Get Your Shit Together Mike!

With another NASCAR weekend quickly approaching I'd like to make a couple of comments. First, I hope that Tony Stewart is okay. He's going to race, but he took a good whack last week at Darlington due to Buckshit Jones' incompetence. NASCAR is having trouble filling 43 car fields these days so I reckon dopes like Jones are necessary. Maybe the fact that NASCAR is having trouble filling fields should signal that they merely led the way to the boom that is auto racing in the US today. Don't get me wrong, I doubt if CART, IRL, NHRA or World of Outlaws is going to take over any time soon, but the days of NASCAR being the only game in town are quickly running out.

Let's be objective though. IRL etc. haven't exactly brought themselves up to the front. They still lack visibility, promotion and suffer from a lack of new American talent. CART is actually stepping backwards in all of this as they focus on the foreign drivers and circuits in their pursuit to be “F1”. Rather, NASCAR is suffering from its inane rules, which seem to change from minute to minute, its never ending schedule and the overall decline of its “marquee” drivers who are all getting old quickly and are not improving with age (re: Mark Martin, Terry Labonte, Rusty Wallace, Jeff Burton, Ken Schrader, need I go on?). Hell the only one doing any good at an advanced age is Sterling Marlin.

Sure, there are still the young up and comers, and young already theres: Jeff “I'm gay so my Miss Winston wife is divorcing me" Gordon, Junior, Stewart, Kevin Harvick, Matt Kenseth, Jimmy Johnson, Kurt Busch and Ryan “Hello” Newman among others. But let's face it, only Gordon, Stewart and Junior evoke any passion from the masses and Stewart and Gordon seem to be strictly love or hate and Junior, while a very talented driver, is popular because he is Dale Earnhardt's son. But since they unloaded the cars at Daytona in February NASCAR has seen fit to change spoiler heights for some makes, they've red flagged one race and then in a very similar circumstance let a race finish under a yellow the next week. Mike Helton who is allegedly in charge of this circus had his usual mealy-mouthed answer as to why this happened. I don't like to criticize Helton since he was pretty much given a baptism of fire when his first race as the caretaker of the series saw the death of its biggest star, but time has come to quit making up the rules as you go in the name of competition. It's not working Mike!

But NASCAR may have even outdone themselves with their new “one engine” rule. Oh sure, on paper, in a perfect world and if everyone was honest (this is not a slam on Sterling's team) then the teams would bring one engine and would not be allowed to have any more on the premises. When the rule is not written that way, then you have what happened last Sunday at Darlington. Sterling Marlin started in the back of the pack because the team changed engines on Saturday. Well hell, you don't have to be a rocket scientist to realize that starting position means next to nothing (other than the glory of being the pole sitter) for a NASCAR race. These guys are even capable of winning from the back when they go to the tracks with pit lanes on both sides of the track. So how much of a penalty is it really to force a team to the back after qualifying while they still get a fresh new engine? None as evidenced last week.

NASCAR is trying to cut costs to the teams and make the sport more attractive to potential owners and sponsors. But they seem to fall short due to lack of vision or knowledge. It all makes me wonder how many teams will pull the ol' engine switch when the show rolls into Talladega. Let's see, you've been punishing your engine the previous days in practice and qualifying. Hmmm, I think I'll put a new engine in the car, because I know I can come from the back to win the race over 500 miles. Nice job NASCAR! There is an unwritten rule of emailing that one should wait 10 minutes after writing an email before sending it. A buffer zone, if you will, to ensure you really want to send the mail. Maybe NASCAR should put a 1-year buffer on new rules so they can examine the ramifications from all angles and make sure they get it right. Otherwise they will become a joke, and after all the hard work by all of those involved in making NASCAR what it is, that would be a shame.