A Voice For The Fans ~ Word Games In NASCAR 9/26/2014 |
I bid
you welcome gentle readers, and of course, a warm welcome as well to our
assigned reader of all things NASCAR, be you a human or a computer. In either
case, we do hope your stay with us is a pleasant one, but bear with us, as
today's topics are varied and may tend to wander a bit.
Is
NASCAR playing word games with the fans? Do we have full fields, or do we have
field fillers? Gentle readers, has it struck you as it has me that it's more
than a tad weird when exactly 43 cars sign up for each week's race, regardless
if the race is east coast, west coast, north or south? Geographic location
alone has always affected how many cars show up to race on Sunday... but no
more. On rare occasion, we may see 44, and one poor soul goes home alone, which
I always find rather sad. If it's just one, let him race; he'll probably park
anyway.
Ah, but
that's another anomaly, isn't it? The start and park brigade suddenly decided
at the start of the 2014 season that it was time to race. Seldom this year do
we see what had become the norm in past years, with a six-pack or more of
refugees from the junkyard returning to the garage shortly after the green flag
told them the race was starting.
What
happened to make everyone racing at the Cup level decide
they would start and park no more? Well, the rose-colored glasses gang, whose
job it is to paint glowing pictures of the health of the sport on my TV each
week would have us believe that they all decided they loved to go racing so
much that parking was taken out of the equation. Nope! I'm not buying that for
a minute.
Mr.
Helton... Mike, the fans have made it very well known, in numbers too hard to
ignore, that start and park is not to their liking, as it is seen, and rightly
so, to cheapen the sport of auto racing. No one listened, because after all,
they, we, are only fans. However, last year something happened that did make it
matter. Joe Nemechek put his $7-figure home on Lake Norman up for sale, and
pictures of it, along with asking price, went "viral" as they say in
social media.
It is
not the intent to single Joe out, but it was his home... it was and is
beautiful, and far more than most anyone reading here today could ever hope to
afford. Fans sat back, took a deep breath and formed one collective thought,
"Damn, starting and parking pays much better than I thought!" The
days are gone when an honest "back marker" paid out more than he took
in, just to race for a day. Finishing dead last on a regular basis provides a
living I could only dream of making at any point in my life. In fact, finishing
dead last just once pays far more than my present fixed income pays annually. I
have a valid and clean driver's license. Would anyone like to hire me for a
race or two? I'm very good at parking also.
It
leaves your scribe a bit befuddled when looking at the number of teams and
drivers that have participated in Cup races for the 28 points races we've now
completed. A peek at the owners list for this year shows 54 different car
numbers have attempted to enter at least one race in 2014, but looking at the
drivers list, that number grows to 74. Seems to be a whole lot of Shake 'n Bake
going on, and it's not happening on the viable teams... the teams that might
reasonably be in the hunt for a win at a given track.
One team
in particular seems to excel at driver changes; that is
the one known as BK Racing, owned in whole or part by Ron Devine, Wayne Press
and Anthony Marlowe. In a time when Roush/Fenway Racing fields only three cars,
Richard Childress Racing, only three, Team Penske and RPM only two and Joe
Gibbs Racing about to make the move from three to four next season,
BK Racing boldly fields four teams... all that's allowed by NASCAR rules. It
would be a long list to catalogue their drivers just for this one season, but
the car numbers running under this banner are #23, #26, #83 and #93. The latest addition to the fold is Clay
Rogers, who started at New Hampshire, completing a total of 45 laps for a return
on the day of $54,155. This is the way the cars of BK Racing finished at
Loudon, and the check each team received for the effort:
#23 Alex
Bowman 28th $93,437
#83
Travis Kvapil 32nd $79,790
#26 Cole
Whitt 38th
$73,655
#93 Clay
Rogers 43rd
$54,155
If
you're counting, that's a total on the day of $301,037 for presenting a best
finish of 28th. Yes, I can hear you; I know it costs money to go racing, but
allow me to share a little secret with you. It doesn't cost nearly as much to
put forth a last place effort as it does to strive for a first place finish.
Those two figures are so far apart it takes a satellite hook-up for them to
talk with one another. This is merely another example of NASCAR in action;
they've told the teams that start and park is now out of fashion, and they are
asked to run as many laps as the clunker of the day will endure. Is it any
wonder that most of the back marker teams are also multi-car teams?
