Green Flag 4.11.08: What's Wrong with Phoenix and What's Right with St. Pete
Posted by Jim Carson on 04.11.2008
Yeah, but can that Rahal kid do a backflip?
Last week was a NASCAR Sprint Cup Series race at Texas Motor Speedway that plenty of folks have called boring. I have a few answers for those critics.
First, it wasn't that boring at the end. That caution with seven laps to go erased Backflip Boy's huge lead and left the outcome in doubt. Then you had half of the lead-lap drivers (five of 10) take fresh tires and restart behind the five who stayed out. Then there was the late charge by Clint Bowyer, at least until his crash with Denny Hamlin at the start-finish line. That's a whole set of SportsCenter highlight reel clips over the course of about five minutes.
Second, for those of you who can't or don't want to take almost four hours to watch a Cup race, do what I do and record it. Then it'll take about an hour and a half to see what you need to see, fast-forwarding through the commercials, cautions and other slow (i.e. boring) parts. You have to be a little careful to avoid flipping past ESPN's ticker until you get around to watching the race, but it's worked for me a lot over the years.
And finally, get your ass out to a local race, most likely a nearby paved or dirt short track. Then you can see shorter races and more of them, and with a lot more action than you'll see at most of the events at the Bruton Smith cookie-cutter tracks.
Now on to the issues of the week.
SATURDAY NIGHT'S NOT ALL RIGHT
This weekend's Sprint Cup event is the first points race of the season that's on a Saturday night. BOOOOO!!!!
Just 12 years ago, there were only three Saturday night races on the Cup schedule: the all-star race then known as the Winston, the August race at Bristol, and the September race at Richmond. The rest were all on Sunday afternoons, except for the Coke 600 on a Sunday night before Memorial Day and the Brickyard 400 which was still on a Saturday afternoon. Indy moved to Sunday around the turn of the century, but it's not an offender.
Back in the mid-90s, operators of the hundreds of weekly short tracks around North America only had three times each season where they were concerned with fans staying home and watching a Cup race on TV instead of coming out to their facilities for some exciting live racing. Some would continue normally on those Saturdays and risked smaller crowds (some areas were affected more than others, and pavement more than dirt tracks), while others either scheduled off-weeks then or brought in specials such as demo derbies or monster trucks.
Then oh, those times have changed. Daytona led the disgusting trend, moving its Pepsi 400 summer show to a Saturday night. Then Richmond slid its spring date to late April/early May and went under the lights. That was still passable, with five potential impacts, and only one time when there wasn't a nice long break between the Saturday Cup races. But then Charlotte moved its October race to a Saturday night. Then Darlington was forced to move its lone remaining race to Mother's Day weekend, and left with that choice it was a no-brainer to run on Saturday instead of angering Mom. (I'm not counting the Bud Shootout at Daytona, because in early February the only short tracks around the country that are running are the paved track in New Smyrna and the dirt tracks in Barberville and near Tampa, and their Florida Speedweeks programs have long traditions and legions of out-of-town fans and race teams.)
The next violator was Phoenix, adding a mid-late April night race just before the totally screwed-up month of May (Richmond/Darlington/all-star on consecutive Saturdays). It's getting worse. Chicagoland Speedway put up lights over the off-season and will join the night brigade this July the week after the Pepsi 400, and Kansas Speedway has plans to move its race in September to Saturday night in 2009.
The main reason for all of these Saturday events is for TV ratings, so that Fox/ESPN/ABC can have races in prime time. But it's backfiring on them, which makes the matter even stupider. In 2006, of the first nine Cup races, the two LOWEST-rated telecasts were the two held on Saturday nights. TRFKA Winston did well in the ratings, but it always does. But there's a reason why network dramas or comedies or even reality shows don't find homes on Saturday nights; most viewers are out and about and not in front of their TVs.
So it's like NASCAR just wants to screw the short track racing community. Many short tracks can't run on Sundays because of local ordinances (some are too close to churches and things like that). The ones that can run on Sundays, at least for regular weekly shows, are going to draw much smaller crowds in the stands, because people just aren't as likely to go places on Sunday afternoons as they are on Saturday nights.
I'll be at a short track this Saturday. That's why there are VCRs and TiVo machines. I suggest you do the same on at least one or two of the Cup-damaged Saturday nights over the next six months.
Now, how about some happy happenings.
INDYCARS 1, OUTSIDERS 1
Graham Rahal was the surprise winner of the IRL IndyCar Series event on the streets of St. Petersburg. In case you're not familiar with the name, Graham is the son of Bobby Rahal, one of the all-time best American open-wheel drivers and winner of the 1986 Indianapolis 500. Graham is also one of the former Champ Car drivers with one of the former Champ Car teams that were absorbed by the IRL in the late-February merger.
The IndyCar opener was the previous week at Homestead, a cookie-cutter oval. The best ex-Champ finisher was 12th and the top qualifier was 15th, which is not exactly anything to write home about. There's a reason for that; the 2007 Champ Car schedule had zero ovals and there was only one on the slate in 2006. And Graham Rahal didn't even race at Homestead, because he had a testing crash earlier in the week and his Newman-Haas-Benjamin-Lanigan Racing team "didn't have enough parts to prepare another car in three days."
