NASCAR Rated XX – Week Twenty Miscellanea
To open this column, we must consider the
eerie similarities involved in Bobby Labonte’s high-side victory over Dale
Earnhardt Junior at Pocono –
Fifteen years and one week earlier,
Pocono’s Summer 500 saw a similar finish, as Tim Richmond fought off Geoff
Bodine up high in Pocono’s treacherous turns, where tradition dictated that cars
could not race. Indeed, Richmond’s radio conversation with Harry Hyde about how
the tires were perfectly matched for such high-side racing became the basis for
one of the most remembered scenes in "Days Of Thunder."
Bobby Labonte’s gutsy overhaul of Junior
brought back memories of Richmond’s greatness and put Bobby just one win short
of the record Tim first set at the Magic Triangle, a record Bill Elliott first
tied in 1989. Elliott’s popular rally to fourth was a much-needed balm for the
struggling Ray Evernham team. It also showed the up-and-down nature of the Dodge
effort’s debut season – much has been made of how Sterling Marlin has been
Dodge’s strongest gun this season with Ward Burton second. Those two, however,
have not been exclusively consistent and certainly have not been the only Dodges
to show genuine muscle.
The general struggle of the Dodges
explains the air dam change for the Brickyard that has non-Dodge competitors
acting like idiots with their whining – but then the art of whining has sadly
become a well-honed one in this sport. Two of the bigger ones were Frank
Stoddard and his "Ford fans would be rioting at Indy" comment, and his
driver Jeff Burton and his assertion about "there’s been no wind tunnel
testing to validate this rule change." There didn’t need to be any, Jeff.
That Burton based his argument on wind tunnel
testing or lack thereof rather than on real-world on-track performance shows how
out of hand technology has gotten – Burton should have been looking at
real-world competition to see the struggle the Dodges have gone through.
Sterling Marlin is still the benchmark of the Dodge program and has struggled
quite badly in the last month of racing, as the momentum of the first half of
the season appears to have worn off, and this could be seen coming in races
before the start of his recent slide at Daytona – at Pocono in June he finished
fourth, which was remarkable in that his car looked poor in traffic most of the
day; since then he finished ninth at Chicago for his only top ten in the last
five races while the other Dodges have struggled even more, and the brand is
still last in the manufacturers’ race. By any objective standard the car
deserved a rules break.
Always proving the company for which he
works is composed of brainless dolts is GM’s Doug Duchardt; his latest entry in
the Racing Idiot’s Hall Of Fame is "It’s the manufacturer’s job to make
sure we have top teams in our camp." Dodge’s one-team-ten-cars approach
took several years to work out in the Trucks, but it finally did, and while time
will be needed in the Winston Cup program as well, the one-team approach is
fundamentally in Dodge’s best interest and will eventually begin to bear fruit.
In GM’s case, Duchardt’s comment is doubly stupid because his company chased
three of the five Dodge teams into that camp by years of neglect; his company
has regularly not done "the manufacturer’s job" of making sure
"we have top teams in our camp." Instead, his company has focused
almost all of its efforts on one driver – Jeff Gordon. That Chevrolet has shown
the depth it has this season is no thanks to Duchardt or his racing program.
And a racecar performance issue beyond
Dodge’s air dam continues to plague the sport – tires and unraceable
aerodynamics. "Once I got in traffic….it was ugly," Gordon said, a
problem universal at non-restrictor plate tracks in racing. With no draft to
work with and cars overly dependent on clean air to run, racing has suffered
badly for many years, with seemingly nothing being done about it.
Adding to the mix is the growing failure
of Goodyear’s "new generation" tires. Tire failures have become
common, and the tire to be used at Indianapolis "is terrible, and whoever
came up with it ought to be (shot)," vented a crew chief to Mike "Tony
Stewart’s Tape Recorder" Mulhern.
The sport knows what will help – more
air-displacement rails on the cars for a much bigger draft – the Craftsman
Trucks have reportedly been testing at Talladega with something along those
lines in an increasingly vain attempt to avoid the inevitable restrictor plates
– a lower air dam to kill the aero-push, and higher tire stagger so the cars
will turn better and not need camber.
The schedule doesn’t hit a true high-banked
track again until Bristol in late August, and with flattish tracks being the
norm until then, the inevitable bashing of flat tracks has begun. But one need
only consider flat tracks in the past to see how racecar technology and speeds
are the reason for inferior competition and safety –
Pocono International Raceway and Ontario
Motor Speedway were the flat tracks of note in NASCAR in the 1970s, and both saw
excellent racing at that time. When A.J. Foyt won the very first Winston Cup
Grand National race there in 1971, he proclaimed it "a wild racetrack for
any kind of car." His 1972 win there saw 35 official lead changes. There
were 38 official lead changes in the 1974 500-miler there, 37 in 1977, and over
30 in 1978 and ’79. And the Magic Triangle saw even more – 43 lead changes in
1975, 47 in ’76, ’46 in ’77, 55 in ’79, ’50 in 1980, ’46 in ’82.
But if Ontario were in existence today,
its competition would likely be as uneven as Pocono’s is these days. What
changed? The racecars and the general dulling of hunger in the drivers. This is
why the Brickyard 400 will not see good competition.
Elliott Sadler’s throttle cut-off failed
him at New Hampshire, and it failed him again at Pocono. And virtually forgotten
was the similar failure with Bobby Labonte that led to his hard Darlington crash
before the Southern 500 – a crash that led to the embarrassment that was boycott
talk for New Hampshire. These failures show again how safety devices tend to
serve up more failures than successes, and ought to make people skeptical of
heavily hyped safety devices in the future.
Skepticism has been in abysmally short
supply in the hysteria over safety, and without such we continue to invest in
devices that do not work to achieve what is really a notional level of safety.
Thus we continue to see roof flaps touted as a great safety device despite their
near-complete failure to keep cars off the ground, and similar hype over the
HANS collar despite Mike Skinner’s Chicago injuries with it, the lack of
head-neck injury to Joe Nemechek without it at his Dover crash, and the general
history of the sport that saw drivers routinely walk away from crashes that HANS
hysteria asserts they should be dying in.