The Comeback, And Race Back To The Yellow
The theme of the Memorial Day sports weekend was The Comeback.
The weekend saw the Yankees come back in game two of their series with the
Red Sox, though erasing a six-run gap wasn’t enough to win the game in extras.
The Sox’s basketball cousins trailed by 19 in the fourth quarter of Game Three
of their series against the Nets, but the ghost with Johnny Most hung over the
Celtics and they won the game. Then the Celtics’ old rival Los Angeles trailed
by 20-plus in their game against Sacramento, and Robert Horry’s desperation
three in the final second won the game.
So it stood to reason that comebacks would be prominent in Memorial Day
weekend racing. In Charlotte’s Grand National 300 Greg Biffle came back from
outside the top five with four to go and actually squeezed into the lead in the
final half-mile, but Jeff Green beat him to the flag nonetheless; it was a
comeback of sorts for Green and for RCR, given their struggles in Winston Cup
this season.
Then came the World 600. Jimmie Johnson dominated, but threw it away on his
last stop under caution – ironically, what necessitated the caution was Jimmie
Johnson, for tagging Hut Stricklin. This put Mark Martin up front for good, and
for his first win since April 2000. The win was also Roush Racing’s fourth in
Cup this year, a balm for the recovering car owner.
The manufacturer scorecard shows Ford with four wins in twelve events, all by
Roush Racing; though Roush has won all of Ford’s events this year, the
manufacturer’s greater depth was on display again with a variety of Tauruses
running up front and leading. Dodge, which struggled throughout the Charlotte
week, managed only one top ten finisher at the 600 (Bill Elliott), and has three
wins to date; its own depth showed in that there were three other Intrepids in
the top fifteen.
Once again GM was on the outside looking in – Jimmie Johnson dominated for
Chevrolet, but that was it. Dale Junior led but fell out – also he and Ron
Hornaday have a bit of history, which helps explain the unpleasantries exchanged
between the two on the track; Robby Gordon ran strong but faded; Bobby Labonte
led briefly but wasn’t that good this night; Tony Stewart nearly got fifth from
Gordon. And when it was over GM’s machinery was well behind. Joe Gibbs’ Pontiacs
have three wins and realistically are the only Pontiacs up to running up front
consistently, while Chevy has two token wins and unless Herb Fishel’s new
designated champ starts winning race after race, Chevy will be lucky just to
have that many.
Racing wouldn’t be racing without controversy, and Indianapolis once again
had it.
This time it involved delineation of the running order when the yellow flies
– in this case, when it flew coming to the white flag – and it showed why NASCAR
handles such things differently. In open-wheel racing and most short track
competitions the running order reverts to the last completed lap when the yellow
flies, but Barry Green and Paul Tracy asserted that the IRL’ s yellow rule
involves freezing the field at the precise moment the yellow flies.
Irrespective of who is right, the Indy situation should have panned out the
way NASCAR handles such situations – by racing back to the caution. This remains
the best way to delineate the field under caution, since reversion to the last
completed lap often nullifies passes undertaken during that lap and thus
prevents controversies such as the one involving Paul Tracy and Helio
Castroneves.
The argument against racing back to the yellow is that it imposes needless
extra danger, but the history of the sport does not support such an argument.
The most often cited example against racing to the yellow was Darrell Waltrip’s
crash trying to make up a lap in the 1983 Daytona 500. More recently there was
Ernie Irvan’s crash into a stopped Greg Sacks trying to get a lap back at Texas
in 1997.
Such situations, though, are rare, and racing back to the yellow has
regularly proven a better method of delineating the running order under caution
than reverting to the last completed lap or freezing the field immediately upon
display of the caution.
The IRL would be well advised to consider a race to the yellow rule to
prevent future recurrence of this 2002 500 controversy.
Indy usually is thick with race-long subplots, and 2002 was no different. The
big subplot was the scintillating effort of Tomas Scheckter, who dominated
before slipping into loose rubber (it appeared he got a massive push behind a
slower car that contributed to getting into loose rubber) and hitting the wall.
Scheckter had been under fire for crashes with his team owner at Homestead and
with another car at Nazareth, but here he didn’t put a foot wrong until his
crash, and a Scheckter win would have been a coup for the IRL as well as for
Eddie Cheever’s team.
Cheever looked stout enough to steal the event himself at the end, but tried
a move, got pinched, and had to back off and that was it. The 500 was
nonetheless an important step forward for Nissan’s Infiniti engine, which has
always had great power but which has suffered in reliability, notably at
Fontana.
The IRL got two new participants during the weekend. First the Twin Ring
Motegi track will run an IRL race in 2003 – a major point of departure for the
US-oriented series. Perhaps not coincidentally, Honda will enter the league as
an engine supplier in 2003, and among its potential teams is Ganassi Racing,
with whom it won four CART titles before Ganassi’s CART team switched to Toyota.
One can wonder how many more tracks will join the IRL in coming years. This
fan would certainly like to see the league return to NHIS and also run at
Pocono.
So the 86th 500 is history and next on the IRL docket is its showcase, Texas
Motor Speedway. Boomtown Casino is the event sponsor, and the IRL at Texas has
become must-see racing, with four of the track’s last seven IRL events being
all-time greats. Scott Sharp has won the last two Spring 500s at Texas but the
showdown this season has been Penske vs. Panther, with Cheever and Menard
jockeying for spoiler status. The way the draft has traditionally worked at
Texas and the way the IRL raced at Fontana, Texas should be another
unforgettable race-long fight for the win.