather dramatic fashion. Reversion to the full 500
mile distance would be a welcome correction, both for Dover and for the
Rockingham track.
Dover comes as the full grind of the
season has now kicked in and the title chase has now delineated into a clear
showdown. Some stories entering the Mason-Dixon 400:
Safety hysteria continues with negative
reaction to the Winston-Salem Journal’s piece suggesting that NASCAR had shot
down the "Humpy Bumper" unveiled at Charlotte. The story turned out to
be untrue – and served to reveal again the extent of hysteria over safety.
The Earnhardt death at Daytona led to yet
another safety analysis, this one by Bill Fleischman of the Philadelphia Daily
News, that got quite a bit wrong or was misleading – it noted Bill Simpson’s
pointless feud with NASCAR without noting Simpson’s admission in a May interview
with Liz Chandler that he saw Earnhardt’s broken belt and found that it wasn’t
installed properly; nor did the piece mention crash reenactments (by Autoliv)
where belts broke on several occasions due to a process called
"dumping," where the metal adjuster snags belt strands and eventually
wears them through with constant use. Finally, the piece noted Tom Propst
without noting the steady unraveling of his story and the general lack of proof
to back up his claim – there have been some indications that Propst was pulling
on Earnhardt’s belt from the opposite area where breakage occurred.
The piece included a Wheeler quote:
"The problem about racing safety traditionally is that no one wants to talk
about it while things are being done because people are afraid that whatever new
thing there is will not work." It unwittingly reflects a frustrating
oversight in coverage of racing safety – whether safety devices, either new or
established, really work. One pet peeve I have in the safety issue concerns roof
flaps – never have I seen one piece that examined the number of airborne crashes
that have occurred since roof flaps were first implemented (my own count shows
some 40 tumbles in Cup, GN, and in ARCA superspeedway events since roof flaps
were mandated vs. some 28 tumbles in similar events in the seven years before
roof flaps); virtually any mention of roof flaps takes at face value that they
have prevented cars from tumbling.
We need to start seeing skepticism toward
the effectiveness of safety devices in press coverage of the issue – would, for
instance, a car with roof flaps have flipped without them in similar
circumstances? I’ve seen plenty of non-aerial spins, in years before the flaps,
similar to those where roof flaps "kept cars on the ground."
The HANS and similar devices should also
be questioned – the peer-review criticism of the whiplash-alone argument of the
Myers report and the contrasting results of such crashes as Ward Burton’s at
Fontana (he wore a decelerator device and suffered a concussion) and Joe
Nemechek’s at Dover (he wore no neck protection and did not suffer any head or
neck injury) justify such.
The worst aspect of safety hysteria
surfaced again in Dave Casey’s "When
Did The Big One Become Part Of Racing?" piece. Casey opens with some
absurdly lengthy missives on how drivers race at Daytona and Talladega
"white knuckles wrapped around the steering wheel….waiting for that one
second where all hell is going to break loose," and how Dale Earnhardt
hated and Mark Martin hates restrictor plate racing (complete with that whining
Martin quote about preferring another occupation to running plate races more
than four times a year), and a particularly offensive portion about how the
wives react differently when they race at Daytona and Talladega as opposed to
other tracks.
It is a never-ending issue, and as such is
long since tiring to keep discussing, but we must.
Mr. Casey, no, it IS racing. It was no
miracle that the Talladega 500 ran caution-free, because crashes are harder and
harder to force nowadays. That race-winner Bobby Hamilton was exhausted
afterward is natural given that there were no yellows to allow him and others to
quickly rest and refocus on winning the race – this is part of why I hate
caution-free races.
The Big One didn’t all of a sudden appear
with the restrictor plates – we saw huge crashes at Talladega in 1973, ’79, ’81,
’83, and ’86; we saw 32 of 50 cars crash or break in 1972; we saw the biggest
wreck in history at Daytona in 1960 involving over 30 cars; we saw multicar
melees at Daytona in 1975 and 1979, ten-car melees at Charlotte in October 1965
and again in 1974 – and so on.
And it bears repeating that death and
serious injury have almost always occurred everywhere EXCEPT in Big Ones.
"The goal is NOT to make a 40-car
high-speed traffic jam…." Sorry, but that IS the goal. Competition equals
sustained combat for the win, the more cars involved the better. When the draft
became massaged out of the cars, the racing suffered (and safety surely wasn’t
improved), and drivers demanded aero changes, so in came aero anchors.
"Their yellow line rule may have
added a little fuel to the fire of safety…." No it didn’t. It took away a
legitimate passing lane.