Evidently they put all of their good parts in the car for St. Pete. And so did most of the other Champ Car transfers, because Will Power and Justin Wilson qualified 2-3, and Rahal and Oriol Servia were also near the front at the start. The race was a little fluky, as it went only 83 of 100 laps because of time constraints and weather, and Rahal and a few others didn't make their pit stops at the same times everyone else did. But there was nothing fluky about Rahal's performance.
It's not as important that Rahal became the youngest IRL race winner, breaking Marco Andretti's mark from last year. The lasting statistic is that Rahal (like Marco) is a young American driver, which is exactly what open-wheel racing has needed. Except for Sam Hornish, the IRL and Champ Car after the Big Split of '96, and especially the last few years, has been dominated by Brazilians, a Frenchman and others. The currently-unemployed Canadian Paul Tracy is a polarizing figure to race fans (I like him), but to non-race fans he's not going to draw anyone into the sport. Helio Crazyclimber danced his way into our hearts (awww!...ugh) and should draw fans to IndyCar racing, but he's Brazilian, as is the equally-fun Tony Kanaan. The only Champ Car/CART champion since the Big Split of '96 was Jimmy Vasser in the year 1 A.S. (after split), and Vasser is now a co-team-owner. Only three Indy 500 winners since the split have been American (Buddy Lazier, Eddie Cheever, Buddy Rice). And Hornish is the only American to win the IRL championship in the last seven years; he's not too charismatic, and oh yeah, he's now in NASCAR.
For the last couple of years, the American hopes of IndyCar racing have fallen on the shoulders of Danica. Marco came in and took a little of that weight. The other Americans in the IRL are Buddy Rice and Ryan Hunter-Reay (with teams that aren't high enough on the pecking order) and Ed Carpenter and A.J. Foyt IV (Vision Racing is just a hair higher than Rice's Dreyer & Reinbold and RHR's Rahal-Letterman Racing). And if your hopes rest on Little Anthony, you're doomed.
Now there's Graham Rahal, and he's the one that took the historical victory. He's the one that will appear on the Letterman show next Wednesday (4/16), a must-see.
He's also the one that'll be under more pressure than the other ex-Champs to perform on the ovals, of which their next appearance will be in two weeks at Kansas.
But for now, the 19-year-old Rahal deserves all of the praise he's getting now, and more.
SPANISH ROAD HOG
When one NASCAR driver takes out another while racing for the lead on the last lap, that replay gets aired over and over on every TV outlet. You have to turn to YouTube or the like to get the same thing from last weekend's World Superbike race at Valencia in Spain.
Home-country rider Carlos Checa slid into race-long leader Max Neukirchner on the very last corner, sending both tumbling into a gravel trap and allowing Italian Lorenzo Lanzi to capture his first win since 2004. The aggressor Checa certainly got the better end of it, because he got back on his motorcycle and finished fifth in that race. Neukirchner, still without a WSBK feature win in his career, was not only done for that race, but he was injured and had to sit out the second race of the weekend doubleheader (in which Checa finished third).
Not too hard to find the bad guy here.
I HATE TO FINISH WITH THIS
Thompson International Speedway in Connecticut is one of the premier paved short tracks in the Northeast, if not the entire U.S. It's a 5/8-mile oval with plenty of amenities for racers and fans alike (a short track with mirrors in the grandstand restrooms?) and plenty of room to provide exciting racing in several divisions. Fox NASCAR announcer Mike Joy got his start behind the microphone at Thompson in the 1970s, so the best play-by-play man in the sport gets to join the list of drivers who have been Thompson regulars and are now in the big leagues. I've never been there, but it's on my list of gotta-see-sometime places.
But unfortunately Thompson has had a few black eyes. In 2004, New England favorite Tom Baldwin was killed in a NASCAR Whelen Modified Tour event at Thompson (Baldwin's son Tommy is a longtime NASCAR crew chief currently with Dave Blaney and Bill Davis Racing). Then last September, John Blewett III died after a crash in a modified race there. It got even worse last weekend, as NEMA midget driver Shane Hammond suffered fatal injuries in an accident while on the third lap of the NEMA main event.
SAFER barriers have been praised universally since their installation at every NASCAR big-three track. Thompson doesn't have this kind of impact-absorbing wall, but it likely wouldn't have saved Hammond, Blewett or Baldwin. According to reports, Hammond's midget got airborne and crashed into a billboard support. Blewett had another car's wheel land through his windshield (ironically the other car was driven by his brother Jimmy Blewett, and they were battling each other for the lead before the crash). And Baldwin hit an infield light pole.
Thompson will recover; its regular season of Thursday action starts in late May, and the NASCAR Mods will be back there three more times in 2008. But please let this be a reminder to everyone who races to take every available safety precaution ... head and neck restraints, full-face helmets, etc. And remember that racing is a dangerous sport, and sometimes these tragedies are possible.
RIP Shane Hammond. And I will do my best to have some good news from some of North America's short tracks in future editions of the Green Flag.
