OFFICIAL PROGRAM
40TH ANNUAL AUTO CLUB-LOS ANGELES TIMES 500
83rd RACE, NASCAR WINSTON CUP GRAND NATIONAL SERIES PRESENTED BY SPRINT TELECOMMUNICATIONS AT ONTARIO MOTOR SPEEDWAY
NOVEMBER 24, 2013
-----------
"They Don’t Boo As Much"
NASCAR's stars reflect on the sport's lengthy period lacking fan rancor
Kyle Busch has heard the boos. It’s inevitable; he's won over forty Winston Cup races and 91 races in the Busch and Craftsman Truck Series. He also happens to be defending champ of the Auto Club/Times 500 - and a former winner of the Miller Beer 500 in March; fans still talk about the fourth-turn melee with Joey Logano and Jimmie Johnson; three abreast all the way around? They almost pulled it off then, and they may do it come Sunday.
Jimmie Johnson has heard them. He's won five titles and 68 races, including three here at Ontario, twice in the Auto Club/Times 500; he and Busch are drivers trying to match Richard Petty's still-standing NASCAR record of six Winston Cup titles; they've come close, Dale Earnhardt came close, all at five titles.
Kenny Irwin, yep he's heard them too; when you win, as he's done eighteen times over the years, you'll start hearing them. Davey Allison, co-owner of Irwin’s #42 Dodge within the three-car Lorin Ranier-Felix Sabates organization - Irwin is Aric Almirola’s teammate there with two-time Grand National champ Matt Kenseth - has heard them.
Even Richard Petty, forever the most popular figure in the sport, would hear them as a driver in his heyday. He's co-owner of Petty-Curb Motorsports, and his Dodge drivers - AJ Allmendinger #43, Buckshot Jones #44, and Richard's grandson Adam Petty #45 - yes, they'll hear booing, like at Pocono when Adam made the mistake of beating Dale Earnhardt Jr. in a wild scramble in the Purolator 500, or even more when AJ won by his entire hood over Junior and Almirola at the Daytona 500.
And Dale Earnhardt? Even as co-owner of DE-AK Racing's Chevrolets wheeled by his son Dale Jr. - #8, now the perennial Most Popular Dtiver winner - by #7 David Gilliland, Ricky Stenhouse Jr. in #15, and Jerry Nadeau in #81 - he hears them, just like he did throughout his driving career.
But the booing is more muted than it traditionally has been. Sure the fan anger is still there - it always will be; they still talk about all the beer cans thrown at the stripe at Talladega, at Pocono, at Bristol years back in controversial outcomes; Kyle Busch taunted fans throwing at him after his Miller 500 win at Ontario.
But it's not the same. Often the boos are just good-natured teasing or simple immediate frustration. When Junior wins - as he did at the Atlanta 500, at the Miller Beer 500 at Michigan, at the Brickyard 450 - he gets the most cheers. He doesn’t get booed; even when he doesn't win, he gets the most cheers. A whopping eight second place finishes this year earned him almost more cheers than his wins; the booing went to the guys who beat him those days.
The four networks’ NASCAR analysts - Dale Jarrett of ABC, Darrell Waltrip of CBS, Tim Richmond of FOX, and Kyle Petty of NBC - they all discuss the curious lack of rancor in a sport where fan anger is inevitable and forever has had an edge to it that isn't found in most sports. They and others all agree it involves multiple causes.
*****
The first of which is the last twenty years really haven’t seen any one or two drivers take over and dominate. When someone wins too often even the garage area can turn against someone, as David Pearson has noted about his historic 1976 season. “It got to where after the Southern 500 (that year) a lot of people refused to even speak with me,” Pearson says. “We haven’t really seen that the last how many years.”
“The last real time somebody dominated was five or six years ago,” says Kyle Petty. "The last eighteen or so years it’s rare somebody wins more than seven races. This year especially we had nineteen guys win. The most anyone’s won is five by Kyle Busch and Jimmie and Carl (Edwards). A lot of the others who won are stuck at two and three or even one.”
Kyle certainly knows, not just with fourteen wins to his credit. His son Adam has eleven wins since starting in 2001. Only twice has he won more than one race in a season. At RCR Clint Bowyer has been solid with ten wins overall, but only once did he win twice in a season; his one win so far this year is that Winston 500 triumph.
“With more winners,” Tim Richmond says, “there’s a mixture of more pressure to win more but also a sense of mission accomplished. Fans see how everybody's averaged fourteen or so winners a year since 2001, they're better appreciating how hard it is to win even for guys who win a lot in a season. Basically nobody’s winning ‘too much.’”
"All our teams kept winning," Alan Kulwicki, the 1992 series champ with Ford, states. "I got some backlash with the alliance with DEI and the switchover to Chevrolet, but that went away when we won. Winning validates a lot and people calm themselves down as a result."
