Disgraceful Hijinks
By Leon H Wolf Posted in NASCAR — Comments (2) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »
I've been meaning to write about the Daytona 500 since yesterday afternoon, but I've been to angry to attempt it. I'm still pretty cheesed, but I'm going to give it a go anyway.
First of all, congratulations to Kevin Harvick, who came out of nowhere to grab the win. Great work and all that. However, it should come as no surprise to find that NASCAR yet again got burned by trying to play favorites and discarding their own rules. The rest of this post will accordingly be griping about how NASCAR is a fantastic sport which is run by a bunch of bumbling idiot jokers. If you're not interested in any of that, just skip what's below the fold...
It all began before the Daytona 500 even started. Matt Kenseth, plus all three Evernham drivers, were found with illegal modifications to their cars. In the case of Kenseth and Kasey Kahne, this meant that some caps in the wheel-wells were left off, which gave the cars an aerodynamic advantage. Now, I don't know a lot about Kenny Francis (Kahne's crew chief), but Robbie Reiser (Kenseth's crew chief) has been around NASCAR forever, and knows good and well that something so obvious is going to get caught by NASCAR officials. You just can't make a plausible claim (to me) that this was an intentional violation of the rules. When you add on to this that both Kenseth and Kahne automatically made the Daytona field due to driver's points, and it makes no sense for them to deliberately cheat during qualifying, especially since it doesn't even determine starting position at Daytona.
Contrast this with what happened before last year's Daytona 500. Jimmie Johnson's crew chief actually inserted a spacer in the back windshield that was deliberately designed to give his car an aerodynamic advantage during the race. NASCAR at the time stated the blindingly obvious: that this modification was a deliberate attempt to deceive NASACAR officials and achieve a competitive advantage for Jimmie Johnson during the Daytona 500. Johnson's crew chief Chad Knaus was given a four-race suspension (just like Reiser and Francis), but Jimmie Johnson was not docked any points. The explanation from NASCAR was that they did not want Jimmie Johnson (who, at that time, was the Peyton Manning of NASCAR) to start the season in a points hole. This year, however, that didn't stop them at all from docking points from both Kenseth and Kahne, despite the fact that their violation was for qualifying, and was much less obviously intentional.
The second place that NASCAR screwed the pooch on this race was on the last lap. After a major crash with 6 laps remaining, the red flag came out, NASCAR cleaned the track, and there was supposed to be a green-white-checkered two lap finish. Sentimental favorite Mark Martin (who has never won the Daytona 500) was in the lead. Martin hugged the yellow line on the first lap, holding off Kyle Busch, who tried to pass him low. Then, on the last lap, Matt Kenseth and Kevin Harvick hooked up on the high side and made a charge that would probably have gotten them both past Martin. However, Busch was hugging the line a little too close, got on the apron and flew up the track into Kenseth, who hit the wall, went sideways, and came back down the track in front of the whole field.
At this point, it is important to note a rule change that NASCAR instituted in 2003. Before that time, if a yellow caution flag came out, you kept racing back to the start/finish line, and the order would be set from there. Obviously, this presented a pretty serious problem because it encouraged people to speed up through a crash that was occurring on the track, and delayed the ability of rescue vehicles to get on the track in case of a fire/big emergency/whatever. So, NASCAR instituted a rule that as soon as a yellow flag goes up, they calculate the position from that point and set the field in that order. This encourages people to go ahead and let up on the gas and respect the safety of the other drivers. In the context of a green-white-checkered flag restart, when the yellow flag goes up, the race is over exactly then, and the winner is calculated from that point.
