Miscellanea For The Last Bye Week
With Sears Point behind us the last bye week for the Winston Cup season
beckons, with racing in CART, IRL, USAR, the Trucks, Grand National, and the
usual myriad of short tracks coast to coast nicely filling in the gap.
In the big leagues so far, the trend has been competitive depth. In sixteen
Winston Cup races so far we’ve now seen eleven different winners – Ward Burton,
Matt Kenseth (three wins), Sterling Marlin (two wins), Tony Stewart (two wins),
Kurt Busch, Bobby Labonte, Dale Junior, Jimmie Johnson (two wins), Mark Martin,
Dale Jarrett, and now Ricky Rudd. We could well reach 20 this season – and to
think, five years ago there were only eleven in the entire season.
Their Grand National cousins have also run sixteen races so far and have seen
ten different winners – Jason Keller has four wins; Scott Riggs, Jeff Green, and
Jeff Burton have two apiece; and Dale Junior, Greg Biffle, Jeff Purvis, Jack
Sprague, Bobby Hamilton Jr., and Todd Bodine have one each.
Then we have the Craftsman Trucks. They have run eight races so far and have
seven winners – Ted Musgrave with two, and Robert Pressley, Travis Kvapil,
Dennis Setzer, Terry Cook, Mike Bliss, and Brendan Gaughn with one each.
Competitive depth has also been the trend in some of NASCAR’s smaller
divisions. Grand National North has seen a different winner in each of its six
races so far – Andy Santarre, Brad Leighton, Mike Johnson, Kelly Moore, Ted
Christopher, and Matt Kobyluck. Meanwhile the Modified Series has run six races
with five winners – Terrible Ted Christopher is the only two-time winner so far.
Eddie Flemke, Ted’s bete noire at Thompson in April, held off challengers Dave
Berghman and Tommy Cravenho at Seekonk the night before the Sears Point round
for his 12th career Mod Tour win. Nevin George, Berghman, and Jerry Marquis have
also won this season.
In the two big league open wheel series, it has been a mixed bag. CART has
run six races with Cristiano Da Matta winning three and Bruno Junqueira, Michael
Andretti, and Paul Tracy splitting the other three. IRL has run seven races and
Sam Hornish and Helio Castroneves have two wins each while Jeff Ward, Scott
Sharp, and Gil De Ferran have one each.
The only major series that has seen domination is USAR’s Hooters ProCup
divisions. Bobby Gill has all but completely blanked the opposition in USAR’s
southern league while Brian Ross has to a lesser extent been The Man up north.
It is here we see the focal point of the age-old sports debate – is domination
better than parity?
In any event, there are stories around racing aside from on-track
competition:
For many weeks Mike Mulhern has reported (in fairness to Mulhern, others –
notably Robin Miller on ESPN – have said the same thing in that general time
period) that Roger Penske was switching his team to Dodge, an assertion the
Penske team has repeatedly denied. Now
Mulhern is reporting on speculation out of Detroit that Penske will return
to Pontiac.
The rumor that Penske will go back to Pontiac strikes me as thoroughly
implausible. Penske quit Pontiac because Herb Fishel had taken control of all
GM’s racing programs and was cutting backing to Pontiac teams after 1993 – GM
responded at the time that Penske tried to in effect horde all of GM’s Pontiac
backing for his team, which is hardly beyond Penske’s MO. The divorce (combined
with Ricky Rudd’s public rebukes of GM when he formed his team around Fords) was
so bitter it led to an interesting exchange of press releases during the 1994
Winston Cup pre-season media tour.
Penske went to Ford and it has been a sweetheart deal for both – Rusty
Wallace has 23 wins in Fords, has done a great deal of the development work
needed for Ford, and neither Wallace nor Penske show any dissatisfaction with
their Ford partnership.
To go back to Pontiac, GM would have to offer them an enormously beneficial
deal – and basically make them their works team and then some. And GM under Herb
Fishel has never shown much desire for genuine depth – remember that Pontiac
teams had to work together to overcome GM neglect and built competitive depth on
their shoulders, with no real help from GM.
