MARTINSVILLE RACINDEALS

HOMEWORK: This is for those people who are coming to the Nashville area to go to the Busch race next weekend. Your homework assignment is to go to NASCAR.com to get directions on how to get to the track. For extra credit, what is the banking in the turns?
See the last item below for the answers.

GETTING SHAFTED: You’re a driver for a team that’s struggled this year, and due to circumstances not under your control, your best finish is a
16th. But the next race is your new home track. The old track you won two championships on no longer hosts the Busch Series. They’ve moved it to a 1.33 mile concrete oval east of town, and man are you pumped up about.

But then you get a call or see on the internet that you’ve been released. Barely a week before the race you’re looking forward to the most this year, and they release you.

It happened just about this way to Chad Chaffin. Thursday morning Chad was talking about coming to race the new track; Thursday afternoon, he’d been released.

Team Rensi, you have no class, and you can expect whoever you put in that sorry piece of junk to get the living daylights booed out of them next weekend.

NOT QUITE TOTALLY NASCAR: If you judged Totally NASCAR by the name, you’d think that it was, well, totally NASCAR. They should name it Totally Winston Cup with a touch of Busch and Trucks. If it were
truly totally NASCAR, they’d cover all of NASCAR’s touring divisions. At least give the top five starting and finishing spots. But, this sports magazine show is only concerned with the top three touring series; anything below that is just completely ignored.

Speaking of sports magazine shows, RPM2nite has been denied access to the tracks this year because of NASCAR’s exclusive TV contracts. They’ve set up cameras outside the tracks where no credentials are required so that they could get interviews with the drivers, and they’re using footage that comes from ESPN’s
old broadcasts plus stills from AP. Personally I don’t have a problem with NASCAR barring them. But….

ESPN has the exclusive contract to broadcast the Craftsman Truck Series races this year, which means
that RPM2nite can use footage they shoot because their network has the rights. So I was somewhat surprised to see driver interviews on Totally NASCAR from the truck series that were obviously taken inside the garage.

Can you say double standard? NASCAR, you need to decide one way or another how you’re going to treat the racing magazine shows. If Fox can go inside the truck garage and get footage to use on their magazine show, then ESPN should be allowed to do the same for the Busch and Cup series. Or NASCAR should bar Fox from the truck series garage. Pick ONE and stick with it.

WHERE’S KYLE?: On Friday after qualifying, I was looking through the starting lineup for Sunday’s race and was surprised to see that Kyle Petty’s name was nowhere to be found. I even did a search of the page, thinking that I’d just overlooked it somehow. The
search came up empty, and I assumed that he’d decided to skip the race.

But when Fox showed the starting grid, I was even more surprised to see Kyle’s name was in fact in the lineup. Then it hit me: I got my info Friday from NASCAR.com. Enough said.

MEDIA HEAT: Ricky Rudd gets asked an admittedly stupid question from some print guy at Martsinville after the race. He makes a sarcastic remark and
storms out of the media center.

One wonders if he’ll get the same media drubbing that Tony Stewart got last year for not bowing and kissing the press’s ring?

SAFETY, SAFETY, SAFETY: NASCAR announced
Monday what anyone with any common sense should already have known: they’re investigating Dale Earnhardt’s accident and they’ll release the results when they have all the facts, and not before.

Good for them.

They shouldn’t let the press, fans, drivers, owners or anyone pressure them into rushing the investigation. It needs to be thorough and complete. Only then should NASCAR release the details of what they found and what they’re doing to fix it…if anything can be done.

CRASH TESTING: This is going to sound a little crazy, but I’m completely serious. I saw a show on The Learning Channel the other night that had several
motor sports stunts. Among the stunt drivers was Brian Carson. I’d seen Carson on some other shows where he jumps his car over other cars. In this show, he jumped off a parking garage (7 or 8 floors I think).

Jumping off a car garage, the car is going to hit nose first. Carson only wore a helmet. It struck me that if this guy was going to be “brave” enough to do this kind of thing anyway, why not let him crash test the HANS collar? Or one of the other head restraint devices?

PURSES:
After I got the official driver points from NASCAR, I imported it into a
spreadsheet  just for the heck of it. Kind of wanted to see how many points back everyone was. Just speculating, but if you’re not in the top 20 by this point of the season, you pretty much don’t have a shot at cracking the top ten.

Anyway,
while I was fooling around, I added up all the numbers in the “money won” column. Boy, was I surprised. After only eight races, 49 drivers have already won over $33 million. That’s an average of about $675,000 per driver, or $4.1 million per race. Seven drivers make up for over $10 million of that though.

So, assuming that the owner gets half of the winnings, DEI has raked in $2.1 million, Hendrick Motorsports has made $1.75 million, Robert Yates Racing and Roush Racing have each made around $1.3 million, and Penske Racing has made $1.1 million.

