May 25, 2007
By Jim Fitzgerald

With all due respect to Ray Bradbury, I’m going to use the basis of one of his stories and add my own personal twist. If you’re familiar with the 2004 Ashton Kutcher movie of the same title as this column you read, or Bradbury’s short story, “A Sound of Thunder”, which inspired it, you know the Butterfly Effect is some small change in the natural course of history that eventually has a tremendous effect on the world as we know it, personally or globally. In “A Sound Of Thunder” the character travels back in time for some dinosaur hunting, only to accidentally step on a butterfly. The premature death of said butterfly begins a chain reaction of events which changes the world significantly from “what was” to “what is.”

“What is,” in our world of Nextel Cup is the following: Dale Jarrett has missed his first race and second after making four hundred and twenty-four consecutive. Michael Waltrip has made only one race all year, and actually has a negative point total. The fledgling careers of David Reutimann and A.J. Allmendinger may be over before they even get started. Dave Blaney appears to be carrying the Toyota torch, rolling along ???th in points.

“What was” was those mentioned above in much better shape than they are currently. I’ll lay it down for you now…I don’t think Toyota was ready to come into Nextel Cup. A flash of strength here or there, with a top ten finish as the best they’ve done, I can’t see where those statistics as a positive outweigh the negative facts of only making thirty-six of a possible seventy starts. Jarrett has been the highest finishing Toyota in four of the nine races he’s made, but his highest finish in those four races was twenty-second. Growing pains aside, those numbers have to be a disappointment for the Toyota brass, after signing big names like Waltrip, Jeremy Mayfield and Jarrett, and nabbing drivers ready to breakout such as Allmendinger and Reutimann.

Is it sandbagging? I doubt it, but how much should Toyota have put into the Old Generation car when they know the Next Generation car is just that, the car of the future. Can they get out of the funk later this season as they grow and learn, or come strong from the box in Daytona 2008? Only time will tell, but history speaks volumes, and ten races in, the results aren’t there.

So…what was the butterfly? Toyota in the Truck Series? Dodge breaking back into the sport a few years ago? Buick, Oldsmobile and Pontiac leaving the sport? Brian France? Bill France, Jr? Big Bill France? The Beach Course at Daytona?

Maybe none of the above. Or a combination of it all. To me, the butterfly was the first day that someone decided they could make a buck racing cars…but that is the foundation of the sport, if you believe the folk lore of moonshiners and back roads racing which eventually evolved into what we today call Nextel Cup racing. So, maybe there was no butterfly, or maybe this is the butterfly, evolving from caterpillar to chrysalis, and this was the natural progression of things that were, things that are and things yet to come.

Whatever it is, be ready for the next cocoon…