It goes not only with drivers and teams, it goes with manufacturers. Fans now are used to the rivalry not being just Ford and Chevrolet. This year it's been tighter than usual as Chevy won eleven races, Dodge and Toyota ten apiece, and Ford nine. Fans are also used to two tire manufacturers in Firestone and Goodyear - Firestone cars won twenty-two races this season. It isn't that brand loyalty doesn't exist - far from it. It's been tighter and that tightness has muted some of the booing.
By most measure it's been the most competitive season in years. The season has seen nineteen winners involving ten different teams, over 1,000 lead changes, the four-wide photo finish won by Bowyer at the Winston 500, the near-photo win by Adam Petty at Pocono, another such at the Pepsi 500 at Michigan won by Kenny Irwin, a total of twelve races where the lead changed on the final lap (though only seven were official last-lap passes). The "plate" races (Daytona and Talladega) stood out, but so did quite a few other races. "I led the last four laps (of the Daytona 500)," AJ Allmendinger says. "But we all saw Junior pass me then Kyle Busch then Almirola and I just sidedrafted the hell out of everyone to win it. And it's been like that almost every other race."
So with so much for so many some of the frustration doesn't develop. But the booing of rivals will always be there.
*****
The other angle TV's analysts look at is that fans better appreciate the drivers as a whole, "because we might not have had them," Jarrett says, noting the rash of career-ending crashes among a dozen major star drivers in the 2000-05 period. TV still shows Earnhardt's Chevrolet snagging Daytona's Turn Three fencing; still replayed are Bill Elliott and Ernie Irvan wrecks where weeks later both drivers announced their retirement. At the NASCAR Research Center in Charlotte one can see what's left of Jeff Gordon's Chevrolet when the entire back third was torn off at Richmond.
"I know what I felt when the whole nose of my car got sliced off," says Richmond about the crash here at Ontario that proved to be his last race. "I knew what I felt afterward meant I couldn't get back in the car and commit the way I needed to."
"Nobody forgets moments like that," Waltrip says. "My own wreck at Charlotte (at the end of 1996), that's when I started realizing I'd better get out. Fans don't forget, they know what can happen, and they seem to better appreciate how it can disappear in a snap."
This past season overall has been noticeably cleaner than a lot of years. "Here in (the Miller 500 in) March we tore up some cars," David Ragan, winner at Kansas in the #98 Gardner-Jenkins-Thorson Toyota, says. "But the wrecking has been more concentrated on a handful of races. Daytona, Darlington, Talladega, Bristol, those are usually where the most wrecks happen, but this year Charlotte, Atlanta, Richmond, and Watkins Glen were the big problem spots." While the Daytona 500 and Winston 500 at Talladega did have ten-car pileups, the Firecracker 450 won by Harvick was uglier with five crashes involving nineteen cars. And even with that seemingly more races than normal were largely free of wreckage.
"One area fans still boo is Bristol," AJ Allmendinger says. "Since redoing the asphalt we have two grooves to run on and we don't just slam each other out of the way. The racing is good, really good, but the bump-and-run isn't there and some fans hate that."
When Kurt Busch, driving the Hendrick Chevrolet #25 once wheeled by Richmond, passed his brother Kyle to win the Food City 500 there, the booing may have been the loudest of the season and evoked memory of the "good" old days. "I had the chance to race my brother clean so I took it. There was no issue between us, but some fans didn't like we raced clean," Kurt says. His brother Kyle adds, "I got beat, there was nothing else to it. I know Kurt has said he'll wreck me to win a race, but he didn't have to. I was surprised fans reacted the way they did."
With this Times 500 maybe the fans will throw more beer cans after the end. Though we doubt it; the fans seem more to enjoy good racing instead.
Such is a parallel universe, and there's more from later......
OFFICIAL PROGRAM
51st ANNUAL AAA LONE STAR 500
99th RACE, NASCAR WINSTON CUP/MONSTER ENERGY GRAND NATIONAL SERIES PRESENTED BY SPRINT COMMUNICATIONS AT TEXAS SUPERSPEEDWAY
NOVEMBER 3, 2019
----------
Bad Blood
The season has been driven by aggressive driving and conflict between drivers
Another Ernie Irvan. And Another Ernie Irvan. And another Ernie Irvan.
Drivers like Darrell "Bubba" Wallace, Ricky Stenhouse, Michael McDowell, and William Byron have been called this. So has Byron's teammate at Hendrick Motorsports, Chase Elliott. It's not meant to be a compliment, despite Irvan's 28 career wins. Aggressive racing is the point of the comparison. Even today Irvan is remembered for a multitude of crashes and resulting bad blood.
