Dodge: We’re Back – And Some People Never Learn
The Pepsi 400 was run on a rain-threatened
day. Sterling Marlin and Tony Glover knew what they had to do, and they did it,
and when the rains that would stop the race finally hit around the 300-mile
mark, they were out front, and they claimed the win for their sponsors……..
Kodak, Delco Remy, and Chevrolet.
Such was the scene of Marlin’s sixth
career Cup victory, in the Pepsi 400 of 1996, at Daytona.
And you thought I was referring to
Marlin’s seventh career Cup victory. Well, in a sense I was, for the old Yogi
Berra-ism of Deja Vu All Over Again played out again in the Pepsi 400 of 2001,
at Michigan. Marlin didn’t lead the most laps this time (he did in the ’96
Firecracker), but he certainly led when it mattered most. Thus ends a five-year
dry spell for Marlin, and that this dry spell ended in the rain is doubly ironic
– and punny.
The other manufacturers were ticked off
that Dodge got the two-inch air dam kick out Chevrolet got in March 2000. Their
crocodile tears were particularly unworthy of sympathy because the Dodge drivers
are all either rookies, dark horses, or former winners who’ve hit on bad luck
the last few years, and are thus more deserving of wins than the hotdogs.
Certainly a Marlin win is far preferable to another Jeff Gordon win or another
Yates Racing win (no offense to Yates and his organization).
Of course being Michigan International
Speedway, another Bill Elliott win would explode into celebration we’d never
hear the end of.
Marlin’s win came after a seven-race spell
where he managed only two top tens, a sign that Marlin’s Ganassi Racing outfit
is not immune to the car balance problems that have plagued the other Dodges all
season. The Pettys, of course, have had it the hardest with multiple DNQs all
season, a frustrating roadblock not unclogged with the inclusion of Larry
McReynolds as a technical consultant. Their Michigan race was another mixed bag
as Buckshot Jones DNQ’d, John Andretti timed superbly but botched a mid-race
stop and lost a lap, and Kyle Petty salvaged 25th. They did, though, get a
deserved vote of confidence as Sprint has indicated it will return in 2002.
The other Dodges have also seen a share of
struggle. Bill Davis’ Dodges have been up and down all season and Ward Burton
hit a surprising down cycle at MIS while Dave Blaney exploded to a top ten
finish. Stacy Compton has been quiet all year and finished in the top 21 while
Ray Evernham’s duo have made the most dramatic improvement in the last month
with both cars in the top ten and Elliott in the top three.
That all the Dodges have struggled is
clear – and that it justified the two-inch kick out should also be clear.
Some people never learn.
Ben Blake’s Speedvision
piece on Michigan conveys an inability to know what to make of NASCAR’s
late-August aero test at Talladega – a test that will in fact involve removal of
the roof spoiler, contrary to an earlier piece of mine. "Is is a show
test?" he wonders.
It sure sounds like one, for the
possibilities suggested for the test don’t make much sense. The proposed big car
design will apparently not be tested – given the failure of the test of this
design in April, it isn’t surprising; the surprise is that the proposal isn’t
DOA.
One suggested change involves shaving the
spoiler – Blake suggests to three inches – letting teams manipulate their air dams
to balance their cars, and then going racing. This, though, would rob the cars
of such down force as to make them undriveable, and would rob them of drag, and
thus make them faster. And it brings back memory of a 1998 rule change to
similar effect – it was called the 5&5 rule, and it accomplished nothing;
adding insult to injury, the 1998 5&5 rule was a remake of a late-1993
experiment along the exact same lines with the exact same failure of results.
Another potential change involves using
Grand National spec shocks and springs – heavier springs than in Cup and with
leaker shocks. But messing around with shock rules led to the fiasco that was
Speedweeks 2000 and didn’t add anything to safety. They might think eliminating
bump stops will help matters, but that’s just wishful thinking.
