AUTO CLUB 500 CALIFORNIA SPEEDWAY
Busch Race- Stater Bros. 300 FX Sat. 5:30 p.m.
Auto Club 500 Bud Pole qualifying FX Sat. 3 p.m.
Truck Race American Racing Wheels 200 SPEED Fri. 9 p.m.
All Times are ET
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Track Facts
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Posted on 02/24/2005 4:05:54 PM PST by WestCoastGal
Busch Race- Stater Bros. 300 FX Sat. 5:30 p.m.
Auto Club 500 Bud Pole qualifying FX Sat. 3 p.m.
Truck Race American Racing Wheels 200 SPEED Fri. 9 p.m.
All Times are ET
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Track Facts
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The Atlanta weekend schedule is particularly perplexing and creates a potential safety problem, since drivers are facing 207 mph corner speeds but with less rear-end spoiler than last season and with new, softer tires a question mark. Teams will actually have much less practice time at Atlanta and Bristol this year than last.
"It's not going to save us anything," team owner Tony Morgenthau said. "This will save us absolutely nothing. We'll still have the hotel rooms, and the guys are still going to have to eat. The savings will be minimal.
"Well, it will save us maybe four sets of tires that we won't have to use. That's maybe $7,000.
"But, like when I bought a boat, the guy said I could save on sales tax if I licensed it in the Bahamas. I told the guy, 'If I have to worry about that, maybe I should worry about how to pay for the gas for the boat, too.'"
Morgenthau says the real savings may come in less aggravation because of fewer inspections.
Greg Zipadelli, Tony Stewart's crew chief: "I don't know what we're going to do Saturday now. We were just talking with NASCAR about that. It's going to be different. I'm not really sure what we're supposed to do at Atlanta and Bristol.
"It would be nice to have more practice at Atlanta. But I don't know that we have any choice - we get what we get and deal with it. Atlanta's going to be different, that's for sure.
NO HABLA ESPANOL: Someone somewhere seems to have listed Dale Jr. as an entrant in next week's Mexico City race... Sorry, kids. He's not entered. Doesn't care for Mexican food. Plus, ya know what happpened the last time he raced on a weekend off.
Jeff'll be back. No Cup race next week. See ya in a couple weeks at Vegas.
OMG!
No, it couldn't be. mercifully, Bo's a black lab. (click my name)
However, Bo's replacement for crew chief is a...
um, he's a
rotti.
Eeeek!
But the yard is cleaner than I imagined...
That can't be. I picked up 20% more points this weekend than last and still lost 5 places!!!
And speaking of less exposure were any cars running behind the top six?
I personally think the teams were just gaining the handle on last years changes and now all this new stuff again. I have been to several boards this morning where long time fans are really disgusted and thinking about not watching races. These changes in their opinion hae made the first two races boring. Daytona was not that exciting with not much close racing because of the new smaller restrictor plate. (the last 10 laps were good)
Yesterday's California race was a mess with tire and engine problems. Some may be due to the new tire/spoiler and gear changes. And, definitely boring.
Not to mention the no Happy Hour practice and impound stupid rule for most tracks after qualifying. As the teams mentioned in the news article they are not saving any money at all except perhaps on practice tires! This stuff will ultimately cost them more money in wrecked cars and equipment.
"3" Misses the Point
Written by: Tom Jensen
Harrisburg, NC – 12/19/2004 The Intimidator. (Photo: Jonathan Ferrey/Getty Images)
Barry Pepper did a remarkable job portraying the late Dale Earnhardt in “3,” but the movie missed the point.
Earnhardt was a larger-than-life character, a fearsome competitor whose fan base and influence dwarfed anyone else in the sport.
At the time of his death in 2001, Earnhardt had the world by the tail. After a couple of fallow seasons in the late 1990s, he was back regularly contending for race wins, his Dale Earnhardt, Inc. team was on the rise, and his son was a budding superstar. He was rich beyond anyone’s wildest imagination, a new grandfather and far and away the most influential driver in the sport.
It’s hard to imagine the real Earnhardt spent as much time dwelling on paternal approval as Pepper’s character did in the movie. Earnhardt was long since past that sort of thing, I’m sure.
Though “3” was respectful, maybe even reverential in its treatment of seven-time NASCAR Winston Cup Champion, it didn’t touch on how what he did changed what happened in the sport.
When Earnhardt spoke on matters concerning NASCAR, his word was law in the garage. No other driver’s opinion mattered as much, whether in NASCAR’s big red trailer, the drivers’ motorhome compound or the track media centers.
