CALL OFF THE EARNHARDT INVESTIGATION – PLUS SHORT TRACKING AND CANCELLATIONS
Racing’s good, bad, and ugly came to light
on the last weekend of April at three different venues across the nation.
The big short track show to see that
weekend was Stafford Motor Speedway’s Spring Sizzler, now something of a
truncated affair with the cancellation of the track’s ProStock division after
last year. The lack of the ProStockers really became noticed when the whole show
ended a lot earlier than normal.
What did transpire nonetheless was another
enjoyable racing affair, beginning with the track’s Late Modelers. Bob
Botticello dominated early but then fell out and the win went to Mike
Quintilliano.
The speedway’s baby, the SK Modifieds
whose genesis many years ago was as controversial as the IRL’s in Northeast
racing circles, went out next, and Willie Hardie bested SK king Teddy
Christopher for the second straight day, this after Terrible Ted cleaned house
at Thompson’s SK-class feature the week before.
The big show was the Featherlite
Modifieds, and a distressing sign of the tough times the division is facing was
the absence of Mario Fiore’s team. There was a car numbered 44, but it was a
different team – their regular number of 12 could still be seen on the roof
despite the thorough job of repainting the team undertook. Ricky Miller was the
driver, and the team spent 12 straight hours preparing the car; among the
changes needed was change to distribution of left side weight.
Quite a few other entries in the field
either lacked sponsorships or were operating on less-than-ideal budgets. But
there they were, plugging along, and one can’t help but feel for these teams.
The race itself started good, settled down
for a long time, then exploded at the end. Ted Christopher led 137 laps before
Mike Stefanik, driving Art Barry’s #21, took over before losing the lead to
Christopher in lapped traffic. The car that worked hardest to stay on the lead
lap was Thompson winner Rick Fuller – I remember two years ago when one
ticked-off Mod Tour competitor dubbed him Road Block Rick; the appellation
proved apt as Fuller could not be put a lap down, by Terrible Ted or by Steffi.
He then got the big break with a Lap 160 yellow, and with 17 to go he’d bolted
from fifth into battling Stefanik for the win, but side by side for the lead in
One, both hit the guardrail.
The battle for second became quite heated
at the end, and this gave the win to John "Do It" Blewitt III, who has
suddenly become a force to contend with in Curt Chase’s #77 following his
rip-roaring win at NHIS last July. Not that Blewitt has not won before, but of
late his stint with the #77 has been bearing greater fruit.
Meanwhile, an enormous embarrassment took
place at Texas.
CART chickened out at the last minute. I
know that’s a harsh term to use, and driver complaints about G-loading are no
joke, but having practiced and qualified, CART should have run the race.
"CART did not sufficiently slow the
cars," noted Eddie Gossage. This qualifies as a monstrous understatement,
and also serves as yet another reminder of the folly of the speeds being turned
in modern racing – as well as a retort to the viewpoint that racetracks need to
be changed because of speeds.
A race did take place at Texas, though, as
a very truncated Indy Lights field – only ten cars – took the green. Damien
Daulkner took the lead after a two-lap wheel to wheel battle with his teammate
at Bob Dorricott’s team, Townsend Bell, and obsessively hogged the bottom groove
all the way around with Bell as his blocking back. This left Derek Higgins to
try and root up the high side for the lead, and it was frustrating to see
Higgins work like crazy to get past Bell with Bell making absolutely no effort
to try and take the lead from Faulkner. This is why I hate team-order racing –
don’t believe Bob Dorricott didn’t tell his two drivers not to race each other.
Also frustrating is the above-mentioned obsessive hogging of the bottom groove –
with another of those ridiculous no-passing-below-the-line rules that artificially
shuts off a passing lane and hurts competition.
Still, it showed how much fun Indy Lights
on big superspeedways are.
The whole CART affair shows a lack of any
foresight by CART, a problem the sanctioning body has shown several times over
the years but which here was even worse than normal. It also further exposes the
"real cars and drivers" arrogance that carried through CART’s feud
with IRL over the years – IRL’s guys took to Texas without hesitation and have
put on some stellar races there.
It was said that only four of 26 drivers
polled did not feel any dizziness on the banks – I suspect one of the four was
pole-winner Kenny Brack, who raced at Texas in IRL for A.J. Foyt and who won at
Atlanta and Charlotte for Super Tex back in 1998.
Unfortunately there wasn’t as much
competition as there should be for NASCAR at California. Between cars that
handled so lousy that team after team short-pitted to try and correct problems,
a slick racetrack, lack of a draft, and aero-sensitivity in the cars, Fontana
became yet another forgettable affair other than for Hank Parker Jr’s
breakthrough victory. It also brought indications that NASCAR will ban
soft-shock setups at all tracks beginning soon, which led crew chief James Ince
to ask aloud, "Why don’t they just issue us cars?"
And already the racing has been forgotten
amid yet another chapter in the Earnhardt investigation – the interview with EMT
Tom Propst who has said that Earnhardt’s belt was not torn in his Daytona crash.
A video of EMTs working on Earnhardt’s car at Daytona has been shown on ESPN,
though from what was shown it doesn’t appear exceptionally conclusive. And Patti
Dobler, who climbed into Earnhardt’s car after the crash, has said she couldn’t
tell if the belt was broken.
Propst has said he has never been
interviewed by NASCAR about what happened. But the question begged is why he
didn’t come forward sooner. And did he make any particular effort to get
interviewed by NASCAR? Apparently he went to the press first.
