Ride Along RacinDeals

SIMPER FI: Last year I gave the #25 Busch car a hard time, first for the
lousy equipment they gave Chad Chaffin, then for the way they released him right
before the Nashville Superspeedway Busch race. That still wasn’t right.

When I found out they’d hired another former Fairgrounds Speedway driver,
Bobby Hamilton, Jr., I figured his career was in a black hole.

But, reports are that Team Rensi is spending money where it needs to be spent, and
giving Bobby Jr. the cars that can get the job done. The evidence is in how the
team is running this year. After just barely losing at Richmond, he
finally got a win Saturday at New Hampshire.

Now, does that mean that Bobby Hamilton, Jr. is a better driver than Chad
Chaffin or any of the others who were in the #25 last year? No, not by a long
shot. As near as I can tell, this is Bobby Hamilton, Jr’s first win… in
anything. Chad Chaffin was track champion twice at Fairgrounds Speedway, and is
tied with Coo Coo Marlin for fifth in points race wins with 39. Put Chad back in
the #25 as it is now and I think he’d be burning up the track, just like Hamilton, Jr. is.
Instead, Chaffin’s stuck with the woefully under funded Wayne Day #16 car. I
guess keeping your name out there is worth something, but I’m afraid that if
some decent team doesn’t pick Chaffin up soon, his time will be past.

F ONE HOME: Ah those crazy kids in Formula O-N-E. Seems everyone is all
aflutter because Rubens Barrichello slowed to let his teammate, Michael
Schumacher, take the win in the Austrian Grand Prix. People are shocked!
Shocked, I tell you, that a Formula 1 driver would just let his teammate pass to
get the win.

It’s a thing called "team orders," whereby if by some fluke, the
number two driver on a team is leading with his teammate in second, he’s ordered
to pull over and let the number one driver take the win. This should put an end
those smug people who, when they deign to notice stock car racing, look down their nose and claim that NASCAR is the
no better than
professional wrestling.

I’m not sure what all the fuss is anyway. Any semblance of competition is over once
the race starts. If engineer A can out-engineer engineer B, then a trained
monkey can drive one of those cars to a win.

Perhaps that’s what they need to do, replace the drivers with trained
monkeys. I tuned into The Speed Channel during their broadcast of the race
Sunday night, just in time to see some poor guy get broad sided by another one.
I watched as they apparently performed CPR on this guy while the commentators
kept talking and ignoring him. I turned off the channel, figuring that I’d just
seen a driver get killed, and that they’d not edited it out (or at least his
extraction from the car) when they broadcast it. I found out later that the
driver only suffered a concussion, but I know I saw them performing CPR, so I
suspect it was a little worse than a concussion.

Those cars are "fly by wire" anyway. Why to they still risk humans
in them? Take the input controls (e.g. steering, brakes, gear shift, etc) and
instead of having them on the car put them in a simulator. Then let the drivers
go at it, with remote controlled cars on those tracks. They’re one step removed
from that now, so why not go all the way?

I’m sure I’ll get mail from people telling me "I don’t get it."
"This is real competition, you just don’t understand." When was the
last competitive lead change in an F-ONE race? What’s the average margin of
victory? Fifteen or twenty seconds? That’s not competition. As I said above, all
the competition is between engineers, and the driver is secondary.

THE ADAM PETTY MEMORIAL 200: Technically, it was the Busch 200. But
they should have called the NHIS Busch race the Adam Petty Memorial 200.

WHAT SPLIT?: People say that the Indy 500 just isn’t the same since
the "split" a few years ago. I assume people are referring to the
formation of the Indy Racing League when they talk about the "split."
What they still don’t seem to get is that the IRL never split from anything. It
was formed to fill a void that CART wasn’t filling.

But judging from the first day of qualifying for the 2002 Indy 500, it
certainly doesn’t look like there’s a "split." There are almost as
many CART regulars as there are IRL drivers. If there was ever a year where the
original IRL/Indy 500 provisional rule should be put into effect, it’s this one.

