The late Dick Beaty, NASCAR’s Winston Cup director in the 1980s and early ’90s, once happened upon Ricky Rudd and Derrike Cope in a garage-area scuffle after a race.
They had wrestled each other to the ground and they were rolling around between two transporters, Beaty reported.
“What did you do?” Beaty was asked.
“Nothing,” he said.
“Are you going to fine them?”
“Nope,” he said. “They weren’t hurting anybody. And they sure weren’t hurting each other.”
This week NASCAR levied $30,000 in fines against three drivers because of altercations last weekend at Bristol, Tenn., that didn’t hurt anybody. Trouble was, they all happened on live national television, while the Rudd-Cope scrap hadn’t.
Kevin Harvick was assessed $15,000 and placed on probation until Aug. 28 for leaping onto the roof of Greg Biffle’s car, then down to the ground right in Biffle’s face, moments after the finish of Saturday’s Busch race.
Dale Earnhardt Jr. and Robby Gordon were fined for “intentionally running into each other’s car during the cool-down lap” after Sunday’s Cup race. Earnhardt was popped for $5,000 for initiating the exchange on the track, and Gordon was hit for $10,000, plus probation through August, for his hard retaliation on the pit road.
Harvick claimed Biffle had spun him during the Busch race; Earnhardt claimed Gordon had held him up during the Cup race; Gordon pointed out Earnhardt had knocked him out of the way earlier.
All were penalized under the catch-all “Section 12-4-A” of the respective Busch and Cup rule books: ” . . . actions deemed by NASCAR officials as detrimental to stock car racing . . . “
Detrimental? Really?
“NASCAR ought to race at Bristol every weekend,” one savvy and grizzled observer said this week, meaning the showers of spice to the sport that consistently explode out of any event at the little half-mile “Thunder Valley” track nestled in the Smoky Mountains of eastern Tennessee. The racing is tight, slam-bang, and tempers naturally flare.
When Bristol puts 160,000 people into grandstands that look like the Rose Bowl on steroids, and those people come to see precisely such goings-on as last weekend’s, it is a reach to call the conduct detrimental.
There’s no NASCAR racing this weekend because of Easter. And the next Cup race, at Texas Motor Speedway on April 7, is already sold out.
But if there were a race in the immediate aftermath of Bristol, at a track such as Darlington or Rockingham where walk-up ticket sales are important to filling the grandstands, then the irony of the term “detrimental” would be illustrated.
Almost invariably, after a set-to at one track, ticket demand increases at the next stop on the tour.
Understandably, NASCAR feels compelled to do something to keep a lid on rowdiness, just as baseball fines the instigators of bench-clearing brawls–which invariably are depicted in every sports section and sportscast in America by the next day, and thus add spice to baseball.
And NASCAR is even more sensitive to altercations than the more established sports because of the residue of NASCAR’s old, backwater, “redneck” image that was fraught with brawling.
NASCAR must deal with an added dimension–hitting with cars, rather than just fists, elbows or shoulders. H.A. “Humpy” Wheeler, president of Speedway Motorsports Inc., which owns six Winston Cup tracks, including Bristol, often refers to NASCAR racing as “the NFL on wheels.”
So NASCAR has joined in the charade of all mainstream sports, which levy cosmetic fines for extraneous violence, playing to a society largely in denial of the neurobiochemical truth: That the human brain, deep in the “medial forebrain bundle” or “old brain,” retains the ancient instincts toward violence for survival.
Leigh Steinberg, the most influential agent in the NFL, has reasoned that the public lust for the “big hit” or the “pancake block” lies precisely in those ancient instincts which have not yet been evolved out of the human brain.
As illustration that the weekend’s flareups were instinctive rather than cultural, consider the ages of the drivers involved this time: Harvick is 26, Earnhardt 27, Gordon 33. All are products of the era of politically correct reason and restraint–when they came through school, even minor fistfights were taboo. Harvick and Gordon were raised in laid-back Southern California, and Earnhardt under the discipline of military school in North Carolina.
So none can be deemed remotely a product of violent background. Saturday and Sunday, they all were simply manifesting human nature–as denied by current culture.
Driving an automobile is an inherently stressful endeavor. Have you yourself not felt anger on the streets and freeways? Intensify the stress exponentially with the speed, risk and rewards of a NASCAR race, and the modern-day notion of “anger management” seems flimsy.
Even Jeff Gordon, 30, a product of the ultra-calm San Francisco Bay Area culture and arguably the most self-controlled NASCAR driver ever, got angry and rammed his car into the back of Robby Gordon’s under a caution flag last November at New Hampshire.
Tough luck: NASCAR’s financial booms and busts usually lag slightly behind economic cycles.
Just as the national economy is beginning to pick up, a 25-year-stalwart figure of the Winston Cup garages, Travis Carter, was forced to shut down his racing team this week because of lack of sponsorship.
The team announced Thursday that all crewmen, shop employees and both drivers, Todd Bodine and Joe Nemechek, would be let go.
Just before the season-opening Daytona 500 in February, Carter and his partner, longtime CART team owner Carl Haas, learned that their primary sponsor, Kmart, had filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy and would back the NASCAR team for only two races.
They ceased operation of Bodine’s wing of the team after the third race, at Las Vegas, but continued to field cars for Nemechek through Bristol.
Bodine already has signed on with the Jackson-Herzog Busch team in which baseball Hall of Famer Reggie Jackson is a part owner; Nemechek’s ability is so well-respected among teams that he’s sure to find a ride soon; Haas will continue operation of his CART team.
But the absence of Carter in the garages will leave a void for traditionalists. He was a mainstay of the fabled Junior Johnson and Associates racing team, back through the championship years with Cale Yarborough in the 1970s, before fielding his own team in 1989.
Rising star: As soon as NASCAR’s sponsorship horizon does brighten, the Indy Racing League had better be prepared to hold onto its skyrocketing star, 22-year-old Sam Hornish Jr., who won the IRL championship last year and has won two of three races this season, including last Sunday’s Yamaha 400 at California Speedway.
Hornish beat Jaques Lazier by only 0.0281 of a second, after a wheel-to-wheel final lap at Fontana. There were 39 lead changes during the race, an IRL record, topping the 32 last year at Texas Motor Speedway.
Still, outside the Indy 500 itself, which draws sellout crowds only because of tradition and “happening” status, the IRL’s intense competitors continue to labor in relative obscurity. The grandstands at California, which always are sold out for NASCAR races and are usually jam-packed for CART races, held apparently fewer than 10,000 spectators for Sunday’s inaugural IRL event there.
No matter how set Hornish may feel in his IRL ride, drivers nearly always go where the money, the events and the fans are. Hiring open-wheel drivers and converting them to stock car racing has been the norm among NASCAR teams since Jeff Gordon came off the sprint car tracks to make such a splash in NASCAR in the early `90s, followed quickly by the late Kenny Irwin Jr.
The last time the IRL produced a meteoric star of Hornish’s caliber, the driver was Tony Stewart and team owner Joe Gibbs had no trouble recruiting him into NASCAR.
