Jeff Gordon’s IROC Turndown, and Shawna
Remember Richard Childress’ blast at
whining drivers following the August 2001 Talladega test with aero-clean
configuration? It remains the best "sound" bite of the 2001 season –
"The current rules (with the roof spoiler and rear wicker) are doing
exactly what (they are supposed to). They’ve got cars that can pull up and pass;
you’ve got lead changes. That rules package is……not for these drivers who
don’t want to get out there and do their job…….The biggest problem is a
bunch of these drivers are sitting back whining they don’t want to run in packs.
If they can single-file it for 500 miles and get a paycheck at the end of the
day, they need to go drive somewhere else…..It just ticks me off……Right
now you can qualify 40th and be up there leading the race, and that’s what the
package is for."
Last time out I blasted Dale Jarrett for
his rather condescending lecture about "if race fans are patient" and
see how much effort goes into making a "good" pass (I never
particularly knew of any other kind) instead of wanting to see nonstop lead
changing. Well, Childress’ August blast still rings true and Jarrett ought to
heed it.
Jarrett’s whine is a symptom of a driver
who no longer displays the hunger. And a lack of hunger comes from Jeff Gordon.
He has officially announced he will not participate in the International Race of
Champions in 2002. Why? The official reason has to do with "quality
time" – the demands on his time due to the length of the Winston Cup
schedule and commitments to sponsors and his increased involvement with his team
and Jimmie Johnson’s team are the stated reasons, with this addition: "This
decision was made after lengthy discussions with my wife, my team, and Rick
Hendrick."
How romantic. How inspiring. How phony.
The length of the schedule isn’t stopping
any other driver from running IROC or other series and never has – compare
Gordon with, for instance, Tony Stewart, who will drive the 24 Hours of Daytona
in 2002. Sponsor commitments aren’t stopping other drivers – if anything,
sponsors WANT their drivers to run in IROC.
Increased involvement with his own team
and Jimmie Johnson’s? Gordon obviously wants to sound like an owner-driver, but
he manifestly is not. Kyle Petty and Brett Bodine are true owner-drivers in
Winston Cup (More on them in due course).
And there is also the IROC schedule. It
has been more years than I can offhand recall since IROC ran a race that wasn’t
part of a Winston Cup schedule – maybe in 1992 when the series ran Michigan
twice within a two-week span. The series will run Daytona, Fontana, Chicagoland,
and Indianapolis, all during Winston Cup weekends. It is not like Gordon has to
fly out to some racetrack from where he’s racing just to run IROC.
It is BS, pure and simple. The real reason
he isn’t running IROC is because he has NEVER done spectacularly well there. His
one win – the 1998 Daytona IROC – came because he Earnhardted Tom Kendall and
Randy LaJoie into the wall off Four (somewhat like the way Earnhardt hooked Al
Unser Jr. head-on into Chicken Bone Alley in ’95) and then jumped the ensuing
restart. Otherwise his record in IROC isn’t much.
Gordon is lying through his teeth about
not running IROC. The length of the schedule and the commitment to his team and
Johnson’s are just pathetic excuses. Gordon is little different from Vikings bad
boy Randy Moss, now famous for saying, "I’ll play when I feel like
it."
As mentioned above, Gordon makes like he’s
an owner-driver, but of course he is not. Getting back to Winston Cup’s true
owner-drivers, Kyle Petty and Brett Bodine offer interesting extremes in the
same basic dilemma.
In Kyle Petty we have an owner-driver with
far too much to work with – he supervises three Winston Cup teams and a
Craftsman Truck team, an organization that in conjunction with Bill Davis and
Ray Evernham was the workhorse in building and developing Dodge’s then-fledgling
return to the sport in 2000. Kyle also is in ultimate charge of a running
top-to-bottom reorganization of the team – identical to the 1989-91 changeover
supervised by ex-Mopar engineer Larry Rathjeb, a change that laid the groundwork
for PE’s latter 1990s mini-renaissance in victory lane. The present
reorganization sees its focal points in Mike Ege’s outsourced engine program,
the hiring of a new crew chief for Kyle and a team manager in Richard Buck
(fresh off two wins with Andy Petree in 2001), and a potential part-time
position for Kyle’s old pal Robin Pemberton. Throw in Kyle’s exhaustive sponsor
and charity works and you have among the hardest-working drivers in the
business. And how many owners do you know who have spent Saturdays personally
pounding out sheet metal on one of their cars? Kyle did this with Buckshot
Jones’ car at Talladega and has done so in general elsewhere – and owners who
get on their back to do that deserve to win races.
