A Curious Thing Happened At Richmond The Other Night . What happened, exactly?

Well, from what I saw from my cushy chair in the living room .a race broke out. Yeah, I was shocked, too. Hello again, gang. I apologize for my disappearance these last two weeks, but I finally found a full-time job to pay the bills .and worked almost two weeks straight to get up to speed as quickly as possible. Considering the amount of qualified people in my area that also could have used that job, especially in the disastrous economy we re having right now . I m extremely thankful to be employed, especially since I ve been out of work since August 2008. To those of you out there who aren t employed, but are desperately trying to become so .it can happen. However, as a bit of advice .next time an election rolls around, how about you vote for someone who isn t doing their very best to destroy the economy? Economy first, and then we can sort out whatever societal issues that plague us .after everyone is employed again. The problem here is that the societal issues .whether they are real, or imagined . were put ahead of making sure that the economy is stable enough to allow business to continue unfettered. We have some housecleaning to do politically .just remember who got us here, and better yet, who s keeping us here, come 2010, and when it s time to elect new congress and senate members. Anyway, let s get back to the racing. I think something interesting is going on in NASCAR. What is it? Well, it s a bit difficult to explain in one or two sentences .but I ll try to give it a shot. First of all, the money available to NASCAR s teams is slowly drying up .and the teams, along with their drivers .they smell blood. Five or so years of sub-par racing has just given way to drivers who are actually trying to score a win. The pile of crap COSHAT (Car of some hideous alternate tomorrow) be damned, the drivers are dragging this polished turd of a car, kicking and screaming, around the track, whether or not the COSHAT wants to go along. To borrow a quote from Talladega Nights , everyone out on the track, including the backmarkers, were driving like pissed-off teenagers. The drivers a lap down, allowing the lead-lap cars to race unencumbered? Yeah, right. Screw you, Kyle Busch, or Ryan Newman, I m not going to stay a lap down, or go quietly. To say that this produced interesting racing is quite an understatement, sort of like saying that an F-5 tornado might produce mild wind gusts .

For the most part, the racing was actually pretty clean, even for Richmond. But the drivers were obviously sick of this ill-handling turd of a race car, and were driving the bejeezus out of the COT anyway in order to try to advance their position .or stay out in front. I didn t see a lot of coasting that s prevalent during other NASCAR races; the constant cautions didn t allow a moment s rest for the drivers, or the teams. The drivers were pushing the car .and it was producing some pretty darn good racing for a change. Other than David Stremme coming two cars short of punting the entire Roush Racing contingent out into the stands, with his Star Trek-sponsored Dodge eventually trying to emulate what happened to the starship Enterprise in the movie Star Trek: Generations , I didn t feel, at any time during the race, that I had to whip out any of my 43 driver voodoo dolls out and perform emergency surgery as a result of someone doing something stupid. This set of circumstances is giving an indication, now that the NASCAR sponsor party is over, and with sponsorship dollars drying up .that the teams are finally having to earn their keep again. This isn t saying that teams or the drivers were sitting on their duffs, just trying to get an occasional top-5 for points purposes .but to most of the fans, that s exactly what it looks like has been going on for the most part, for the last 5-10 years. Now? They no longer have that luxury .if it was ever there to begin with. If you slack off, just try to run laps, and maybe eke out a top-10, sorry, that s not going to work anymore. If you finish 23rd, there had better be a darn good reason for finishing that far back, with either crumpled fenders, only one good corner left on the car, or a NASCAR official stuck head-first in the grill as proof that you were attempting to drive the wheels off of your car .and accidentally accomplished that task. While this is great for the fans, and excellent for bailing out NASCAR from having to do anything to improve the accursed COSHAT ( What? Fix it? Hey, the racing has never been better! ), this has to be an additional drain on a team s already beleaguered resources. Think about it for a moment; As a team owner, you now have a reduced stream of sponsor income, or might be facing such an income reduction, and now, since your sponsors are now requiring better results, you are forced to run a spec. car primarily designed more for safety purposes, and the actual racing ability being an afterthought, and push it harder than it s designed to run. Since the car doesn t want to corner .and it s impossible to keep it tuned .your driver now has to drive the car on the ragged edge, on almost every lap .or he s going to be a lap down almost immediately. And since 42 other drivers out on the track are now having to do exactly the same thing you are doing .pushing the badly-designed COSHAT to its ragged edge .it s not a matter of if your driver is going to get bumped into, spun out, or ran into the wall, it s a matter of when. And now, since you are forced to make your driver run the wheels off of his car, alongside, in front of, or behind 42 other drivers now having to do the same thing .your car is going to get damaged, you re going to chew up more tires (the COSHAT loves tires, remember?), and it s going to cost more to repair your car for the next event that it s going to be used at.

While the racing is definitely getting more interesting .this can t continue forever. Another problem? Double-file restarts. From a racing standpoint .this is quite possibly the dumbest thing since deliberately purchasing expired store-made birthday cake .just to save a buck. From an entertainment perspective .why, it s a great thing to have 43 cars jammed in together as close as possible, isn t it? Especially if the lead-lap cars, from 2nd place all the way back, are stuck behind slower backmarkers two or three-wide in the corners? Wow, what a great idea! NASCAR doesn t want any one driver to dominate the race, and has made hundreds of rule changes in order to prevent someone from becoming too dominant .yet in the case of double-file restarts, precisely that happens. Wow, what sheer genius. NASCAR engages in verbal diarrhea about how many lead changes occur during a race, yet, the doublefile restarts do a good job at preventing any increase of that number. Someone from 2nd-place on down could be in a great position to get to the lead quickly, and set up an exciting duel, but what happens instead, is usually, the lead car gets around the first car one lap down, and pulls away, while 2nd on back now has to destroy their tires trying to get around backmarkers a lap or more down. If you are a lap down .I m sorry, but there s probably a reason why you re back there to begin with. There s absolutely no reason to keep lap-down cars up there, other than to ensure that those who get in front of the leader get a lap back the few times in a season that it does actually happen. Frustrated fans complain about a lack of decent racing up front .NASCAR completely ignores them .and since a set of tires on a COSHAT doesn t last very many laps .we continue to see single drivers lead hundreds of laps, simply because they were lucky enough to get around the backmarkers who had the inside line. You know, those same backmarkers that just happen to cause a lot of accidents on their slow slide back to the rear of the field, and do such an excellent job of holding up the rest of the field, so that the lead one-lap-down car can get the Lucky Moron pass back to the lead lap after they or one of the other lap-down-or-more cars causes another wreck. Single-file restarts could fix a lot of what s wrong with NASCAR racing. Imagine that, on every restart, you could have actual racing for postion, where 1st through 10th can actually fight for the lead, instead of the disaster that occurs now whenever the green flag flies again to resume racing. The tires on the COSHAT don t allow for drivers to spend five to ten laps fighting backmarkers first, and then race for position once the one-lap-down crowd gets punted out of the way. I m not the most technically astute NASCAR observer out there, but it doesn t take an expert to see how badly the backmarkers hold up the lead-lap guys at times, especially at small tracks with no place to pass .just like what was occurring, over and over, at Richmond on Saturday night.

The France Cartel s blind adherence to entertainment first, logic second is never going to allow fulltime single-file restarts to happen. I think this is at least one answer to the NASCAR problem of boring races .and like all of the other problems plaguing NASCAR at this point .the COSHAT being the prime reason .I wonder if it s going to take a complete and total disaster to make any changes. See you next week.