Bill Elliott’s Back, and Other Parts At Homestead
"Every time I see Ray I smile at him
because I know what he’s going through. I’ve been there. I know what it’s all
about."
The older a driver gets, the harder it
becomes to win. And when Ray Evernham came to Bill
Elliott, it changed for the veteran driver: "Now it’s, ‘you guys set it
up and I’ll try to give feedback.’"
So Bill Elliott’s back. And his back along
with the rest of him went to victory lane at Homestead. The win was his 41st as
a driver, and Ray Evernham’s 50th in Winston Cup.
For Elliott, the eight years before this
win were a nightmare of hope, close calls, and futility. In 1992 he’d joined
Junior Johnson and had perhaps his most memorable season, coming in second in
points after five wins, four in a row in March, after a frustrating 1990 and ’91
tenure with Harry Melling, a tenure ending nine years, the 1988 title, and 34
wins together.
But after 1992 crew chief Tim Brewer was
fired, reportedly after siding with Flossie Johnson in her bitter divorce from
Junior. The Johnson team suffered in 1993 without a win, and in 1994 there was
more frustration, a mini-renaissance that saw Elliott shoot down Dale Earnhardt
at the Southern 500, and finally departure for his own race team. The NASCAR
system, however, was aimed against owner-drivers. Nonetheless Elliott was
usually competitive. But in 1996 Elliott broke his leg in a single-car airborne
crash at Talladega. After that healed up he ran strong for much of 1997, but by
1999 the toll of being an owner-driver was grave.
Then Ray Evernham hired Bill for his
fledgling Dodge team, and amid the usual first-year blues the team showed moxie
and it now has paid off with a win.
Elliott touched on a reality of racing
that continues to plague the sport – "Track position is everything. These
cars are so aero-sensitive, so tire-sensitive (that) the cars that could drive
up front in clean air were the cars that could drive away."
Amid all the whining about Daytona and
Talladega rules, little notice has been given to the unraceability of the cars
everywhere else – if anything, the fight over Daytona/Talladega rules has
eliminated the key element to allowing cars to pass – a powerful,
aero-push-killing draft.
Calls for greater banking in the turns at
Homestead ignore the real culprit – the racecars. Virtually the same problems at
Homestead are to be found on higher-banked tracks, and higher banking would mean
higher speeds – not that Homestead’s present speeds are really necessary.
On that issue, a revealing comment was
made by crew chief Ben Leslie in National Speed Sport News’ November 7 issue –
"It takes a certain amount of time for the (roof) flaps to deploy and that
time is insufficient……as speeds exceed 194 MPH." This is a tacit
admission that there is such a thing as a safety cut-off point for speeds. Now
194 is a bit high for such a cut-off point, as the cars have taken flight below
that – 185 ought to be the true cut-off point above which speeds should not be
allowed to pass.
Unable to pass on the track, the cars work
to pass in the pits – and this led to an appalling spectacle that sent two of
Ricky Rudd’s crewmen to the hospital, one with a serious head injury. There are
calls for mandatory pit crew helmets, but that would not have helped much here.
The real culprit is NASCAR’s policy of closing pit road. This so packs cars
together in the only place where they can pass that there is no room to
maneuver.
Closing pit road began in April 1989 after
the Atlanta 500 – there the pace car picked up the wrong leader and Darrell
Waltrip lost a lap, an incident highlighting some problems with the manual
scoring process of the time. Closing pit road began to lead to some serious
crashes, at Talladega, Martinsville, and Charlotte, before tragedy struck at
Atlanta – by a bitter irony, it involved Ricky Rudd and Bill Elliott.
Few seem to remember the days when pit
road was never closed for anything beyond a catastrophic incident in the pits.
Teams would dive into the pits before taking the yellow, and there was a natural
staggering of stops, and little pit crowding. There was thus no pit speed limit
because there was no need for one.
This will of course be ignored in the
clamor for pit crew helmets, and the fact it will be ignored highlights the
biggest safety weakness in racing – the mindset that more hardware instead of a
change in procedure is the answer. Just as seriously slowing the racecars would
work better than head restraints in driver safety, so keeping the pits open so
teams can pit in naturally staggered intervals would work better than mandating
crew helmets.
The issue of safety got another push with
the Charlotte Observer’s magnum opus on 260 deaths at racetracks since 1990. But
lost amid the sob stories was that these casualties occurred in a span of some
150,000 events – a lower rate of loss than a typical highway season.
Racing remains safer than most other
sporting endeavors, but the world is looking at it differently since the death
of Earnhardt – looking at it differently but not necessarily in a better way. A
wholesale wave of quasi-amnesia has permeated much of the safety debate, with
the sport forgetting procedures that worked – such as leaving pit road open –
and mandating new hardware (head restraints, roof flaps) that look effective but
have less going for them than meets the eye – amid all the head whip argument
little remembrance has been paid to past crashes involving massive headship that
did not produce injury – all the while ignoring such core problems as escalating
race speeds.
Safety won’t improve until the sport looks
at core problems instead of symptom treatments.