If Penske does switch from Ford, the most likely (even only) candidate will
be Toyota, should the manufacturer enter Winston Cup as long rumored. Penske’s
IRL team (and also Chip Ganassi’s) will run Toyota engines in IRL as the brand’s
two works teams (Ganassi already runs Toyotas in his CART cars), and it thus
makes sense for Penske to run Toyota Solaras for Rusty Wallace and Ryan Newman
if the decision to switch arrives.
Speaking of Pontiac, why do reports persist (NASCAR Online had one after the
Sears Point race) that say Joe Gibbs will go to Chevrolet when the Gibbs team
has repeatedly denied such, has been doing a lot of work on the 2003 Pontiac
(Bonneville?), and when a switch back to Chevy (JGR ran Chevys 1992-6) would put
them low on their engineering totem pole versus being the big fish in Pontiac’s
small pond?
As for the satellite to that rumor – that Cal Wells will switch to Pontiac –
the lack of an available engine supplier (despite reported offers from Richard
Childress) is the most obvious drawback, but the general lack of desire on GM’s
part to spend serious money on teams other than their designated champion and a
few supporting players remains the biggest long-term one.
Here’s another rumor I’m puzzled by – the one that Ricky Rudd, rather than
retire, will run 2003 back with Hendrick Motorsports.
Why would Rudd return to the General Motors fold? Remember his "they
won’t even give me the time of day" tirade when he finished up 1993? Since
then Rudd has run nothing but Fords and has had his greatest successes there –
New Hampshire, Phoenix, Rockingham, Dover, the Brickyard, Martinsville, Pocono,
Richmond, and now Sears Point, all won in Fords. Given how Joe Nemechek has
suffered the same fate as almost everyone else who has driven the #25 since
Schrader’s top five in points in 1994, and given how Terry Labonte and the #5
have faltered since the end of 1999, can one really expect Rudd to get a fair
shake back at Hendrick?
The newest cause célèbre in Winston Cup is to shave some of the rear
spoiler to eliminate the aero push and allow Goodyear to soften their tires for
better compensatory grip. Rusty
Wallace has been the point man in this lobbying – "I’m politicking real
hard now, and a lot of drivers are, to get the rear spoilers downsized on the
cars."
Rusty’s primary gripe is that Goodyear’s tires are too hard because of the
increase in down force – "(Goodyear) has told me that if we can get NASCAR
to….get the down force off (the rear), they’ll soften the tires back up. When
they soften the tires back up, then the tires will wear and we’ll see the
passing come back."
Wallace further states, "But you’ve got to take some (down force) off
the back so you can’t charge into the corner so hard."
Along that line, GM engineer Terry Laise stated in Speedway Scene’s Michigan
400 issue, "The way you used to pass in Winston Cup is the driver got up
under another car, got him a bit loose, he went up the hill, and the pass was
completed…..You don’t do that so much anymore (because) we have so much rear
spoiler on these cars….Right now the loss (of down force) is greater for the
rear car than the lead car. So he develops an aero push and doesn’t force the
other guy to get loose."
There is also that the tires, being so hard, are not grinding rubber into the
racing surface, which helps create a higher groove. Softer tires would allow
such grinding.
The problems with the proposed reduction in rear spoiler are several. The
practical one is that Goodyear may have tires for the entire rest of the season
already made – when John Darby of NASCAR hinted at running cars with lower rear
spoilers and softer tires at Kansas in late September, Stu Grant of Goodyear
stated at Sears Point that Goodyear’s tires for that race are already made and
would not change.
The longer term problem is that, as Edward Luttwak once put it, there is no
free lunch in strategy – if you reduce the size of the spoiler, you certainly
make cars looser, but you may pay the price of cars that snap around too easily.
I remember when it was fairly common for cars to lose air off their spoilers and
thus crash, and the steady increase in spoiler size has largely eliminated that.
There was also the fact that, when the 5 & 5 rule was run in 1998, the tires
were substantially softer than today’s, and the cars usually suffered a
debilitating aero push plus tended to snap around more due to lack of rear down force
– basically the sport had the worst of both worlds back then.