Look
closely at the points lists... both drivers and owners. You'll see that only 41
teams have even "attempted" to run every race, and a few of those
have been turned away on one of those unlucky days when that extra car showed
up and someone went home. Looking still closer, you'll see that only about 23 teams
have what I'd call a viable chance to win. There might be a couple more, but
"Iffy" would have to be part of their definition. Does anyone reading
here really expect that Front Row or Germain Racing
will win a race this year? Next year? Ever? No, that's
not being unkind; that' s being realistic.
That's
enough to worry about this week regarding who's on the track, why and when. As
all but the cave dwellers know, NASCAR dropped its new "Rules
Package" on us yesterday, and a lot of it can be filed under "Already
expected" or "Knew this was coming." Your scribe is already
fielding questions on the package, and I find it somewhat elating that you
think I'm informed enough to answer them. We'll probably be dissecting the new
rules for closer examination, but one terminology out there needs immediate
explanation... tapered spacers. Guys and gals, whenever NASCAR adopts a new
buzz word, they have a reason... aka a hidden agenda in doing so. This is a
picture of a tapered spacer, as shown to us last month by Bob Dilner of NASCARONFOX through his Twitter account.
Does
that look at all familiar to anyone? It's a restrictor plate folks, plain and
simple. You can call a pig a rose, but it's still going to look like a pig, and
yes, it's still going to smell like a pig as well. This is the worst case
scenario, come to be. They said they wanted to slow the cars down. Fine by this
scribe; at most tracks the cars have outgrown what the track was built to hold
anyway. Taking 25-30 mph off the speeds would be an instant improvement in the
actual racing... but do it with a smaller engine, perhaps a small 6-cylinder or
ever 4-cylinder crate engine. The cars keep getting lighter, little by little,
and it doesn't take the massive 8-cylinder, 9000-10,000 RPM power plants to
push 'em around a track.
That
would make them slower in an honest fashion. What this "tapered
spacer" will do is turn many of the tracks we've enjoyed this year...
Michigan, Atlanta, Texas and several more... even Darlington for goodness
sake... into smaller versions of Daytona/Talladega. NASCAR... Mike, Steve,
Brian... someone, listen please! Hear what fans you have left! Since the game
playing of the early 1970s, we've only once run restrictor plates on a track
less in size than Daytona. That was at New Hampshire in the
fall of 2000,
after the deaths there earlier that year of Adam Petty and Kenny Irwin. The
results were, to say the least, pathetic. Jeff Burton sat on the pole and led
every single lap on his way to the checkers. Why? No one could pass the leader.
Absolutely no one.
Is this
what you want to return to gentlemen? If so, you are alone in your thinking.
Look around at the empty seats and sagging TV ratings everywhere we go. We
thought the idea was to fix that, put the racing back on the fast track, as it
were, and bring back the old fans while embracing the new ones. Pardon my
terminology here, but screwing up the races with plates at every track is the
single worst idea anyone in racing ever had. Don't believe me? Be honest with
your fans and tell 'em what you're proposing. I promise you; no one is going to
like it and no one will want to watch it.
Gentle
readers, we'll be talking more about things in that rule package in days to
come. I need some time to discover exactly what terms such as "automated
pit road" and "Driver-controlled track bar" actually mean. It's
obvious that we cannot trust the sanctioning body to divulge the truth, so bear
with me and we'll find it together.
Now it's
time for our Classic Country Closeout, and while Brian and the gang are
tinkering with the rules and confusing us with parts that have more than one
name, Country Music has been known to do something similar, but with melodies,
not words. Listen carefully as I present to you the perfect example of reuse.
First up is a wonderful Hank Thompson tune... one from the early days... called
"Wild Side of Life."
And of
course, the answer to this song came from the one and only Kitty Wells, with
her smash hit of "It Wasn't God Who
Made Honky-Tonk Angels."
Those
two are a given, as one was written as the answer to the other, but wait;
there's more. Check out this great "live" version of the King of
Country Music, Roy Acuff, singing his 1936 rendition
of "The Great Speckled Bird."
And then
of course, there's the one that started it all. Here are A.P., Mother Maybelle and Sarah Carter, the original Carter Family,
singing their 1929 rendition of "I'm
Thinking Tonight of My Blue Eyes."
Oops! I
thought I was done, but this was on the same page as the Carter Family, and I
just had to grab it and share it. This is June Carter-Cash singing a bit of
explanation of what you've just heard here. She cites the date as 1928. I'm not
going to argue with June, as neither one of us were there. Just give a listen
to this lovely lady telling us about all four of the songs...
Be well gentle
readers, and remember to keep smiling. It looks so good on you!
~ PattyKay