Pre-Christmas Miscellenea
Racing withdrawal. It happens this time of
year and lasts until February. The waiting is always tough. With most of my
Christmas shopping done, some miscellaneous ramblings:
Remember that enormous crash with
Alessandro "Alex" Zanardi at Eurospeedway in September? Well, Zanardi
recently stood on artificial legs for the first time, so it is now a no-brainer
that he’ll be in CART starting grids next year or in 2003.
Can you believe it.
I get taken to task for blasting drivers.
The fact is, though, that they deserve to get blasted when they do or say things
that are wrong. Well, Dale Jarrett provided another reason to be blasted with
his remarks on CNNSI’s NASCAR Plus show.. Commenting on January testing at
Daytona Jarrett launched into a self-important lecture about how the roof
spoiler rule of 2001 made it so there was nothing except bravery and positioning
in restrictor plate races instead of experience, hard work, and pit stops being
factors. He concluded by saying that if the fans are patient and understand how
hard they have to work to make a "good" pass, then they’ll enjoy the
racing.
Who the hell are you kidding, Jarrett?
Don’t lecture fans about what good racing is. Good racing is 49 lead changes at
the Daytona 500 and anywhere else. Good racing is cars that can pass the entire
field regardless of where they start or where they restart. It is NOT that
nonsense about one pass that matters is better than 300 passes – that is
garbage, pure and simple. Good racing is nonstop combat for the win.
The roof spoiler rules had that and the
aero-clean rules of this coming season will generally not have that – the cars
will draft poorly, push in traffic, and passing will be too difficult. Of course
Jarrett likes the new rules because he basically doesn’t have to work to win
races – this is a racer? You insult people’s intelligence, Jarrett. Good racing
is not about pit stops – it is about lead changes.
Another who gets it curiously wrong is
Mikey Waltrip, whining in that same CNNSI episode about the need for bigger
cars. Few have noticed that the cars HAVE been getting bigger over recent years
– the Monte Carlos of today are noticeably bigger than the Luminas of 1994 and
surprisingly measure up well to the cars circa-1976 – one measurement of Dodges
I read indicate that the Intrepid of today is actually a few inches longer than
the 1974 Charger. Few also keep in mind that the Craftsman Trucks are not
terribly slower than the cars. So bigger cars by themselves don’t make up the
real answer.
Tony Stewart got a raw deal in a recent TV
tribute to Dale Earnhardt. Stewart self-depreciatingly commented on his Daytona
tumble by saying, "The world isn’t going to end because a racecar driver
crashed." The piece, though, used his quote as if he was making this
comment about Earnhardt.
And yet in its own way it is the most
sensible thing said about reaction to Earnhardt’s death this season. Clearly for
his family and close associates it has been a traumatic time like no other – for
many of the rest of us, though, the grief was carried far and away too greatly.
The silent 3 laps wore out their welcome by April, other tributes acquired a
tackiness to them, and a general inability of the sport to put it out of its
mind and race was on display all year. The sport handled Alan Kulwicki’s death
and Davey Allison’s death with greater maturity than it has generally handled
Earnhardt’s.
Daytona supposedly will name
"something" after Earnhardt. Once they do, can the sport finally put
it out of its mind and race?
According to Frank Stoddard there is more
safety work to do, such as mandating full-face helmets for all over-the-wall
crewmen. "We’re going to have somebody get hit and knocked face-first onto
the asphalt, and that’s when we’re going to wish everybody had on a full-face
helmet." Such raps against open-face helmets carry an unfairness to them,
since open-facers, while hardly perfect, have a generally good protective record
over the years.
"Anybody who’s going to be on top of
the pit box, including a driver’s wife, needs to have on a fire suit," says
Stoddard. Frank, why don’t you just outfit every crewman from pit guys to PR
hacks to the guys who sweep the shop floors with armor and be done with it?
While fire suits are certainly a good idea, at some point the overkill has to
stop. If they want real safety, why does the sport consistently overlook
alternative approaches, approaches that will solve or at least alleviate the
problem WITHOUT the new equipment? A pit road change is available that will
prevent these pit collisions without armoring crewmen – just stop closing pit
road when the yellow comes out and let the cars pit at naturally staggered
intervals, as was done before March 1989. On ESPN Classic and Car & Track on
Speedvision we see old races that ran without these pit road rules and so forth,
and there was generally less of a problem then than there is now, and I myself
remember such races without pit road closure, and how teams could pit without a
speed limit and so forth and were safer than they are now.
Speaking of old races, one in particular
showed how far the competitiveness of the racecars has deteriorated – the 1991
Pocono 500, re-aired on ESPN Classic in mid-December. By historic Pocono
standards it was not one of their best races, but it did show quite a bit of
passing and some great side by side through Pocono’s tricky corners. The most
striking quality was how the cars could suck up on each other and pass more
easily than they can today, and this was at a time when the aerodynamics of the
cars was already becoming too much in terms of slickness. I was at that
particular race and remember how Richard Petty got tagged in One by Lake Speed
and went on to pass twelve cars with authority in the remaining laps. An
interesting contrast was shown in a subsequent ESPN Classic race, the 1993 Dixie
500 at Atlanta won by Rusty Wallace in his final start for Pontiac. If you saw
both the ’91 Pocono and ’93 Atlanta races, notice how much more difficult it was
for the 1993 cars to pass, despite the higher banking allowing more sustained
side by side.
NASCAR has implemented a minimum driving
age of 18. Some have complained that it is two years older than kids can get
their licenses. This is a nonsensical response – it is bad enough that we let
kids two-plus years too young to drive – especially when liquor becomes a factor
as well; to let them onto racetracks with adult drivers can be similarly
foolish. Lee Petty had the best response when 18-year-old Richard asked to race:
"Wait until your 21, then you’ll be three years older and hopefully three
years smarter by then."
Would it be too much to ask if Nashville,
which loves NASCAR like no other city, followed NASCAR’s lead? Whenever I
purchase a CD I browse the country section and seemingly half the new-coming
acts contain kids who aren’t halfway through high school yet – and this is
reflected in the general banality of the material they are given. LeAnn Rimes’
life has become tabloid fodder of recent – the price of too-early fame, perhaps.