I also have a serious disagreement with Rusty’s objection to charging the
corner so hard – why is this bad? Isn’t charging hard through the corners what
these race drivers are supposed to do?
Finally, there is the aspect of incompletion. As Terry Laise noted above, you
could pass by getting under a leader’s bumper, loosening him out of the groove
enough to get past. This, though, works on short tracks and one milers like NHIS,
Dover, and Rockingham, and it works to some extent on bigger tracks. At places
like Pocono, Michigan, Fontana, the old Ontario (and its inspiration,
Indianapolis), and even on the quad-oval intermediate supers, it has
historically been quite different – at Pocono and Michigan you drafted up to the
leader and beat him into the corner; this is how the Modifieds pass at NHIS. And
it gets back yet again to the lack of drag and resulting weakening of the draft
in the cars.
Some changes to the NASCAR rulebook are offered by Sherry
Fisher. A look at some of them.
Fisher gets it right about the quality of national anthem singers. Diego
Garcia (like Ms. Fisher I’d never heard of him until Sears Point) did the song
well – in contrast to the lady at Stafford Friday night, who screwed up
"land of the free" as so many often do. If they invite Martina McBride
back to a NASCAR race, I hope she does the national anthem without
embellishment.
Fisher also scores by advocating extra bonus points for laps led. I’ve harped
on this forever and will do so again – the number of laps a driver leads should
directly reflect into the point system, either through bonus points for each lap
led or changing the five-point system presently used to five for leading, five
for most laps per quarter, and ten for most laps total.
She is sort-of right about Rusty Wallace and Darrell Waltrip calling people
"cats" – what other 1970s Hanna-Barbera television programs did they
watch regularly? But the fans holding "Boogity Boogity Boogity" signs
do the catch cry better than Darrell, so leave them alone.
Race tracks, though, should not be called by corporate names – Infineon
Raceway doesn’t convey much; where is it? Ontario? Fort Worth? Daytona? This is
why geographic locales should still be used in press and audio-video coverage.
Here’s an intriguing
rumor by David Poole – switching The Winston and settling the SMI
shareholder’s Texas Motor Speedway lawsuit in exchange for SMI’s long-requested
second Texas date.
"NASCAR…..has its own issues to deal with (such as the proposed
downsizing of the rear spoiler and compensatory softer tires, plus more testing
of larger roofline/greenhouse cars)." There is also the Texas lawsuit –
"NASCAR would very much like to see the lawsuit….go away. It thinks it
might be able to make that happen by giving Texas a date from a track owned by
its sister company (ISC), but wants to make moving The Winston (from Charlotte)
part of the bargain."
Presumably Rockingham’s early-November race would be the ISC event stricken –
certainly Talladega, Phoenix, Homestead, Kansas, et al are off limits in that
department. As much as I oppose such date trades on principle – why these guys
can’t hash out a schedule that adds second dates at Texas, Fontana, and Vegas
while leaving all the other dates alone is still a frustrating question – such a
move is realistically the least damaging compromise presently available. Bruton
Smith, Bill France, and company would be well advised to seriously consider such
a compromise.
NOL had a Gaylen Duskey piece on racing movies – which leads to the question
of why so few are worth remembering. I saw Driven with Sly Stallone and Burt
Reynolds, and given that I went in knowing where it would screw up like
seemingly all the other racing movies do, I enjoyed it.
But that it screws up like most of the other racing movies do only shows how
abysmal the general quality of the genre really is. So what can be done to make
a truly memorable racing movie? Some suggestions –
1 – NO RACING ANNOUNCERS – real life or otherwise. In movies, racing
announcers are completely distracting, and always presented as if the teams are
even listening to them.
2 – THE TEN-MINUTE TAKE – One of Alfred Hitchcock’s favorite filming devices
is something utterly alien to modern million-edit Hollywood – the ten-minute
take. Where possible Hitchcock would shoot one complete scene lasting ten
minutes (some of his late-40s films consisted entirely of ten-minute takes), the
amount of expended time on a typical reel of film. This is the most realistic
device in filming, as it catches everything in real time.
