2000: SO WHAT WENT WRONG?

The cycle is always amazing – one season
will be a mixed bag, another season will be better, and then it seems like the
sport gets a year no one wants to end.

Incredible as it may seem, 2000 managed to
have all of that, even though overall it was a season more worth forgetting than
remembering.

Controversy usually starts before the
first practice session for the Daytona 500, but this time the controversy took
on a new and disturbing angle. It began following the stunning revelation that
NASCAR President Bill France Jr. was ill with cancer. Though France would return
by season’s end, his absence was felt almost right away.

It began when NASCAR made clear an intent
that media outlets would have to have their stories fall under NASCAR
jurisdiction and thus require heavy licensing fees, this under Article Four of
NASCAR’s hard card credential policy. This surprising power grab by NASCAR
angered the media and this anger effectively killed the idea.

But it was just the beginning – for the
2000 Daytona 500 NASCAR had dredged up a rule tried for 1997 Speedweeks,
mandating spec shocks and springs designed to keep the cars from squatting down
onto the track surface. The 1997 version robbed the cars of front down force in
dirty air, and in 2000 it happened again – the result was the worst Speedweeks
in decades, with a combined 17 lead changes between the Grand National 300 and
the Daytona 500.

Indeed, the whole of Speedweeks could have
been considered Speedweeks from Hell. One race promised great racing action –
the inaugural Craftsman Truck 250 – and it didn’t just meet the hype, it crushed
the hype as the lead changed hands 32 times and the finish was a fantastic
throwback to the drafting days of NASCAR’s 1971-84 competitive apex. But it was
all forgotten in a horrendous melee that left Geoff Bodine all but dead – Bodine
survived and raced again, but he said he saw his late father Eli and that Eli
told him, "It’s not time, Geoff," – ten Trucks wiped out, and seven
spectators injured after the tri-oval fencing was torn out.

The poor quality of racing at Daytona
carried into the next few races, and the epithet boring was used to the point
where NASCAR hauled Dale Jarrett before the press to gripe about how "we’re
risking out lives out there" and the press should emphasize that they’re
racing their guts out and to not call the racing boring. When seemingly everyone
hooted at such a pathetic attempt to spin the truth, Jarrett had to back down.
NASCAR then got a reprieve in a spirited Atlanta 500 that ended in a Dale
Earnhardt-Bobby Labonte photo finish.

The reality, though, was that the racing
was boring. Moreover, it had been generally boring for a number of years. The
reasons were clear enough – the cars were designed for speed, not for racing in
dirty air; by not being designed for dirty air the cars lacked down force,
particularly on the nose, and thus could not turn and thus could not race; the
cars also lacked a draft to work with almost everywhere they raced – this
combination of drafting and dirty-air down force was shown by the Modifieds at
New Hampshire in a race that bettered most others by a wide margin.

There was also the never-ending politicking
by manufacturers for rules concessions in the name of parity. NASCAR then put
out strong feelers that it would require a universal template for the cars, thus
making them more clones than independent racecars. Detroit said no, fans said
no, no rational justification could be made for a common template, and the idea
(for now) appears dead.

After another dismal outing at Daytona,
the Winston Cup cars ran a test in August where they were fitted with
aerodynamic disrupters; such disrupters had been tested in April 1997 and the
results of both 1997 and 2000 tests were the same – the cars drafted and raced
like they should. These disrupters were mandated for the Winston 500 at
Talladega, and the result was astonishing – Talladega had seen awesome racing in
both of its NASCAR weekends in 1999, but the 2000 Winston 500 saw more leaders –
22 – and more lead changes – 49 – than seen in nearly fifteen years.

Ironically, the week before had seen
NASCAR first break through into a return to its competitive glory. Goodyear Tire
& Rubber had had a NASCAR monopoly for some seven years; the fundamental
aspect of that monopoly had been developing for some time and it exploded full
force in 2000 with tires so inconsistent that no one could make them run.
Goodyear’s incompetence reached its nadir at Charlotte in October when a
shortage developed; by sheer dumb idiot luck the October National 500 turned out
to be one of the best races in over ten years as the lead changed hands 46 times
– a number not approached since 1991.

Despite Goodyear’s good fortune at
Charlotte, overall the tire giant had failed in its job and confidence in its
tires was now at an all-time low. Though there is no immediate sign that
Firestone or Hoosier Tire preparing for a return to NASCAR, there has been
testing of NASCAR tires by Firestone. NASCAR also announced it would revert to
one tire company for its Modified Tour, but retracted the change when it became
clear the Mod Tour’s tire war between Hoosier and Goodyear was too important to
end.

Overshadowing all of this was safety. When
Adam Petty and Kenny Irwin were killed at NHIS, driver demands that NASCAR do
something reached a fever pitch, and when Jeremy Mayfield punched the wall at
Indianapolis and had to sit out two races it got higher. When Bobby Labonte
punched the wall at Darlington it reached a level where talk of a driver’s
boycott at Loudon began. NASCAR responded with a soft-wall test at Loudon using
the same Styrofoam material credited with saving Jimmy Johnson’s life at Watkins
Glen. The test, however, was a spectacular failure, and NASCAR mandated
restrictor plates to slow top-end speeds for the Loudon track, plates identical
to those used on NASCAR’s Modifieds at the track since its 1990 debut. Many
howled in protest, and blamed the plates for the fact that Jeff Burton led the
race wire to wire, though realistically such blame was groundless – it boiled
down to aerodynamics again.

The issue of safety even led to one of the
more scandalous farces of the year – a snap drivers meeting at Talladega where
some drivers advocated "out of bounds" lanes on racetracks and there
were several nauseating speeches, notably one by Ricky Craven, about how drivers
supposedly don’t care if they live or die even though if they die they’ll never
see their families again, which only begs the question of whether these men are
racecar drivers or chickens.

There was also an acidic comment by
motorsports journalist Ed Hinton about how NASCAR’s safety nightmare became real
"in a year when F1, CART, and IRL combined suffered no driver fatalities at
all." Lost there is that it is no victory for those racing bodies, in light
of the bloody 1996-9 period when it seemed open wheel racing was literally
killing itself off.

Then there is the Latford Point System, a
perennial controversy since 1982 and now even more controversial as all three of
NASCAR’s big-league touring series saw their titles clinched before the final
race and where there were a combined six or seven different point leaders all
year. The weakness of the Latford System is such that NASCAR had reportedly
begun exploring changes to the points as 2000 progressed.

Yet another controversy erupted when new
tracks at Kansas City and Chicago were awarded Winston Cup dates in 2001.
"That will mean…the longest and most grueling schedule in all of
professional sports. Privately, the teams groaned. Their personnel, especially
crewmen, were overextended to the breaking point," claimed Ed Hinton –
except as David Smith of RCR pointed out, it was all a matter of intelligent use
of personnel; teams with 18 members total would test every single week during
the 1980s without the personnel problems of today.

So the sport approaches 2001, and its
newest player, Dodge Motorsports, is working like crazy through some serious
teething problems to get ready for Speedweeks 2001. NASCAR will mandate the same
aero package used in the Winston 500, which should make for a bang-up ten days
of racing come next February. The other controversies of 2000 will also require
continued addressing.