And get this: there’s a "summit" meeting this weekend of all the
open wheel brass. Titled "Open-Wheel Summit", some of  the
bigwigs from the IRL, CART, F1, and USAC are getting together for this
conference next Tuesday and Wednesday. Looking at the schedule and noting some
of the presentation topics, another name for this summit would be "Beating
NASCAR: How We Can Make Fenderless Racing More Entertaining."

GREED: I keep hearing people make disparaging remarks about NASCAR,
SMI, ISC, and other entities involved in stock car racing. Why the remarks?
Apparently because these entities have the audacity to want to turn a profit.

Last time I checked, we were still living in a capitalist country, where the
people who put up the capital are entitled to make profits from that capital.
I’m sick and tired of hearing the word "greed" when it comes to these
people. If you don’t like the fact that these companies are doing what they’re
supposed to (i.e., making a profit), then stop consuming their products.

THE 25 CURSE CONTINUES: If you’re Joe Nemechek, you’ve got to have
mixed feelings about getting the 25 ride as the "interim" driver.
Jerry Nadeau is the latest victim of the Hendrick 25 team, which has proven to
be a black hole for drivers who drive the car. It’s obvious that that’s either
the third or fourth team in the Hendrick hierarchy, but I guess having a
second-class ride is better than no ride.

P. T. "HUMPY" BARNUM: I see Humpy has made his annual pick
for The Winston. You have to hand it to him, from a promoter’s standpoint,
getting the press to cover something as lame as him picking a winner for a race
says something about his PR skills. I’m sure the sponsor of his track got
mentioned a few dozen times too.

SHORT TRAC: Word this week is that the TRAC folks are interested in
running at the Fairgrounds Speedway here in Nashville. I’d like to see them run
there. But there are a few issues that may prevent them from doing it. The most
pressing issue is the one of the lease to the track. The current leaseholder
acquired the remaining year of Dover Downs’ lease at the beginning of this year.
That means that the Tennessee State Fair Board, which awards the lease, will be
taking up the question this fall of who to lease the track to. You’d think that
the folks who have the track now would have the upper hand over anyone else who
might want to run the track, and in the normal world that’d be true. But we’re
talking about the Fair Board here. These are the folks that ran NASCAR Winston
Cup racing off in 1984. So with the uncertainty of who the promoter will be next
year, I don’t see TRAC doing anything here.

RIDING WITH EARNHARDT: Thanks to the folks at Nashville Superspeedway,
I got a chance to do another ride along on the track last Tuesday. This was
presented by the folks at Busch who brought along their own two-seater Busch
Series car. Jeff Purvis and Kerry Earnhardt were the two Busch drivers who were
giving rides. Purvis was driving one of the Monster Racing cars while Earnhardt
was driving the Busch car.

I’d already been on a ride along
back in March, and at the time I estimated the top speed we hit (in my
second ride) at 135 to 140.  After my ride Tuesday, I think the estimate I
made then was high, probably by about 20 mph. In the Monster Racing cars, the
rev-limiter kicks in to such an extent that the driver doesn’t really have to
brake to get into the corners. You just let off the gas and it sticks. But
Tuesday, riding with Earnhardt in the Busch car, he had to brake… a lot. I
said back in March that the feeling of acceleration was more pronounced on the
.596 mile track at the Fairgrounds. Well, I’m here to tell you that I got the
same feeling Tuesday at the big track.

The feeling I’m talking about can best be described as this: as you enter the
turn, your instinct kicks in and your right foot starts looking for the non-existent
brake petal. Then you think "we’re going too fast; there’s no way we can
make this turn." That’s the feeling I got at the Fairgrounds, but it was
missing in March. There was no doubt that you were going to make the turn. But
Tuesday the adrenalin kicked in big time.

I’d like to thank the folks at Busch and Nashville Superspeedway for the
opportunity… it was simply amazing.

NEW KID ON THE BLOCK: We’ve got a new guy who’s started submitting
columns to RacinDeals.com. His name is Mike Harper, and his column is "The
Spin Out Zone." He has an interesting take on things, and I hope you
all enjoy his stuff. So that brings the total of regular contributors to three
in addition to my RacinDeals column. Plus we have a couple more people who are
occasional contributors.  Not too bad for a "get it off your
chest" site… Thanks go out to everyone who reads this stuff.