JULY 4TH RACINDEALS

DEERE CHAD: Congratulations to Chad
Little for getting out from under the Roush umbrella. The #97 and the #16 teams
have been second-class teams from day one. Kevin LePage should follow Little’s
lead and get out as fast as he can.

HEAVENS TO BETSY! A TOBACCO SPONSOR:
Surprise. The NASCAR Winston Cup Series is sponsored by…Winston. Yes, that’s
right. A cigarette company. This is apparently news to a reporterette in Orlando
who wrote a piece earlier this week about it.

It seems that because the Cup series is
sponsored by Winston, by association the drivers are endorsing smoking.

Using her logic, because race car drivers
are sponsored by beer companies, then they’re endorsing drinking and driving.
They must also be endorsing reckless driving, because there are wrecks on the
track as well.

I’ve been watching WINSTON Cup Racing
since 1989 or so. I’ve had the opportunity to attend about 4 WINSTON Racing
Series National Banquets. I’ve had the opportunity to cover as a member of the
media about 10 WINSTON Cup races. If you’re a smoker, and you smoke RJ Reynolds
products, you won’t have to worry about running out of cigarettes, because
they’re certainly plentiful in the media centers and on the banquet tables.

But in all the WINSTON-sponsored events
I’ve been to, not once have I been tempted to start smoking, simply because
Winston was a sponsor. By the same token, I’ve never been tempted to start
eating a Slim Jim just because they’re in the media center too.

I guess the whole irony of this is that if
the government hadn’t outlawed some of the tobacco company’s free speech rights
in the first place, they wouldn’t have needed to find a way to get their brand
noticed by the public.

THE DAYTONA PIT CREW COMPETITION:
In case you missed it, the Daytona Pit Crew Competition was won Saturday night
by Jeff Burton. In between the competition, they ran the cars around the track
for 180 laps.

Except for the start of the race and
restarts, it was another snoozer. And if someone tries to tell me one more time
that all the makes are equal at Daytona, I’m gonna scream. Three Chevrolets in
the top 25 in qualifying, and three in the top ten at the finish doesn’t spell
"parity". When you have guys like Jeff Gordon and Dale Earnhardt can’t
even lead a lap, something needs to be done.

Race fans deserve better than this.

GETTING THE POINTS: People are
complaining already about how bad the Winston Cup points system is. Oh Dear,
they say. Drivers who have only one win are ahead of drivers with two wins in
the points!

Why don’t we just give the championship to
the driver with the most wins? Why even have a points system? I’m not sure how
you’d break a tie though. What if two drivers won 5 or 6 races each? If winning
is the only thing that matters, you can’t go to their second place finishes,
because those aren’t wins.

So I guess you’d end up with co-champions
in that situation. That’d be really entertaining.

The whole point (no pun intended) of a
points system is to, well, award points. NASCAR has had some convoluted systems
in the past, but the one they have now works. If a driver wants to win a
championship, then he needs to run well every week, not just in 4 or 5 races
where he might get a win. Should a driver with 10 wins and 15 DNF’s be a
champion? I don’t think so, and under the current system, he won’t be.

OUT WITH A WHIMPER: I watched most
of the Busch race Sunday.  I say most of it because CBS bailed out on the
fans again.  They didn’t even switch to TNN to show us the rest of the
race.

So long, CBS. You might have been an
innovator at one point, but not any more. Maybe that’s why you didn’t get a
piece of the NASCAR pie next year.

(7/5/00) Well, based on the email I’ve gotten, it seems that TNN did show the rest of the race. But when I switched to TNN, instead of making an announcement or running a crawl at the bottom of the screen, or having a “Milwaukee rain delay” message in the corner, they didn’t say a thing. They just went into that Late Model race directly. I’m not hovering around a TV waiting for TNN to figure out what to do. I still say this doesn’t bode well for race fans next year, when the majority of coverage will be on broadcast networks. Will TBS be able to carry the conclusion of rain delayed races on NBC? Does the contract even allow for that?