In 2005 at Talladega, Dale Jarrett and Tony Stewart were racing toward the finish in exactly the same fashion when a wreck occurred behind them on the final lap. Although Tony Stewart ultimately crossed the finish line first, NASCAR determined (correctly) that Jarrett was leading when the yellow flag went up, and awarded him the win. Ditto last year at Talladega, when Brian Vickers was awarded the win after causing a wreck with Jimmie Johnson and Dale Earnhardt, rather than having to race the hard-charging Kahne to the finish line. The fact that the field was frozen at the yellow flag saved both Johnson and Earnhardt at least ten positions in that race, and was part of the reason that Johnson won the championship. NASCAR now has telemetry in all their cars which sends up a warning when any car reaches a certain angle against the track. As soon as Kenseth's car went sideways (at which point he was still ahead of the rest of the field), the yellow flag should have by rule gone up - something that is not supposed to be discretionary. Instead, in what was pretty clearly a calculated move to try and give Martin a chance at the victory, NASCAR sat on their hands and allowed Martin and Harvick to race to the finish line.
What happened to the rest of the field wasn't pretty. Because they didn't get the yellow light, they did what they were supposed to do and kept barreling on. Numerous cars were struck with incredible force. Clint Bowyer's car flipped over and skated across the finish line upside down, at which point his car burst into flames. In short, it was exactly the sort of situation that NASCAR intended to avoid when they decreed, by rule, that this would not happen again. Kenseth and Busch, meanwhile, got screwed the most in this process - especially Kenseth, who fell all the way back to 27th in the field.
Yeah, I'll admit, I'm a Kenseth fan, so I'm biased. But I get a little sick of all the times he gets screwed by NASCAR just because he's not a good-looking golden boy like Earnhardt, Johnson, or Gordon. The bottom line is that this sport does play favorites, and it detracts from the legitimacy of some of the fiercest competition in any sport.
Word
by CJB68
My POV is that this was mostly done shooting from the hip since you can have so many circumstances going into a race, especially since they had the green-white-checkers restart instituted for all three major racing divisions. At the very least, they don't keep doing it over and over again like they did at that one last Gateway Trucks race a few years back, and you wouldn't get a restart if the yellow came out on the last lap anyway. I was more disappointed by the massive amount of commercials (which were even shown on DirecTV's NASCAR ticket with the race action being relegated to a smaller portion of the left-lower corner of the screen) and the fact that television and the Hollywood crowd are exerting more and more of the influence in NASCAR than the folks who paid for those tickets to the races themselves. And, as I was rooting for Mark Martin at the end, I could sympathize with him over missing another one (perhaps his last), but "Happy" Harvick's a winner I can live with, unlike someone from Jack "the Grouch" Roush's stable.
But any sport, like politics, has its heroes and heels, it's screwy officiating and rules which seem to mean a different thing from one event to the next...
My solution, of course, is to only watch the major events at the classic tracks on TV, maybe one or two of the supporting events at the local tracks (I'm close to Dover and can take day trips to Pocono and Richmond) and spend most of my Saturday nights at a local dirt track. Except that now my brother got talked into the NASCAR Ticket and I may as well watch those channels while he golfs (heh).
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"Straight Talk Express"? My bum feet! -- Me, on Senator McCain and other "moderates"
happens when you have the wreck happening behind the 2 leaders and stop the race. How many other people would be upset if they yellow flag and end the race with less than a turn to go? I think more people want the race decided at the finish line. A lot of people were mad at the 2005 'dega race you reference, since that wreck didn't involve the 2 leading drivers. The other 'dega was a wreck involving the leader of the race.
They did freeze the field once the leaders crossed the line. They were darned if they do, darned if they didn't.
They let the top 2 settle it out on the track to the finish line, but maybe they should "fix" the order of the finish of the rest of the drivers. This might be something they can look at for a rule change (anyone ahead of a wreck on the final lap races to the line, everyone behind is frozen), NASCAR has been good about addressing situations during the season. I don't think NASCAR plays favorites anymore than the NFL does. If they did, they probably would have frozen the field and given Mark Martin the win, since he was leading at that point. The way it played out, by not freezing the field they 'gave' the win to Harvick. If they played favorites, Gordon and Earnhardt wouldn't have missed The Chase a couple of years ago.
The yellow flags are discretionary, say the last car around the track blows a tire and spins out on the other side of the track and it would be an automatic yellow and end the race? That ain't gonna happen.
Sometimes your guy gets screwed by a seeming arbitrary call, it happens in every sport.
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