Pre New Hampshire RacinDeals

STRANGE BEDFELLOWS: Wasn’t is just a few weeks ago that Kevin
Harvick knocked Robby Gordon out of the way to get a lap back?
And now they’re going to be teammates for a race or two? Should
be interesting…

STEWART’S ACTIONS: People seem to think I’m criticizing Tony
Stewart for being a competitor and having a very spirited
competitive attitude. Nothing could be further from the truth.

My problem with Tony Stewart is what he does off the track (or
after the checkered flag in the case of his love tap to Jeff
Gordon). Since people seem to want to compare racing with stick
and ball sports… imagine what would happen if a hockey player
initiated a fight with an opponent in the parking lot after the
game? What if he got mad at a reporter in the dressing room and
knocked the reporter’s tape recorder out of his hands? Would the
NHL put him on "double secret probation" as NASCAR has
done to Stewart?

What NASCAR has done is basically condoned Stewart’s actions,
and pretty much said that "probation" is meaningless.

LAWN MOWER RACE: That’s what I call races like we saw Sunday
at Chicagoland Speedway. No, they’re not racing lawn mowers there.
A lawn mower race is a race where you watch the first 50 laps, go
out and mow the lawn, and come back and watch the last 50 laps.
With the single-file racing going on, you don’t miss anything.

MEGABUCKS: RJ Reynolds, faced with a law that wouldn’t allow
them to run ads on TV, had a lot of money laying around. So 30
years ago, they hooked up with NASCAR and other sports to sponsor
events with the money they couldn’t spend otherwise.

Now they’ve been forced to abandon all but one sports
sponsorship, and the one they’ve stuck with is NASCAR. So what
happens to all the money they’ve been throwing at NHRA and the
other sponsorships they no longer have?

How about a No-Bull 10? Heck, they could put a million bucks
in the purse of every race if they wanted to.

Hopefully, they’ll be able to sponsor multiple NASCAR
divisions, which would mean keeping the Winston West sponsorship
and hopefully going back to sponsoring NASCAR’s Weekly Racing
Series.

RASSLIN AND RACIN: After Daytona, there were a lot of
comparisons made between racing and professional wrestling. Looks
like that line is getting thinner. Bob "Hardcore"
Holly, a "WWF Superstar" will apparently be racing a
Late Model at Langley Speedway this weekend.

CULTURE SHOCK: I’m finishing up
this column from the media center at Nashville Superspeedway. The Indy Racing
League is here this weekend to run a 200 lap race under the lights Saturday
night. This is more or less my first time in the garage area of an IRL race.
Although I was in the garage for the 1997 Indy 500, I didn’t get to see the cars
run because the race was postponed two days because of rain, and I had to be
back in Nashville on Monday.

Anyway, I’ve noticed some major
differences between the IRL and NASCAR in the garage area. Here are some of my
observations:

• I’ve never, ever seen anyone in a
  NASCAR garage vacuuming their space.

• The IRL apparently allows crew members
  to wear shorts in the garage; NASCAR doesn’t.

• Since there are so few cars, each team
  gets two garage stalls.

• I’ve yet to see any IRL drivers near
  their cars in the garage. I guess they hit the hauler as soon as they get
  off the track.

As I write this, we’re waiting on the rain
to stop so the track can get dried for qualifying, which was supposed to already
have started.  The fast cars are going a touch over 200 mph, which I
believe is the fastest laps ever turned in the state of Tennessee.

And are those cars loud! I think they’ve
matched the resonant frequency of the grandstands, because if you stand in the
pits as they go around the track, you can hear a sound that’s not quite in tune
with the engines coming from the stands.