June 2, 2007
By Jim Fitzgerald

What could have been…?

Clint Bowyer could have won at Bristol. Kyle Petty could have taken the checkered flag first at Phoenix. Mike Bliss could have come in first place at Darlington. Paul Menard could have won the race at Richmond and Kenny Wallace could have pulled off the upset of the decade by winning at Martinsville.

It could have happened.

As the schedule takes us to Dover, Delaware for this week’s NASCAR Nextel Cup Series event, the Autism Speaks 400, presented by VISA, we will see the return of the Next Generation car. (It is no longer the Car of Tomorrow. Tomorrow is today.) The return of the new car means many things, one of which is the certain continued dominance of Hendrick Motorsports. The domination is quite deserved, don’t get me wrong. The new car was coming, and those who worked on it the most, and thought about t the most were the ones who would come out on top. It doesn’t take a genius to see this.

What could have -- maybe what should have happened was NASCAR deciding they wanted to build a new car, and go about it in a different way. Maybe instead of letting the teams do the testing, NASCAR builds the prototype, several of them. They hire the IROC test drivers. They do the testing in a closed session without any of the teams present. Once they have their product, they take it to the teams.

“This is our product. On March 25th, 2007, in Bristol, Tennessee, we’re going to race it. You have from now until then to build it, have it pass inspection, qualify it and start it in the race at Bristol. You may not test it before then. Here are the specifications. Good luck to all of you.”

No mass testing. No mass practices. Fifty teams build a car, show up, and do what they can with what they have. It almost has a root-of-the-sport type of feel to it. Build it, bring it, race it. The results could have been mind blowing. The possibility of an underfinanced team, heaven forbid a single-car owner, touching on just the right combination, the right set up, the perfect recipe of luck, parts and adjustments, however slim, might have just happened.

NASCAR, the Ultimate Money Making Machine, (That’s UMMM, if you didn’t catch it) would have gotten what they were, and are, looking for. They would have a new marketable driver, as a rookie or a veteran finds their way to a win. They would have sales through the roof, as this driver’s souvenir trailer would have been emptied before it left the track for the trip home. They would be able to toot the “any given Sunday” horn as loud as they wanted to toot it, because an under funded team and basically an unknown driver would have walked away from the track after striking gold with a win.

Equality. Isn’t that what NASCAR states is the goal? Don’t they want us to believe that there is a possibility that any one of forty-three drivers can win at a track other than Talladega? Given, we may not have had the storybook ending of the winless and under-funded driver and team. NASCAR and the fans may not have won that. However, for the shortest of times, for the briefest of moments, until the multi-car teams tested the hell out of the cars, they would have certainly had that equality. They could have changed someone’s life.