"Yes, I hear the comparisons," Irvan says. "I know what I had to go through. My deal with Sterling in particular, we never really could get along, and I know I rubbed people the wrong way. I wanted to lead, I had to lead, and these young guys, they see they have to lead."
Irvan had to publicly apologize to drivers in a prerace drivers meeting. He earned one-race suspensions twice in his career. He'd see a hole to pass cars through, he took it - even if it was grossly ill-advised.
Now with only four races left in the season the aggressive driving and bad blood between drivers hasn't let up. All those drivers unflatteringly compared to Ernie Irvan have won races this year - in fact Wallace, Elliott, Stenhouse, McDowell, and Byron have combined for nineteen wins, in a season where sixteen other drivers have won.
So it's pretty crowded in the winner circle this year, and the aggression level field-wide has by all accounts increased markedly. NASCAR's Points Playoff round - the final ten races see a 50% increase in points awarded plus a striking 100 point bonus for each win - has only added to the intensity.
And the bad blood.
The Daytona 500 melee is where it really started, Chase Elliott vs. Aric Almirola, then Bubba Wallace vs. Denny Hamlin. There were multiple different leaders on the final lap - more and more the common outcome at Daytona and Talladega where Penske Fords, Petty-Curb and Ranier-Allison-Sabates Dodges, the Chevrolets of the Richard-Alan-Dale alliance and Foyt-Haas-Stewart, and the Toyotas of Gardner-Jenkins-Thorson and Bowers-Rocco Motorsports have won 40 of the last 44 Daytona-Talladega Winston Cup races - and a semi-bystander - the RAD Alliance's Austin Dillon, in Dale Earnhardt's iconic RCR 3; he led 29 laps so bystander is underselling his effort - wound up passing everyone, escaping two big wrecks on the last lap, and being the winner.
The anger between drivers was just beginning.
The Miller 500 at Ontario brought it out between Kevin Harvick in FHS Racing's #4 and Kyle Busch in Joe Gibbs' 18. Busch won that one, chased by seven tightly packed pursuers; Harvick then sideslammed him coming to the white flag and won the Coca Cola 500 at Atlanta in a five-car scramble. The two let each other - and those listening and watching - know it was getting personal.
"Seeing the bad blood early in the season," NBC analyst Jeff Burton says, "I wasn't sure what to make of it. Harvick and Kyle having to be separated at Atlanta, that raised a lot of eyebrows. When it seemed to calm down, then it kept going." The Champion Spark Plug 450 at Dover Downs International Speedway was a David Ragan win over Martin Truex Jr., this while Kenny Irwin and Adam Petty bodyslammed each other - and the SAFER barrier - for third. That one curiously was laughed off by the two. "That's their nature," Davey Allison, co-owner of Irwin's #42 Dodge. "They're intense but they don't carry it out of the car."
The Winston 500 by Geico, though, wasn't laughed off by anyone. In most circumstances a shocker of a win by Bubba Wallace in only his second season would have evoked the loudest cheers anyone would ever see, especially in a 27-car fight to the end. But when Harvick swerved past on the backstretch and Wallace blasted him in Turn Three, no one was laughing. "I should have been calmer," Wallace says. "He sideslammed me and I lost my cool and it wiped out almost everyone. We won the race, but I told Richard (Petty), Mike (Curb), and Trent (Owens) afterward I didn't want to win that way." The fight in the garage between Harvick and Wallace after the race caught everyone's attention as a fight naturally will.
The Coca Cola 600 was another apex of aggression and driver fireworks. Three crashes involving thirteen cars marred the last twenty laps and Clint Bowyer this time was one of the ones, as he and David Ragan crashed out of the win following a tag from winner Chase Elliott.
"By the 600," Darrell Waltrip says, "it had stopped being just racing. Now it had gotten personal. The drivers weren't speaking to each other, they were throwing punches. Another big wreck, another fight in the garage. Nothing anyone could do could calm anyone down." It didn't calm down in a vicious Brad Keselowski-Wallace crash at Pocono won by Wallace's teammate Adam Petty, nor in Wallace swerving Harvick to win the Pepsi 500 at Michigan, nor in Harvick's Brickyard 450 win over Joey Logano and Busch, nor in Bowyer's win in the Bank of America 500 at Charlotte over Hamlin.
And now Texas begins the stretch run for the title and the fivesome of Harvick, Elliott, Kyle Busch, Keselowski, and Matt Kenseth in the RAS Dodge. Kenseth hasn't been immune from bad blood; after winning at Bristol he raced around and plowed into Logano, aftermath of the two almost crashing on the last lap.
And the season is still waiting for cooler heads.
That darned parallel universe.
No comments:
Post a Comment