The opposite extreme comes in Brett
Bodine, an owner-driver with too little to work with. Almost chronically under financed
and undermanned (remember the phone card sponsor scam he had to put up with in
1997), Brett nonetheless has built a nucleus that can do well on the racetrack.
2001 saw two of his proudest moments in years – a top ten at the Firecracker 400
and a top eight at New Hampshire. Brett’s fight to keep his team has at times
been almost more than one can stand – in 1996 it got to where his wife and
partner Diane was sobbing during Brickyard qualifying out of fear that a DNQ
would destroy the team they had mortgaged everything for. In 2001 Brett had a
sponsorship deal that basically didn’t pay up, so on he struggles.
Brett is one of those drivers who has only
one win, a fact that obscures his potential for more. One year after his debut
win in 1990 he led the most laps at North Wilkesboro, and got a cheap shot into
the wall by Ricky Rudd, who for awhile was enemy enough to throw a punch without
provocation at Brett at that same race in 1993. Brett had a winning effort in
the 1993 Summer 500 at Pocono, but had to settle for fifth; he had a winning
effort at the 1994 Brickyard and came up short. Since then he drove Junior
Johnson’s car in Junior’s final year as an owner; after 1995 Junior sold the
team to Brett. The struggles began almost right away; at Daytona a car burned to
the ground; the next one was crashed in a qualifier. He nonetheless made the
field in a second backup, shot to the rumble end of the top ten, then got swept
into another wreck.
But Brett won’t quit as an owner-driver,
and that’s saying something as the NASCAR system of recent has killed off such
owner-drivers as Geoff Bodine and Ricky Rudd, both blue-blaze terrors on the
track as owner-drivers in the mid-1990s. While I offhand can’t remember the last
time Brett sledge hammered dents out of his Winston Cup car, I don’t doubt he’s
done such at some point.
Two extremes of the same dilemma, and
neither Brett nor Kyle have the billionaire guardian angel that Jeff Gordon has.
Kyle has three teams and Brett may field a second team for Geoff if he can get
some sponsorship. Any and/or all five are more deserving of wins that a driver
who acts like a quitter in not running IROC.
From the "Say What?" files –
Shawna Robinson was last seen barely making the field at the Michigan 400,
spinning out during the race, then failing to qualify for subsequent races she
entered. Her 2001 season also saw crashes, including a typically stupid move on
Shane Hall at Texas in early spring.
Shawna intends to enter 24 Winston Cup
races in 2002, driving Dodges powered by Ernie Elliott for BAM Racing; the team
has no sponsor but says it has enough money to run 24 races.
She’ll be lucky to make even one of them.
It is a mystery that there are people out there who are still willing to take a
chance on Shawna. Almost from her late 1992 debut in Grand National, Shawna has
been an embarrassment. Her 1993 season with Mike Laughlin and Polaroid
sponsorship saw one crash after another; she did manage a top-twelve at Indy
Raceway Park, but that was about the only highlight. She switched teams for 1994
and at Atlanta’s GN 300 she won the pole, on Hoosier Tires. On the start Mike
Wallace blew her off on the backstretch, then she spun and took out several
others – and press coverage blamed Mike Wallace for the crash, because in
passing her "he took air off her car and that caused the wreck." Never
have I seen a more irrational and hysterical analysis of a situation as this
(though Earnhardt coverage in 2001 comes close). The very next race, she tried
to punt another car into Martinsville’s grandstands and tried to fly in there
herself.
Polaroid quit after 1994 and she tried a
few GN races in 1995 with Chris Virtue. She also entered the Daytona 500 but
didn’t make the field. By May of 1995 she was out of racing. Then in February
1999 she entered the ARCA 200 at Daytona in a James Finch Chevy, a car light years
better than most of the others in an ARCA field, and somehow avoided the crashes
and finished second – and a fit of Shawna-mania was born. She finished fourth in
an ARCA race at Charlotte in a Kranefuss-Penske car, and Shawna-mania was out
there again. It didn’t go away when she trashed the Finch Chevy at Talladega’s
ARCA 300; instead she hopped into the Kranefuss Ford and ran much of the ARCA
season in 2000. She crashed at Daytona, crashed at several other places, then at
Atlanta in November she was actually racing for the win. After sending Tim
Steele into the wall she gagged on the last restart and finished third. The
scorecard showed several top fives and tens, in cars light years better than
those of almost all her fellow competitors.
Now she’s going to try Winston Cup, as if
the miserable 2001 effort isn’t a harbinger of 2002. Is there any shortage of
suckers out there?