The Southern 500, The Problem With Driver Analyses, Silliness, and Kenny’s Comments
Rain played havoc with the weekend, washing out several short track events
such as Thompson Speedway’s Thursday Night Thunder as well as NASCAR qualifying
at Darlington. The rain also shortened the Southern 200 for the Grand National
cars, leaving Jeff Burton with another Darlington win and a number of teams
having to rebuild racecars after another series of Darlington hits.
The rain also delayed the start of the Southern 500 to just before 3 PM, and
even after it started it had to run under yellow to finish drying the track,
then for a quickie sprinkle that helped eat up some 20 laps before the green
flew for real. Once it got going it was a calm race by Darlington standards, and
suddenly Jeff Gordon has two in a row.
The race was also a rejuvenation of sorts for Bobby Labonte, whose struggle
this season has been strikingly heavy. It also signals that the team has begun a
genuine turnaround.
One track that escaped the rain was Stafford, CT, and a fireworks show
preceded a surprisingly calm night of competition; rookie Craig Collins finally
cashed in on a victory in the Late Models, while Jimmy Williams stayed ahead of
the pack in SK Mods, a race highlighted by a nifty maneuver up the middle of two
cars by fourth-place finisher Eric Berndt.
Amid a Silly Season that keeps getting sillier – no sooner did Christian
Fittipaldi sign with Petty Enterprises than fellow CART alum Mad Max Papis test
with Travis Carter and may run a Carter Racing Grand National car – are two
driver analyses of differing tones and differing views, but which share a common
thread of puzzling view. The first is in the print edition of National Speed
Sport News’ August 28 issue, a pieced by Mike Kerchner asking, "What Made
Ricky Rudd A Hot Commodity?"
Kerchner wonders why there was such a furor when Rudd made himself available
for a ride in 2003, because according to him, Rudd’s "on-track record isn’t
all it’s cracked up to be," because Rudd has won 23 races but not a single
championship. He then compares to drivers like Jeff Gordon, Dale Jarrett, and
Bobby Labonte, who have won the title, and to Tony Stewart and his fifteen wins
in his first four seasons.
Well, let’s look at Rudd’s career and compare it to those of the drivers
Kerchner mentions. Let’s start with Rudd’s teammate in his present status as
lame-duck driver for Yates Racing. Jarrett didn’t enter Winston Cup on a regular
basis until 1987 with Eric Freelander’s #18, then in 1988 joined Cale
Yarborough’s team for two seasons, was cast aside, then saw his career rescued
by – ironically in light of Rudd’s 2003 ride – the Wood Brothers. Jarrett then
joined Joe Gibbs’ 1992 startup team and won twice before going to Yates in
substitution for recovering Ernie Irvan. When Yates slotted him in the #88 –
this after Jarrett’s original plan to form his own team, a plan that never got
past dream stage – Jarrett’s stock exploded.
Jarrett’s tenure with the Yates #88 has been remarkably free of turmoil –
only Todd Parrott’s brief promotion upstairs has interrupted the flow within the
#88 crew. In contrast we have the chaos and changes in key personnel that have
frequently plagued the #28 since Davey Allison’s death; one of the key igniters
of the Rudd-Yates standoff was a switch in crew chief Mike McSwain’s role in the
team. The lack of turmoil in Jarrett’s team certainly helps explain his
consistency of success.
Then there is Jeff Gordon, well known to have been blessed with the very best
racecars and engineering help from the very first day he stepped into a Winston
Cup car, a claim one cannot make for Rudd at any time in his career, certainly
not when he himself drove for Hendrick and for a four-year span won more races
than any other Hendrick team.
Then there is Bobby Labonte, who struggled in two seasons with the then-under funded
Bill Davis team before joining Gibbs for 1995. Like Jarrett, Labonte has been
free of team turmoil throughout his tenure – the recent mini-collapse of the #18
has threatened that, though Darlington may be enough to calm those waters.
Labonte’s teammate Tony Stewart has been free of team turmoil – all his turmoil
has been self-inflicted.
