Pocono RacinDeals

ELEVEN WINNERS: Ricky
Rudd becomes the 11th different winner this year. Sure doesn’t seem like there
have been that many. Maybe it’s because Jeff Gordon gets all the press when he
wins, and that makes it seem like there have only been three or four winners. Ah
well. I suspect that we’ll only end up with 12 or 13 winners this year.

It was good to see Ricky Rudd get the win
finally. All the conventional wisdom said that he’d win pretty quick once he got
in the #28. I after an owner has had one team as the primary team for so long,
it’s hard to devote the same resources to the other one.

CAUTION, NASCAR AHEAD:
NASCAR does it again… they threw another one of those "safety"
cautions on lap 25. Only this time, they told the teams what lap it was going to
be on, which virtually gave Bobby Labonte the lead (for a lap or two anyway).

Like I wrote a few columns ago, if they do
this, then they should require everyone to pit, change four tires, and go back
out in the order they came in. Anything else is unfair.

R & D BLUES: I was
happy when I heard that Casey Atwood was going with Ray Evernham because at the
time I attributed most of Jeff Gordon’s success to Evernham. So when Evernham
won the bidding war over Rick Hendrick for Atwood’s services, I figured he’d get
Evernham’s coaching the same way Gordon had.

Looks like I was wrong.

Casey had a great run going at Pocono
Sunday, and would have probably had a top ten finish. But his engine let go
towards the end of the race, and he ended up with another bad finish. It’s hard
to get good finishes when the equipment doesn’t hold up. And it looks like in
Casey’s case he’s the R & D driver for Evernham.

I still think Casey’s better off with
Evernham than he would have been with Hendrick. It’s looking like he should have
stayed in Busch another year and stuck to his original game plan of not getting
into Winston Cup too early or with a bad team.

TV HIGHLIGHTS: NASCAR has
said that "bona fide regularly scheduled recurring news programs of which
hard news elements constitute the main feature or in regularly scheduled general
sports update shows" can now air two minutes of race highlights. Some
people have said that that means that RPM2night can now show video of the
weekend’s races.

I’m not so sure.

"Regularly scheduled" to me
means that a show comes on on a particular time and day. RPM2nite comes on every
day, but ESPN has shown that they’re not too concerned with the race fan when it
comes to having a regular time. Most days it does come on at 7 pm (Eastern), but
if there’s some college basketball or some football or baseball game on, they’re
not above moving the show. So one day it might be on at 7, the next midnight,
the next 6:30. That doesn’t seem to "regular" to me.

RACINMEALS: I thought
Sterling Marlin ate Krystal’s before a race. When did he start eating lobster?

THE NATION’S NEWEST SUPERSPEEDWAY:
Would someone tell Fox that Kentucky Speedway is not the nation’s
newest superspeedway? Saturday they said that they were bringing us the Busch
Grand National race from "the nation’s newest superspeedway" and
that’s just flat out wrong.

Seems that Fox was so involved in singing
the praises of Kentucky Speedway that they forgot about Nashville Superspeedway.

And how appropriate is it for one of the
broadcasters to be involved with the track? We don’t know any of the financial
dealings that Darrell Waltrip has with Kentucky Speedway, but it sure looked
like Fox was doing its best to make the track look good for a possible Winston
Cup date in the future.

It’s great that they honored DW as being a
Kentuckian and all that (even though he’s lived in Tennessee more years than
Kentucky), but he shouldn’t have been on the announce team.

With that being said…

TWO ARE BETTER THAN THREE:
Waltrip and Mike Joy handled the announce duties for the Busch race. A few weeks
ago here in Nashville, Buddy Baker said that he thought that three was too many
in the booth. I think he was proved right Saturday night. With just Joy and
Waltrip in the booth there was a lot less confusion and the broadcast was a lot
cleaner.

Next year put Larry McReynolds in the pits
where he can give us more in depth analysis of what the teams are doing, and
just have Joy and Waltrip in the booth.

STAR MANGLED ANTHEM: I
missed the beginning of the National Anthem before the Pocono race, but once I
heard the mangled words, I knew immediately that it was Billy Ray Cyrus. He always
says "for the ramparts" instead of "o’er the ramparts" and
"for the land of the free" instead of "o’er the land of the
free."

Folks, this isn’t rocket science. I don’t
care who they are, the race promoter should audition the anthem singer to see if
they’re fit for the job. If they mangle the words but otherwise sing on key and
on tempo (and don’t improvise the melody), then give them the words and let them
sing it correctly. If not, then get someone else.

THE BIG ONE: Conventional
wisdom bites the dust again. One car gets loose at Pocono and we end up with a
dozen or so in a "big" wreck. I thought "big" wrecks were
only supposed to happen at restrictor plate races?

TIME OFF: Nashville
Speedway USA was off Saturday night (even though they didn’t have Fan Fair there
this year, they still used the fairgrounds for parking), so I had a Saturday
night off. I haven’t been to a baseball game in a while, so I figured I’d go see
the local AAA team play. But then I remembered the Busch race, so I stayed home
to watch that instead.

But I still wanted to see a ball game, and
sure enough, they were playing Sunday night too. I figured I’d go after watching
the Pocono race.

Then I remembered: The owner of the local
AAA team wants to bulldoze Nashville Speedway and let the taxpayers build him a
brand spanking new stadium for his team to play in. There’s absolutely NO
way that team is getting any of my money voluntarily (but with the tax hike the
mayor’s proposing, it looks like they’ll be getting it from me
involuntarily…at least as long as I live in this county). Nashville taxpayers
have footed the bill for over a half a BILLION dollars in the last few years to
build the arena and the stadium. Enough is enough.

SAFETY CONCERNS: From some of the
commentary I’ve seen, you’d think that NASCAR didn’t really care anything about
safety. Why, they’re so cavalier about it that teams can get by with thin roll
bars and even roll bars with holes drilled in them.

No wait… Didn’t NASCAR just fine and
suspend a Busch Grand National crew chief for doing that? They fined him 30
grand and suspended him indefinitely. I’ve never heard of them suspending
someone indefinitely. They’ve always put a time limit on it. To me, that tells
me that they’re aware of the safety issues and are taking action to make sure
the cars are as safe as possible.

Of course, the NASCAR bashers will say
that NASCAR is just doing that to deflect the heat they’ve been getting. Ah
well…

MISSING SEARS POINT: Sunday while
the race is on, I’ll be somewhere in Florida on vacation. I’m not taping the
race, so I’ll miss it completely. It’s a road course, and they don’t lend
themselves to much action anyway. Start in the front and hit the cautions right,
and you got yourself a win.

Even though I’ll be gone all next week,
I’ll have the laptop with me, so I’ll be able to get email and I might even
write something about NASCAR next week.