Sacramento, California
–
If you’ve been keeping up with what NASCAR calls its Sprint Cup Series
“playoffs,” you’ve likely lost touch with racing.
Because what
it is going on out there right now is not what I’d call racing, a genuine shame
since I’ve truly enjoyed my sometimes intimate involvement with NASCAR over the
decades.
But what we
have at the racetrack now is something akin to Big Time Rasslin’ or Roller
Derby.
Whose fault is
it? One word: NASCAR.
The racing
body built this house of horrors brick by brick, and even though the ominous
writing was clearly written on the wall a year ago, the series now finds itself
on the extreme end of a sham – far removed from “have at it, boys” and now
firmly entrenched in the “omigod, what are they doing out there?” zone.
Two weeks ago
at Talladega Superspeedway, the “greatest drivers in America” couldn’t execute 100 feet
of green-flag racing on two race-ending restart attempts. Coincidentally, defending series champ Kevin
Harvick, helped trigger the second incident.
He was in a badly lame car and just happened to catch the rear bumper of
a car blazing past him on the right. The
ensuing wreck secured Harvick’s advancement to the next round.
No evidence of
foul-play, NASCAR said…Wink, wink.
Then last
weekend, in the endless 500-lap run around Martinsville Speedway’s oval, Matt
Kenseth made good on his repeated threats to stick it to Joey Logano, who has
dominated this year’s playoffs and was dominating Sunday’s race when he was intentionally wrecked by Kenseth.
By the way,
Kenseth was delivering “payback” for a recent racing incident that was nothing
more than hard, competitive racing between him and Logano … the kind of
bumper-to-bumper battle that fans see a thousand times in a typical
NASCAR season.
NASCAR has created
the current situation with short playoff rounds in which a single bad race can
eliminate a competitive driver … Jimmie Johnson this year, for example. So, it didn’t take long for drivers to figure
out that competitors could be eliminated from the series trophy chase by wrecking
them. Or perhaps you can wreck
another driver who is in line to win the series championship simply because
you’re mad at him.
Is any of this
a surprise? No.
I wrote the following in a blog
post on Nov. 17, 2014, just after the conclusion of last year’s Sprint Cup
Series season: Keep this format in place, and I can
pretty much guarantee that the inevitable will occur: A driver or his teammate
will deliberately wreck a competitor to eliminate him from the playoffs. It
will happen. Count on it.
And so, here
we are.
And while I
appreciate the storybook ending folks want as Jeff Gordon prepares to wind up
his sensational career, I have serious trouble with him inheriting what would
be a fifth NASCAR championship with the aid of strategic wrecking. I would
rather have the drivers decide it with their skills, no matter what form of
racing we’re talking about.
For example,
at the 2014 Indianapolis
500, I would have been pleased to see Helio Castroneves win his record-tying
fourth Indy classic. Instead, he lost by
an eye-blink in a spectacular late-race duel with winner Ryan Hunter-Reay.
But suppose a
Castroneves teammate (or friend) had decided the outcome that day by, say, deliberately
crashing out Hunter-Reay during a previous caution period, giving Helio the
win. For my money, that would have been
the most undeserved Indy 500 victory of all-time.
What’s next
for NASCAR? Racing teams deliberately
crashing out the cars of other racing teams, based on pre-race plans? Can you imagine the screaming if the
equivalent happened in pro football? A
defensive end perhaps crushing the knee of the opposition’s star quarterback
two seconds after the whistle blows on a given play, all in the name of “doing
anything it takes to win the championship?”
Sad. Wake me up if you ever go back to racing.
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