Pre-New Hampshire —– And Remembering September 11
Yep, here we go again.
New Hampshire is here and already the whining has begun. Not long after
multi-millionaire Rusty Wallace ran his mouth in regard to how NASCAR driver
salaries aren’t as big as stick-and-ball athletes’ salaries, he then went after
New Hampshire’s configuration.
"They’re going to have to bulldoze the place," Rustoleumn said.
"They’re going to have to rebuild the track, reconstruct the turns."
No they don’t Rusty – they need to reconstruct your opinions, because your
opinions are not worth a damn.
New Hampshire was built as a multi-purpose track. As such it holds races for
Winston Cup, Grand National North, and the Modified Tour. And since the GN North
and Modified series do not have any problems putting on competitive races at
NHIS – the surface was as slick in their races as it was for the Winston Cup
cars in July, and the Cup drivers exaggerated the amount of track breakage in
the turns – not to mention that the Winston Cup cars have yet to put on a
memorable race at Chicagoland, Kansas, or Texas, while the IRL has put on
tremendous battles at all three, and you get to the heart of the problem that
Rusty and the other racetrack pseudo-experts don’t want to deal with – the
racecars.
Mike Snow a few weeks back wrote about multi-purpose tracks and how they need
to be more stock car friendly. Stock cars may be the biggest fan draw right now,
but the open wheelers and the non-Winston Cup classes have the same right to
race on these facilities, and adding banking to NHIS won’t solve anything. Those
drivers who griped about how the track was slick in July apparently have never
raced on slick racetracks before – just how many drivers remember events at
Bristol, Dover, Darlington, Rockingham, Pocono, Charlotte, etc. where the
surfaces were slick? I sure as heck remember such races – banked or flat,
racetracks often get slick, and with some frequency they can get very slick.
Jeff Gordon said the surface in July was "unacceptable." Presumably
this was because he couldn’t pass a single car on the racetrack (about the only
way he got by anyone was to cheap-shot them in the turns; his shots were noticeably
harder than rubbing Rusty Wallace’s bumper off at Bristol), a condition more due
to aero-push than to the surface.
The racecars in NASCAR’s big leagues have long needed a major change, from
the low-drag high HP raindrop bodies of today to wider-tired, lower-HP,
aero-anchored machines – the type of package to be found on 2000-1 Winston Cup
restrictor plate cars, on the Modifieds, and in the old Indy Lights and present
Infiniti Pro Series. When the Modifieds change the lead lap after lap on the
exact same track where the Cup guys gripe they can’t pass on, then you know the
cars are the culprit, not the track.
Exhibits A and B in the case against Rusty Wallace and his bull bleep-dozers
are Grand National North and the National Modified Series, two divisions racing
at NHIS this weekend, and two divisions with quite a few exciting events at this
track. Winston Cup boasts of its close point race, yet all three divisions at
NHIS are going through tense point battles that could swing decisively by the
checkered flag.
Andy Santarre leads Busch North with 2,246 points. Trailing him by a mere 27
is Brad Leighton, each with three wins. Only seven behind Leighton is rookie
Matt Kobyluck, a Stafford Motor Speedway alum. Fourth in points is Dale Shaw,
but his gap of 150 will need some heavy help to whittle down.
"In the past, I just went out worried about winning, not about
points," says Santarre, a fact that got him to the point lead but which
former champion Leighton may be able to exploit given his three-win streak at
NHIS. Also hurting Santarre is that his shop is in North Carolina, making for
longer supply runs for the crew compared to the New Hampshire-based shops of
other teams.
Ted Christopher will make a rare Busch North start at Loudon, and Santarre
notes that Christopher, July runner-up Brian Hoar, and other part-timers will
"have their guns loaded." Still, Santarre came a fender short in May
and certainly knows that beating Leighton can help derail the #55’s title hopes.
The Featherlite Tour is the second of the two Saturday races, and their point
race is even hotter. Eddie Flemke holds a 37-point lead over Jerry Marquis – who
no doubt expects the Boehler #3’s aero package to be better than in July – and
69 points over Thompson winner Mike Stefanik. Rick Fuller hasn’t won yet this
year but the Sheba #8 driver is only 91 points out of the lead and just six
ahead of Todd Szegedy. Ex-Roush Trucker Chuck Hossfeld has Bob Garbarino’s
Mystic Missile #4 in sixth, 110 points out of the lead, and Terrible Ted
Christopher has the most wins of the year at five, but is 115 out of the lead
and will be looking to turn things around at NHIS, a track where his
Earnhardt-esque numeral scheme has often matched his restrictor plate drafting
panache.
Ted is trying to win three titles this year – the Mod Tour title and track
titles at Thompson and Stafford, CT. He still has a hole to climb out of at
Stafford, but he’s been able to gain ground
The Infiniti Pro Series raced at Chicagoland before the IRL main event, and
Aaron Fike took the win. The wing package on the Infiniti Pro cars was changed,
adding more drag and thus making the draft stronger.
This led to an interesting comment from A.J. Foyt about his grandson Anthony
IV’s run in the Chicagoland race – A.J. noted that Anthony learned a lot more
about racing in the big draft of that race than he did in winning the first two
events.
Such is a fact of racing that is often lost amid all the manias about how
today’s drivers just flat-foot it and so forth – traffic teaches you more about
racing than just hitting marks on a racetrack
Finally, this past week saw the first anniversary of the most devastating act
of war visited upon American soil. Throughout the country vigils and remembrance
ceremonies were the order of the day, and at NASCAR tracks and NFL stadiums this
weekend the ceremonies will continue.
Amid the grief, a vital fact has been curiously lost – this was not a tragedy
in the purest sense. It was an act of war visited on us by a culture, radical
Islam, that is as barbaric as one can conceive. Recently controversy erupted
when Natalie Maines, lead singer of the Dixie Chicks, protested Toby Keith’s
anthem "The Angry American" because of its "simplistic"
message and how it belittled "an entire culture rather than the bad people
who do bad things."
Ms. Maines displays ignorance as dismal as some of her vocals. These were not
"bad people," they were officially sanctioned soldiers of a culture
that has been at war with civilization for centuries. Their first encounters
with America were in the form of the Barbary pirates – operating from Tripoli,
Tunis, Morocco, and Algiers, they plundered international shipping and forced
massive ransoms until they were dispatched by warships sent by President Thomas
Jefferson and commanded by Commodores Edward Preble, William Bainbridge, and
Stephen Decatur – it was during this war that American marines captured Tripoli
and thus created the second stanza of the Corps’ official march1.
Islam is often mistranslated as a term – the literal translation means
"submission," and in the 20th century submission has been the goal of
radical Islam and led it to sponsor international terrorism on a vast scale.
When the World Trade Center imploded, there was dancing in Arab streets as
though the local populations had won a war – for in a sense they had won a
battle.
So it should be remembered for what it truly was – an act of war, not bad
people doing bad things. This is the lesson of September 11 that should not be
forgotten.