Now consider Rudd’s career – his 1975-80 years running under financed
racecars, either his own, Nelson Malloch’s #7, or the Mercury of Junie Donlavey,
his 1981 season with the always-mercurial DiGard team, his two years helping
build Richard Childress Racing, his four seasons with Bud Moore – four of the
most memorable years Bud has seen – his two years with the trouble-plagued Kenny
Bernstein team and Larry McReynolds, his four years with Hendrick, his six
seasons running his own team amid a NASCAR system steadily asphyxiating hands-on
teams like his own, and now his three years with Yates and the recent crew
turmoil that signaled the end of his tenure after 2002.
Kerchner’s comparisons suffer greatly in proper context. Especially cheap is
Kerchner’s shot that Rudd spent six years as a car owner and "ended up
losing his sponsor and selling the assets of his team to Robert Yates."
That’s not quite how it happened – yes, he lost his sponsor, or more accurately,
someone else "stole" it. Cal Wells entered NASCAR and grabbed Tide
sponsorship in a move that left more than a few surprised at him and left Rudd
bitterly noting that Tide was going to a team that at the time had no cars,
garage, crew chief, or anything else beyond a sub-par CART team that would win a
race and then fold a year later.
For Rudd to have won as many races as he has amid the frequent turmoil he’s
faced is quite remarkable and is a point completely missed by Kerchner.
If there are driver analyses that come off as too harsh because of lack of
context, then there are analyses that make poor or nonexistent use of context
for the opposite end – to give excessive praise. Such is the case with M. J.
Hall’s defense of Shawna Robinson1.
Hall cites several stats from Robinson’s website to buttress his defense of
Robinson in a Winston Cup season where there has been literally no highlight to
be found. Hall cites Robinson’s success in the Daytona Dash series; he then
cites how she finished 23rd in 1993 Grand National points; he cites her Atlanta
pole in 1994; he cites her top ten runs and poles in ARCA in 1999-2000.
And along the way he shows a near-total lack of grasp of what actually
happened during Shawna’s ten years in stock car racing’s big leagues. Robinson
finished 23rd in 1993 Grand National points, all right – and a major reason she
finished that low was because of crashes. Crashes, crashes, and more crashes –
that was Shawna Robinson in 1993; one of the most typical was Talladega, where
from five seconds back she never cracked the throttle and wound up smashing into
Mike Wallace. In 1994 it was more of the same – in that Atlanta race she won the
pole and crashed on the opening lap; she tried to blame it on Mike Wallace
because he had the temerity to PASS her on the first lap, and the media
incredibly went along with the story about how Mike Wallace took air off her car
by passing her, as if now passing was considered far too dangerous for racing’s
good.
Shawna tore up enough cars in 1994 to lose her third ride in three seasons,
and in early 1995 she hooked up with Chris Virtue and tried to make the field
for the Daytona 500 and Grand National 300 – and failed in both. Then she lost
her ride and couldn’t find another one – presumably team owners finally figured
out how poor she was as a race driver.
Four years and two children later she reentered stock car racing in ARCA’s
200-miler at Daytona in a James Finch Chevy, a car light years better than all
the other cars in ARCA. She finished second in the 200, and her history as a
race driver was forgotten amid a wave of Shawna-mania. The wave continued in
2000 when Michael Kranefuss put together an ARCA team with Winston Cup-caliber
equipment. She raced the full season, crashed a lot as usual, and and with
superior racecars managed a number of top ten finishes. But she was incapable of
winning – at Atlanta she punted Tim Steele into the wall, then gagged on the
restart and threw away first and second.
Then for 2002 Elizabeth Ann Morgenthau assembled a Winston Cup team for her,
and that saga is now well know – she crashed in the Daytona 125, got lapped
faster than you can say The Monkees Meet SheDaisy, and ultimately lost her ride
to drivers who actually showed decent form in traffic. While she may yet return,
her 2002 season realistically is over and can only be called a total failure.
It’s one thing to stick up for certain drivers, but to stick up for one who
has literally nothing of substance to show for ten years of effort is a bit
much. The excuses about how the BAM team has no factory backing and so forth are
true enough, but ignore that when those cars were driven by someone who knows
what he’s doing, they weren’t so bad that they couldn’t salvage something. With
someone other than Shawna, the cars actually showed something; with Shawna they
were junk.