The obvious implication here is that
NASCAR fabricated the whole story about belt breakage, but their arch enemy the
Orlando Sentinel has not come up with any kind of believable motive why. The
Star tabloid has come up with a reason, but it falls apart – they claim that
NASCAR wants to cover-up foot dragging on safety issues. The problem here is
that plenty of similar crashes have occurred without any serious injury to
drivers, so what foot dragging has there been?
Jim Litke of the AP tries to come up with
a reason in his "The Cost Of Doing Business" piece, but his reasons –
"Start with money" – don’t particularly come off as impressive,
either.
Ignored in the present safety controversy
is that most of last year and early this year the safety focus was on soft walls
– chassis rigidity was all but completely ignored until about a month after
Earnhardt’s death, and even the HANS collar got a lot less attention until now
than soft walls. Ward Burton’s concussion with a Simpson-designed
neck-protection system is not a good sign for the HANS’ effectiveness – the fact
a HANS cracked at Atlanta also indicates the device’s effectiveness may have
been oversold.
Many want to put the blame to NASCAR
because it mandated thicker-strength metals for roll bars for 2000; this ignores
that teams were stiffening their front clips all the same, but with
lighter-weight (and more expensive) metals.
A lot of us have forgotten that NASCAR’s
safety record remains quite good – comparisons are still made to the safety
efforts of F1, CART, and IRL, and they consistently ignore that NASCAR’s three
big league divisions have run more races in the last eleven seasons than all
three open wheel divisions combined – some 800 NASCAR events versus 500 open
wheel events – and have seen nine NASCAR driver deaths versus seven driver
deaths, six spectator deaths, and at least two other non-participant deaths. So
who trails behind whom in safety?
The entire Earnhardt investigation long
ago reached the point of not accomplishing anything – if anything, it reached
that point on Monday after the Daytona 500. The salient facts – Dale Earnhardt
and Ken Schrader hit the same wall at the same speed at similar angles;
Earnhardt died; Ken Schrader got no injury – are really all we need to know; all
the rest has proven to be little more than repellently gory nitpickery. So maybe
the Earnhardt investigation should just be called off – it hasn’t done anyone
any good.
And that is hasn’t done any good only
raises questions about the Sentinel’s motive for pushing this issue as it has.
I’ve come to the conclusion that they want two things – they want to say that
NASCAR killed Dale Earnhardt et al, and they want to punish NASCAR. The trouble
here is that NASCAR never killed anyone, and the Sentinel wants to punish NASCAR
because it didn’t maintain safety standards that are realistically impossible to
establish. NASCAR’s safety record is a lot better than the Sentinel makes it out
to be, and the unavoidable reality is that drivers on occasion do get killed,
despite every safety precaution there is – remember those wheel tethers open
wheel cars put on in 1998? They didn’t work in the IRL Atlanta 500k. Remember
roof flaps? They have proven to be a mirage of safety.
"Maybe that’s what finally got to
(Tom) Propst," Jim Litke writes, "The idea that NASCAR
would…..conclude that Earnhardt’s death was a coincidence, or the end run of
incredibly bad luck……After all, those excuses had been god enough in the
past."
And the problem here is that those
"excuses" are likely closer to the truth than anything else.
The twin issues of CART at Texas and
NASCAR came together at ESPN’s racing web site – if Ed Hinton’s pre-Talladega
piece "Where is NASCAR’s Conscience?" qualifies as the worst analysis
of the safety issue so far, Jerry Bonkowski’s "CART Shows Winston Cup The
Way" serves as a similarly awful sequel.
"Now may be the time for NASCAR
drivers to call the sanctioning body’s bluff," Bonkowski writes. He then
notes veiled driver threats of a New Hampshire boycott last September and also
the whining of a Talladega boycott, ignoring that at Loudon NASCAR tested soft
walls and the results were a spectacular failure, and that the Talladega safety
concerns were overblown. Bonkowski also ignores that the New Hampshire boycott
talk came after Bobby Labonte’s throttle stuck at Darlington – which wasn’t
supposed to happen with kill switches recently installed in the cars – i.e. the
talk happened when a recommended safety change failed to work.
Bonkowski suggests drivers like Jeff
Gordon, Bobby Labonte, and others give "some serious thought to finally
asking Helton (and company) a number of poignant and serious questions,"
such as "Why hasn’t NASCAR made any major advances to driver safety? Why
hasn’t NASCAR mandated or at least begun implementing the installation of soft
walls, again in the name of driver safety? Why is NASCAR dragging its feet on
the Earnhardt investigation? Why hasn’t NASCAR eliminated the use of restrictor
plates, which normally increase the risk of potentially violent crashes at
Talladega and Daytona?"
Mr. Bonkowski, here are your answers –
1 – NASCAR – the entirety of the
organization (drivers, teams, the sanctioning body, etc.) – have never stopped
making advances for driver safety; they’re all supposed to work together. NASCAR
is not the only or even the primary guilty party here.
2 – Soft walls are an illusion of safety,
shown by the failed NHIS test, Arie Luyendyk’s disastrous Indy crash in 1998,
and by inconclusive other testing.
3 – Part of the problem is that everyone
wants a quick and easy answer that simply isn’t there, and the bigger problem is
that nothing is being accomplished by the present investigation.
4 – CART’s Texas fiasco provides another
argument FOR restrictor plates – there would not have been any problem with
G-loading if they’d run restrictors on the engines as well as much rawer drag.
And the safety issue at Talladega was overblown to begin with, as shown by the multiple
injuries and deaths occurring everywhere EXCEPT in restrictor plate races – the
three that occurred at Daytona 1994-2001 were single car or two-car crashes.
Safety is certainly a necessary issue to
explore. But it needs to be done rationally, and without emasculating anything
in the sport.