And the whole idea behind the test is
wrongheaded – NASCAR is looking for a way to separate the cars from the tight
packs. This is emasculation of competition, and it is wrong. The cars need more,
not less, drag, and drag that can’t be massaged out of the bodies. Separating
the cars adds nothing to safety – drivers get hurt and sometimes die in one car
and strung out crashes far more frequently than they stub their toes in those
oversold "big one" accordion-melees they so decry – one need witness
the hard Kevin Lepage hit at Michigan’s Grand National 250 to see where real
danger lies – and it isn’t good racing – it isn’t that strung out fields don’t
produce good racing, it is that being packed together for the race’s duration
produces more sustained racing.
And talk of reverting to a smaller
restrictor plate likewise ignores that this was what the cars ran at Talladega
in April 2000, a package so inferior to the later aero-anchor package that
reversion to such displays a stunning ignorance of history.
Another aspect of the test is to find a
package the drivers can be comfortable with. Aren’t these the same drivers who
approved the aero-anchor package they now don’t want to race with? I often get
pilloried because I take drivers to task for opinions they have; the line goes,
"they’re the ones risking their lives out there," yet such
contradictions as shown above show why drivers deserve criticism when they botch
things.
"A great man seemed to die for no
good reason. Now he’s gone. What are they going to do to keep it from happening
again?"
So wrote Monte Dutton in the August 14
Area Auto Racing News. From what is now a dam breakage of leaks reminiscent of
the flood scene in Superman The Movie, we can expect NASCAR’s Earnhardt report
to recommend serious changes to the cars.
But does anyone seriously believe this or
anything else will "keep it from happening again?"
This is the cold reality that is lost amid
all the acrimony over Earnhardt’s death. "If racecars crumpled up in the
front the way they collapse (in the back), several lives would probably have
been saved," writes Dutton. Yet J.D. McDuffie’s death in a tire-barrier
impact and deaths that occurred with some frequency with softer-front chassis
than are run presently put a cold asterisk to this assertion.
I know of the fact that the Mod Tour saw a
rash of fatalities before front-clip changes were made in the early 1990s. That
such changes helped is true enough. That they nonetheless made no difference in
such crashes as Jan Leaty’s bad NHIS crash of August 1998 is also true. Safety
changes at NASCAR’s top levels in recent years don’t bode well for the
effectiveness of proposed safety changes to come – throttle kill switches proved
a spectacular failure with Bobby Labonte; roof flaps have not prevented over 40
airborne crashes in the eight years since their implementation.
Safety changes ought to have a more than
reasonable confidence in them to actually do some good. This, too, is lost amid
the rush to "do something to prevent this from happening again." A
change made more to make a change usually winds up solving nothing.
And there is the irksome view that
NASCAR’s entire raison d’être needs to change. Writes Mike Mulhern,
"NASCAR needs to show a new face, a new approach to business, and NASCAR
executives must turn (the Earnhardt report) into something upbeat, something
encouraging, something with an optimistic ring." Because if not, "then
the past six months of anguish and waiting might have been in vain."
No, NASCAR does not need to show a new
face, etc. The old approach continues to work better than the approach of other
sanctioning bodies. What needs to change is that outside observers need to
better study the sport and see why it runs as it does.
The problem has never been secrecy,
ignorance, or lack of credibility on NASCAR’s part. The problem is that its
critics have controlled the debate without having to themselves justify the
arguments they push. Why, for instance, would more crushable front clips –
again, they are by no means a bad idea – be better than, say, restricting the
speed of the cars so they can’t reach 160 at Atlanta and Michigan? They talk
about right front impacts, but could the tires and the damnable push they create
have something significant to do with it, and if so why not change the tires so
the cars are far less likely to push, and thus hit right front first? We’ve all
seen in-car footage of drivers’ heads whipping about with no serious injury to
the drivers in question, so aren’t head restraints overdoing things? Three of
the four drivers killed in NASCAR’s top ranks wore full-face helmets, so what
good would a mandatory full face helmet rule do? And the question seemingly no
one bothers to ponder – why did Schrader hit the same wall at the same speed
with the same kind of stiff chassis at similar angle as Earnhardt, with
completely different results?
If the past six months of anguish etc.
have been in vain, then so be it. We ought to be honest enough to acknowledge
that changes often are unnecessary and do more harm than good, and keep this in
mind when discussing changes to the sport.