Opinions on Racing
The RacinDeals archive: race reports, commentary, and the conversations that followed.
If the 1988 season had been a disaster, 1989 offered hope of redemption for both Richard and Kyle. For Kyle, the mid-summer 1988 meeting had led to employment by a new team owner in Winston Cup – Felix Sabates. A refugee from Castro’s Cuba, Sabates was a self-made billionaire who’d first dabbled in racing in […]
Okay, I’ve got to know. When did race car drivers become so damned boring? Sorry, I didn’t mean to start out on a profane rant like that. It’s just that lately, week after week at tracks around the country, the American race-going public is forced to sit through an endless stream of bland, inane, corporately […]
Sixteen-year-old Beech sophomore Chase Montgomery is on a mission. Beginning his racing career in go-carts, Chase has grown into the Late Model Stock car division at Nashville Speedway USA and plans to continue his dream to the Winston Cup level. "It all started when dad (Ray Montgomery) bought me a go-cart," he said. "It was […]
AOL TV: Somewhere amongst all those commercials on TBS, they managed to show a few laps of the race at Pocono. It’ll be interesting to see the score TBS gets on Perfect Paranoia. My initial impressions are that they ran a LOT of commercials. I usually channel surf when commercials come on, and usually the […]
Unknown to most observers, Richard Petty by 1983 had been inquiring with other car owners about becoming their driver. With Petty Enterprises overtaxed by running two teams, Richard approached M.C. Anderson about replacing Cale Yarborough, who had announced he was going to Harry Ranier’s team for 1983. Anderson, however, wanted no part of Winston Cup […]
Kenny Irwin was dead less than a week before the vultures began to circle. Irwin, a former NASCAR Craftsman Truck and Winston Cup Series Rookie of the Year, was killed in a horrific July 7 practice crash at New Hampshire International Speedway, just yards from the spot where 19-year old Adam Petty lost his life […]
Perhaps no big-name driver had less going for him entering 1979 than Richard Petty. He’d come off a frustrating, winless 1978 season, and the Petty Enterprises team was only eleven races into running the kind of General Motors racecars and engines that most of their competition had spent years winning with. Making it worse, Petty’s […]
DO SOMETHING, EVEN IF IT’S WRONG: I’ve seen a lot of commentary in the last few days regarding the tragic death of Kenny Irwin at New Hampshire International Speedway. People are outraged by everything from the seeming lack of compassion from NASCAR to the track owner’s statement of "the track is fine." The common theme […]
I spent some of my spare time this morning writing about aero matching and how racing is supposed to be entertainment for us fans. Then I got a call telling me about Kenny Irwin’s death at New Hampshire. Suddenly, "entertainment" didn’t really matter anymore. In all the talk about parity this, and aero matching that, […]
As I sat contemplating whether I should or should not write this open letter of condolence to the mother of Kenny Irwin, I decided to risk intruding on such sacred ground as a mother’s grief for outliving her child, to tell her how much we’ll all miss her son. I am a sports writer, relatively […]