"Racing at Talladega and at Daytona
are two entirely different animals……" Actually the aero anchors showed
that such differences are not relevant to anything – the only difference worth
noting was that at Daytona we saw the cars run the Richard Petty high grooves
lap after lap again versus obsessively hogging the bottom.
No, Mr. Casey, there is no need to
"figure something else out," for the thirteen year restrictor plate
experiment has succeeded where nothing else has – the plates reduced speeds, and
I mean TRULY reduced them; they better equalized the field. That the drivers
don’t like it says something about lack of toughness as well as about how
stressful the racing is.
"(Earnhardt) died because of NASCAR’s
insistence that a 40-car cyclone at Daytona is a great thing and we should be
happy about it." That is a lie, Mr. Casey. Earnhardt died in a two-car
crash common at all tracks.
Another lie is "artificially close
races." The Atlanta 500 certainly had an exciting ending but it cannot hold
a candle to Daytona or even this past Talladega 500 in terms of REAL racing. 49
lead changes always trumps 25. Real racing means SUSTAINED side by side combat
for the win for the entirety of the race, and Atlanta without plates and aero
anchors did not deliver such, Daytona and Talladega did. The artificial tag is
insulting and wrong.
Mr. Casey, your suggestions for changes
hold no water. Reduced banking will not prevent eventual addition of the plates
to Michigan and Fontana and will only eliminate good racing lanes. The drivers-lifting
argument was discredited with the failure of the 5&5 rule based on this
conceit. Smaller engines ignore the failure of NASCAR’s V6 experiment in Grand
National and those V6s needed plates all the same as V8s at the plate tracks.
No, the only changes NASCAR should make in
this area are to start phasing in plates and/or aero anchors to more tracks and
to rescind the yellow line rule, forever. Then we can get more racing like at
Daytona and Talladega and like the Featherlite Modifieds at New Hampshire –
which run restrictor plates and high-drag anchor-style aero.
Team reorganizations are common, and
before Dover two teams saw major shakeups. The bigger involved Petty
Enterprises, a team plagued by DNQs despite bursts of strength at Atlanta,
Darlington, Bristol, and Talladega. Crew chief Chris Hussey and engineer Doug
Hewitt are basically seeing their roles expand to try and better centralize car
preparation.
Some have questioned why an outsider –
Larry McReynolds was reported considering a team manager role at PE when his FOX
commitment ends in late June – will not be brought in. Right now an outsider
does not appear to be necessary – the organization’s problem has been getting
its cars balanced and consistent, and better centralization of preparation can
help there.
With McReynolds mentioned as a possible
team manager, a little precedent should be remembered – at RCR McReynolds
struggled as Earnhardt’s crew chief, so in June 1998 Richard Childress switched
Mac to Mike Skinner and Kevin Hamlin to Earnhardt. The move made headlines and
by August had begun to gel into better-running cars for both RCR teams.
Others have also attacked the
five-year-plan approach noted by Kyle Petty toward the team – five year plans,
though, have some history in recent NASCAR. PE hired Larry Rathjeb to reorganize
the entire enterprise in 1990; the reorganization was completed in 1991, and it
took five years and some painful times (six DNQs in 1994) before wins came
again. Andy Petree became a full car owner at the end of 1996, and it took five
years and the addition of a second team before he won again. And Dodge’s whole
approach is a five-year plan – get going the first two years, then get the
driver and manufacturer titles by the end of five years.
Five year plans of this type, contrary to
some views, do not accept mediocrity – they simply lay plain that time,
patience, and persistence are necessary.
Will this mean there won’t be an outsider
brought in to PE? Not now – if the present change doesn’t work, it appears they
will find an outsider.
Speaking of RCR, Kevin Harvick’s second at
Charlotte was a needed boost for a team that has gone through the usual rookie
struggles since the Atlanta victory. It even led to some trash talk between him
and Tony Stewart over Stewart’s Indy-Charlotte double and Harvick’s commitment
to both Winston Cup and Grand National’s full schedules.
Jeff Hammond made a point about defending
Stewart’s Indy-Charlotte double, but the criticisms of such remain valid –
Stewart’s focus was not concentrated, it was scattered. That he finished sixth
at Indy and third at Charlotte doesn’t change that he should have focused on one
or the other, not both.
If Charlotte was run on Monday instead of
Sunday, the double would be more feasible.
Over and over we also hear about how good
Goodyear’s harder tires have been this year. Certainly the epidemic of failures
from the previous few seasons has not yet appeared, but the fundamental
unraceability of the tires is still there, a problem higher stagger helped to
correct. The hardness should remain the same, but Goodyear needs to increase
stagger to eliminate the aero push the cars suffer from.