Racing is perfectly suited to the ten-minute take because the proper flow of
the race cannot be captured outside of Car & Track documentaries by constant
edits – especially when the trained eye can catch when an edit is a staged scene
and the next is real race footage. Racing scenes should feature ten-minute takes
showing multiple completed laps, and where edits are necessary, none should be
shorter than ten seconds.
3 – DOCUMENTARY APPROACH – Film a racing movie as if it is a documentary, a
la Tora! Tora! Tora!, The Longest Day, or The French Connection – even hire
William Friedkin or other such-minded director for the job.
4 – BETTER USE OF CGI – The curse of racing movies has forever been that race
scenarios as written cannot be simulated except through endless (and always
choppy) editing. Modern CGI, though, allows better recreation of circumstances –
the way CGI has advanced movies can recreate old races such as in the 1970s or
early ’80s primarily or solely through CGI.
5 – GET REAL ON RIVALRIES – Racing rivalries do not involve feuds over women.
6 – PORTRAY LENGTHY RACE PREPARATION – One of the best scenes in The French
Connection is not the famed car-train chase, but the painstaking teardown of
Frederic de Pasquale’s posh Lincoln Continental by Gene Hackman, Roy Scheider,
and Irving Abrahams searching for hidden drugs. The scene is pretty long and can
seem to bog down at times.
This approach should be applied to race preparation scenes – give lengthy screen time
to car preparation and the painstaking aspect of the process.
7 – NO MUSIC SCORE – Offhand the last movie I can remember that eschewed
background music was Fail-Safe, and the lack of music only enhances its
effectiveness. A racing movie should feature not one note of music anywhere –
music only distracts in a racing film.
Finally, there have been these reports – first there was a little blurb with
the announcement that Sarah Fisher had secured a season ride for the rest of the
IRL year – that she will also test a Grand National car. There has also been
confirmation that IRL champ Sam Hornish will at least try to drive
"some" stock car events in 2003, and finally Paul Tracy is looking at
a NASCAR option.
Some have noted how it is another example of how open wheel racing, rather
than cultivate young American talent (Fisher and Hornish), is letting it get
away. Certainly the noticeable rise in non-American rear-engine open wheel
drivers getting IRL rides clashes with one of the founding goals of the league.
That Canadian road racer Paul Tracy is considering it as well is another sign of
open wheel racing’s serious weakness.
But there is also the record of open wheel talent entering NASCAR. There was
a time when the seeming consensus was that short track open wheel talent would
be almost the only source of new NASCAR talent. The actual record, though, is as
hit-or-miss as with any other class of upcoming talent. Jeff Gordon, John
Andretti, Tony Stewart, and Robby Gordon are four open wheel vets who made it to
the top, but there are numerous other examples of open wheelers who either
didn’t make it or who have seen their NASCAR careers stall out – Jason Leffler
lost his Winston Cup ride and is now in the Trucks, and for the time being there
seems little prospect of a return to Winston Cup or Grand National. Kenny Irwin
had that brilliant ride in David Blair’s Yates Racing satellite Ford at
Richmond, but from then it was largely downhill until Irwin’s death. Jason
Schuler – remember him? I recently found my copy of the 2000 Talladega Grand
National 300 and he was entered; I offhand don’t recall him lasting in GN beyond
2000. Randy Tolsma has two Craftsman Truck wins but there seems no realistic
shot for him to advance upward in NASCAR ranks. Mike Bliss got a Winston Cup
shot in 2000, it fizzled out, and now he’s back in the Trucks.
Not only USAC short track open wheelers have gotten shots in NASCAR’s big
leagues. Steve Park and Jeff Fuller are two Modified Tour veterans who reached
the Grand National and Winston Cup level. Park got his shot with DEI and has
three GN and two Winston Cup wins, but of course his Darlington crash has played
havoc with everything. Jeff Fuller, meanwhile, got to Grand National and won at
Bristol in 1996 with Ted Geschteckter’s #47 (now #59); he was largely out of the
upper levels of racing in the latter 1990s but got a Winston Cup shot in 2000
that went nowhere.
So the record with open wheelers in NASCAR is no more of a magic bullet than
any other racing class for team owners looking for racing talent.