SPEAKING OF POINTS: Maybe it IS time to change the points system. If Jarrett wins many more races, the race for the championship will be over before July. Is the winner getting too many points? He’s already got a 123 point lead over Gordon, and is 312 points ahead of Sadler in 10th. Maybe they should start out at 100 points for the winner and drop by two for each position. Limit the bonus points to the pole winner and the driver who leads the most laps, giving each one of those 2 points.

CRASH FOOTAGE: The Earnhardt family is supposedly upset at the timing of Sylvester Stallone’s new movie, “Driven.” It’s “too soon” after Earnhardt’s death and Warner Brothers is “exploiting” his death with the release.

Sorry, I don’t get it. This film has been in production for a while, and the release has been planned for this summer. The film apparently has very realistic looking crash scenes, but no one is killed in the movie. I guess the thinking is that they’re using the crashes to draw people to the film.

OK, if it’s bad to use crashes in the movie trailer, then why don’t we
criticize Fox? If you’ll look closely at Fox’s intro to their race broadcasts, you’ll see a wreck in which the whole rear end wheel and
axle assembly flies towards the camera. You know that’s fake, right? And there are other crashes that have been digitally manipulated in the intro to “enhance” the wrecks. Where’s the outrage?

WHERE IS GLADEVILLE?: I’ve seen stories on the wire saying that the new track is “about 20 miles” east of downtown Nashville. If 40 miles is “about” 20 miles, then I guess they’re correct. The
wire
story also had the number of tons of rock blasted on the site off by a few billion.

When Dover Downs purchased the lease to Nashville Speedway USA from Bob Harmon, they announced at the time that they were going to build a track in Nashville/Davidson County. But they weren’t able to find enough land inside the county/city limits, so they looked east. They found a site near Gladeville, TN. The original layout had the track straddling two county lines: Wilson and Rutherford.

But a bunch of know-nothings in Rutherford called CRASH (County Residents Against Speedway
Havoc) convinced their county officials that the Speedway was a bad thing. So Dover was forced to move the track a few feet to the north to get it completely inside Wilson County.

Speaking of the CRASH folks, you might have seen the link here to the left called C.R.A.P. That’s my parody page of the web site of misinformation that the CRASH folks put up. I’ve avoided linking to their site before now because I didn’t want to give them the impression anyone actually cared what they were doing. But if you’re up for a little humor, take a look at their
site and then come back and take a look at my parody site. It’s pretty obvious from reading it that all they’re after is money. Let me know what you think.

I did get to go to the Superspeedway on Saturday for their open house. It’s pretty impressive. They’ve said all along that there would be “100% site line visibility.” Frankly, I was skeptical of that. I figured those folks on the first two or three rows would be lucky to be able to see the back stretch. But I got to see first hand that if you’re sitting on the front row, you’ll be able to see the whole track.

It’s an impressive facility, from what I’ve seen. But work crews were still working Saturday to get everything finished, from the press box to the luxury suites to the infield
buildings, so I didn’t get to see everything.

SAVE OUR SPEEDWAY: The flip side to having the new superspeedway is that it looks like Nashville Speedway USA will be plowed under after Dover’s lease expires at the end of 2002.

That’s a shame.

Nashville city officials are making noises about building a baseball field there for the Triple A team that plays here in town. That’s just great; the Nashville/Davidson taxpayers have spent almost a half a billion (that’s Billion) dollars over the last few years, building places for a bunch of muscle bound, overpaid “athletes” to play. Now they want to spend more of my money building something for a private entity. It’s not right. And add in the fact that they want to raze the most historic speedway in the country, that makes it even more of a travesty.

But the Fair Board,
which controls the leasing of the track, has never had a clue when it comes to the operation of the Speedway at the Tennessee State
Fairgrounds (with the exception of granting Bob Harmon the lease). NASCAR got fed up with them in 1984 and pulled the Winston Cup races from the track. While the Series would have eventually outgrown the facility, it could have lasted on the Winston Cup circuit until at least the early 90’s.

Now the folks who are on the Fair Board are wondering what to do with the track after Dover leaves. Uh, here’s an idea: find someone who wants to run races at the track. Don’t wait until September of 2002 to start looking. Put out the “Speedway For Lease” sign now. Leasing the facility to a track operator will cost the city (i.e. the tax payer) less money and it’ll keep this historic track operating.

GRADING YOUR HOMEWORK: OK, for all you folks who did the homework assignment above, did you enjoy the race you went to? You got to see some great short track action Saturday night. What’s that you say? You had tickets to the Busch race at Nashville Superspeedway but missed it and ended up seeing a great Gatorade All Pro race at Nashville Speedway USA?

NASCAR.com seems to have taken some track facts from both speedways and mixed them up and put them on their site. The directions they have to Nashville Superspeedway will take you to Nashville Speedway USA. In at least one place, they’ve got the banking on the new track at 18 degrees, which is what the old track is banked at (the new one is at 14 degrees).

COVERING
THE RACE: I’ll be at the new track starting Wednesday afternoon, and will be
reporting on the activities for Racing
Information Systems. If possible (and if anyone’s interested), I’ll be doing
a daily log here on the site similar to what I did last October at Talladega.