Shed no tears for ESPN.
The pending end of RPM2nite is a result of the access feud between NASCAR and
ESPN, a feud that began because ESPN would not put its NASCAR highlights on its
SportsCenter show – if they had, then the whole issue would have been moot. ESPN
could have solved that whole issue, but didn’t.
So RPM2nite will go the way of Pat Patterson’s Raceday program. While
regrettable, one should show no sympathy toward ESPN, a network that had a lot
of racing coverage and then lost almost all of it – F1, NASCAR, and CART. Trying
to blame it on NASCAR’s bidding war package ignores as usual that ESPN was
outbid fair & square – a typical caper given how ESPN for years displayed
less imagination and less allocation of resources to its racing programs than
such rivals as CBS and World Sports.
The Craftsman Truck Series presumably will be withdrawn from ESPN next season
and placed on SPEED Channel, which makes sense given where the rest of NASCAR’s
programming has gone.
Another Silly Season tidbit concerns Cal Wells’ engine program next year –
there’s scuttlebutt that he’ll open his own engine shop. He’ll need some luck –
Joe Gibbs was the last team I can remember that switched from a lease deal to an
in-house program and made it work. Bob Whitcomb’s team switched from their
Hendrick deal in 1991 to an in-house deal, and ultimately folded; Darrell
Waltrip switched to an in-house engine program and for awhile looked like would
pull through, but ultimately DarWal Racing and its engine program went down.
And one should recall the struggle Joe Gibbs Racing went through in the first
year (1996) of its in-house program. John Wilson headed it up and for over
two-thirds of the season the #18 was consistently underpowered – they even had
to use Childress engines for the restrictor plate tracks. At Charlotte in
October they looked like they had their program humming, then blew up. Finally
in the final two races they got it down and won the Dixie 500 at Atlanta. The
JGR motor program has changed chiefs since – Mark Cronquist heads it up now –
and it’s been on the stampede ever since – 30 wins since that first with a JGR
motor.
Then there is the jinx that has plagued teams that ran Fords and switched to
GM – the Stavola Brothers did that and their team collapsed; Bill Davis did in
1994 and it nearly sank him – also consider he’s won more races in less time
AWAY from GM than he ever did with them.
Mike Mulhern calls him Jaws Too, because Kenny Wallace runs his mouth as much
as Darrell Waltrip. Unlike Jaws I, though, Herman The German has no Winston Cup
wins to his credit, and even his stint with DEI’s #1 wasn’t that impressive – at
least Jaws Too hasn’t shown the bonehead moves Jaws I often showed.
But he still runs his mouth, and does so again on the issue of Grand National
costs2.
The sport is too expensive for its own good – which is true – and Kenny says the
cars need to be changed to become basically Winston Cup cars with lower
compression and a smaller carburetor. "And we need to cut back on some of
these racetracks we’re going to," Herman claims, because trips to tracks
like Fontana and Phoenix supposedly help price the sport out of reach.
The sport is too expensive, but Herman The German doesn’t even address the
core reasons why. Changing the wheelbase of Grand National cars – presently 105
inches to Winston Cup’s 110 – won’t bring down any costs. And if that happened,
you’d likely see a huge influx of Winston Cup teams running GN races at Cup
tracks – a move that would push regular GN runners out of victory contention –
if not the series – altogether. It was no surprise that Jeff Burton won
Darlington’s Southern 200 with such absurd ease – he got practice the series
regulars did not by running his Cup car.
And the core reason is the same in Grand National as it is in Winston Cup –
each individual race team has far too many racecars, each one tailored to a
specific track. NASCAR’s one-engine rule needs to be extended to a one-car rule
– the car run at Daytona be marked as the superspeedway car; the Rockingham car
be marked as the short track car; with a backup for each – and no special
"Bristol" "Martinsville" "Daytona Shootout" etc.
cars as is the present practice. Forcing teams to run just two cars all season
with a backup for each will almost certainly cut costs as well as the workload
of the teams.