POST ROCKINGHAM RACINDEALS
TRIBUTES: I’ve seen a lot of suggestions about how
to pay tribute to Dale Earnhardt. Everything from retiring the number 3, to
immediately inducting him into the hall of fame, to only running 42 cars last weekend, to having every car come in on the last lap and wave the checkered flag
to an empty track.
I understand why people are suggesting these things. They
want, in some small (or big) way, to make sure the world knows what Earnhardt
meant to racing and race fans.
But they’re wrong.
The best way to pay tribute to Dale Earnhardt
is for the drivers to race their hearts out like they always do. If Richard
Childress wants to use a different number next year (like Felix Sabetes/Chip Ganassi did
after the loss of Kenny Irwin), then that’s his prerogative in conjunction with
NASCAR.
Should NASCAR retire the number 3? "Other sports do
it" we hear. NASCAR doesn’t, and shouldn’t. Yes, some drivers become
identified with numbers, but why would you pick #3 to retire? Why not retire
every number he drove?
Obviously, you can’t. The argument that there are
only 110 numbers aside, if you retired Earnhardt’s number, what would that say
about the other drivers who have died who’s numbers weren’t retired? Why
wouldn’t you then retire the #7? Or the #28?
NASCAR should (and probably will) wait a long time before
reassigning the number out of respect.
SPEAKING OF TRIBUTES: I have to say that the
near-deification of Dale Earnhardt, Sr. has me a little uncomfortable. People
are elevating him to a higher level than what I think even he would be
comfortable with.
Personally, I’m relieved that the planes didn’t get to do the missing man
formation over Rockingham. That really should be reserved for military heroes.
Dale Earnhardt could drive the tires off a race car, but that doesn’t mean he
deserved a military honor.
FOX TV: Racing fans are spoiled. Read that
again. I’ve never seen so much whining than I have about how Fox is doing
on their broadcasts. One "columnist" even called it garbage.
Frankly, I’m surprised at how good the coverage is. Are
there problems? Sure.
Darrell Waltrip and Larry McReynolds give the fans a fresh
perspective from people that were just in the sport. But sometimes they get
too excited and start another topic before finishing up the last one, or interrupt
one another with exclamations of what’s happening on the track. But they’ll get
better.
The new FoxTrax technology is simply incredible. ESPN and
TNN in their comfy contracts with the tracks would never have dreamed up this
new visual aid.
I also hear a lot of things about how great ESPN was. This
is the network that still won’t commit to a permanent starting time for
RPM2nite. One day it’s on at 6:00, the next it’s on at 5:00. This is the same
network that would start a race late because of the football draft. Or would
only give racing a few seconds on their mainstream sports news show. ESPN took
NASCAR for granted, and you see where it got them.
NOT THE SOURCE: On the new NASCAR.com site, they
say: "Our mission is to bring the same Action, Heart and Soul of your
favorite sport to your favorite site!"
They do sum up their site pretty good though: "And we
hope you’ll like our noise on the new NASCAR.com as well." If a noisy site
is what they set out to create, then they’ve succeeded. There’s so much noise
you can’t get to the meat.
Last year, you could watch qualifying timing and scoring
on your browser. This year, you’re lucky to even be able to get qualifying
results on the same day. Last year, you could choose an HTML version of timing
and scoring during the races. This year, if you don’t have a 1 gigahertz
processor and all the Java patches, forget it.
You don’t take over a web site and offer less info than
the previous management. Not if you want to keep fans coming back.
But it looks NASCAR.com is getting "AOL-ized",
and the fans they want coming back aren’t your hard core fans.
MEMO TO EDITORS IN THE MAINSTREAM PRESS: The
acronym for The National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing is NASCAR.
Acronyms are all upper case. NASCAR is the correct usage, not Nascar.
If you people had been following this sport before Dale Earnhardt’s death, you’d
know.
SPEAKING OF THE VULTURES: Some
newspaper in Orlando wants to get it’s hands on the autopsy photos of Dale
Earnhardt, for God only knows what reason.
The newspaper’s mouthpiece said "We
have journalistic reasons to want to see the photos so that we can provide the
public with the most complete reporting about this tragedy and through the
reporting we all might come up with solutions to avoid these types of tragedies
in the future." Yeah, right. They’ve also said that they won’t publish the
photos.
I’m not sure why I need to know the
details of Earnhardt’s autopsy. We’ve already had way more details on
Earnhardt’s post-mortem than we did on Adam Petty, Kenny Irwin, and Tony Roper
put together.
Whatever happened to decorum?
SAFETY DEVICES: I’m somewhat alarmed that some
drivers over the weekend were using some sort of device that was apparently
developed over the last week by a crewman on one of the teams. This device
somehow attaches to the belts and is supposed to prevent the head from snapping
forward similar to the HANS device.
What alarms me about this is that there doesn’t seem to be
any evidence that anyone has thoroughly tested this system on crash test
dummies. Does it really do what it’s supposed to do? Could it actually cause
more harm in the right circumstances?
Again, for the thousandth time, doing something wrong
quickly could be worse than doing the right thing slowly.