As they speed through the finish, the flags go down.
The fans get up and they get out of town.
(Lyrics from ‘The Distance’ by the musical group Cake)
Indeed, after the fans at the track watched the Shelby 427 this last Sunday, they definitely got up, and got out of town. However, given what occurred during the race, I’m thinking that both the fans at the track AND the fans watching from home both had a collective ”What the **** just happened?” moment after the checkered flag sailed, with Kyle ‘Bump And Run’ Busch taking home the trophy. Either that, or it was a collective sigh of relief, the sort of sigh you would expect from the survivors of a horrific disaster, the kind that you might associate with having just seen the Hindenburg explode, or the making of the 1985 music video ‘We Are The World’. In short, I’m not even sure you could have called it a race.
Uh, what’s going on with top-tier teams? For two weeks in a row, Mark Martin has mechanical problems; Jeff Gordon seems to have forgotten how to pull onto pit road (which I don’t think was entirely his fault); Jimmie Johnson just couldn’t handle yet another race without running into something, and since the race was a dud, anyway, he decided to try to end his race early by lightly stuffing his car into the wall, hopefully taking himself out of the race, but alas, Chad Knaus forced him to go back out there; and according to Roush, Goodyear somehow managed to put a tire together that actually WORKS on a COSHAT (Car Of Some Hideous Alternate Tomorrow).
Now that you mention it, I think that Roush and Hendrick were the only teams that really had any problems. However, given that these guys are usually really well-polished, is it entirely possible that the COSHAT has indeed finally introduced ‘parity’ into the sport of NASCAR, in that now NOBODY can consistently tune these cars?
I honestly don’t know what was going on in Las Vegas on Sunday, and at this juncture, I’m getting to the point where I am really not beginning to care anymore. For all intents and purposes, the Shelby 427 looked more like a ‘B’-grade automotive film version of William Shakespeare’s ‘Comedy of Errors’, instead of being an example of (supposedly) the best racing series in existence. And of course, who suffers the worst?
The writers who cover NASCAR.
Oh yeah, and the fans, too.
I know it appears that I have nothing nice to say about NASCAR in general, and to be honest with you, I don’t.
Nah, just kidding.
Seriously, I would really enjoy having something positive to write about for once. So would a lot of other NASCAR-based writers out there. However, the ‘positives’ are greatly outnumbered by the disaster stories, and of course, the ‘train-wreck’ material always gets more airtime.
There were some positive stories….but it was buried, in more ways than one, due to the miscues and mistakes of the top two mega-teams. Since most of the super-team contingent were out with blown-up engines, discovering how easy it is to overshoot pit road, or rediscovering just how much fun it is to hit the wall, this allowed some others to get some coverage for once, drivers and teams who would normally be absolutely FORGOTTEN during a regular race, had the rest of the Roush and Hendrick teams been contenders.
Bobby Labonte? Before the last pit stop (or two, I lost count), he was in 2nd place. This prompted me to come up with my own set of parody ‘questions’ for Ask.com (“How do you hide ‘evidence’?”)…
Kyle Busch? Not a whole lot of mentions since the 2008 season…and he ended up having the car to beat.
Hey, look, Toyota came to race this time!
But I can’t focus on that right now. The fans are being short-changed (especially the paying ones) due to crappy racing, with the fiddlers playing while NASCAR burns. Three races in a row that have been either incredibly dull, or incredulous in how many cars were wrecked or blew up.
How much longer is this going to continue? Or is this what we are to expect from the rest of the season, 34 more ‘B’-grade performances?
See you next week.
You can contact Larry Van Zandt at Insider Racing News.
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The thoughts and ideas expressed by this writer or any other writer on Insider Racing News, are not necessarily the views of the staff and/or management of IRN.