Hard as nails and a wizened old sage, Earnhardt was part Clint Eastwood, part Yoda when he weighed on important issues, which in his final few years didn’t happen all that frequently.
But when it did, it was obviously significant.
So I knew something unusual was happening as I walked into the infield media center at Richmond International Raceway on the morning of Friday Sept. 8, 2000.
J.R. Rhodes, the long-time public relations man for Earnhardt, grabbed me by the arm and said, "Dale wants to see you in his trailer, right away."
At the time, I was working for NASCAR Winston Cup Scene, and Dale had never asked to see me in the three years I'd been on the beat. The truth was, Earnhardt's overwhelming popularity meant he had absolutely no need for the press any more.
Earnhardt was the top draw in the series and knew it. He was The Man, he was The Franchise and he'd long since ceased needing the media's help. Earnhardt rarely did extensive interviews anymore.
This was different, though. NASCAR was in crisis, and the drivers were in an uproar.
Earlier that season, Adam Petty and Kenny Irwin had perished in separate crashes at New Hampshire International Speedway.
All summer long, Winston Cup drivers had sent progressively more urgent messages to NASCAR that it had to move more swiftly to improve driver safety.
A week before the Richmond race, when the Winston Cup Series was in Darlington, the drivers were on the edge of revolt. At Darlington on Friday, Bobby Labonte had a violent crash caused by a stuck throttle, the same culprit suspected in the deaths of Petty and Irwin. Labonte was badly shaken, though not seriously injured.
Four top Winston Cup drivers - Jeff Gordon, Rusty Wallace, Dale Jarrett and Jeff Burton - blistered NASCAR at Darlington, accusing the sanctioning body of dragging its feet on safety. In a series where seldom is heard a discouraging word, at least not within earshot of the media, it was remarkable to see top drivers break ranks and lambaste NASCAR. There was even talk of a potential strike by the drivers.
On Saturday, NASCAR President Mike Helton hosted a press conference to discuss the issue of safety, but it turned into a P.R. nightmare. Helton, who tried to maintain the company line that all was well, got savaged by reporters, just as NASCAR had been by the drivers.
During the week leading up to Richmond, the media printed and broadcast story upon story suggesting that NASCAR was doing nothing, or at least not enough, while drivers were dying.
Against that backdrop of tension and ill will, the Winston Cup Series moved to Richmond the following week.
Somewhere between Darlington and Richmond, Earnhardt decided he was going to end the safety controversy himself. Earnhardt was both fiercely loyal to NASCAR CEO Bill France, Jr., and keenly aware of the dangers of racing, and he didn’t appreciate the other drivers mouthing off about it.
So Earnhardt decided he’d stage a min press conference at Richmond. Inside Earnhardt's trailer were newspaper beat writers David Poole of the Charlotte Observer, Monte Dutton of the Gaston Gazette, Henry Miller from Indiana and me, physically large men, all of us.
As Earnhardt walked into the back of his hauler, took one look at us and bellowed, "Goddamnit J.R., I told you to go get me the four biggest writers in racing, not the four fattest asses."
Whereupon everyone broke into laughter for a second, just long enough for Earnhardt to get a hard, cold look in his eye. There's a reason his nickname was "The Intimidator."
"You know what I think about these guys who say racing's too dangerous?" Earnhardt said, the room suddenly totally silent in rapt attention. "I think they're all a bunch of f*****g pussies. If they don't want to race, then they should go home and tie a kerosene rag around their ankles so the ants don't crawl up their legs and chew their candy asses off."
Whew.
From there, Earnhardt only gathered steam, talking about going to poorly equipped rural tracks in the 1960s with his late father, Ralph, and seeing drivers and spectators killed in accidents.
"I started racing, going to races when I was a kid watching my daddy race," Earnhardt said. "He raced at some damn race tracks that were dangerous, where if you wrecked, you went head-on into the f*****g fence post and stuff would drive through your car.
"I mean I've seen it all. I've seen a train rail track come through the pits in Columbia, South Carolina and cut a man's legs off. The car hit and come spinning through the pits and cut the man's legs off, cut him down like a toothpick.
"It's not a totally safe situation anywhere you race. I accepted that when I came into racing," Earnhardt concluded.
The following week, the same newspapers that had been ripping NASCAR over safety all carried stories about Earnhardt ripping his fellow drivers.
With that, the driver rebellion ended. Although Winston Cup racing had many stars, Earnhardt was its unquestioned leader. What he said was law and he single-handedly quelled the biggest insurrection in Winston Cup since the Talladega fiasco of 1969.
None of us could have imagined that five months later, we'd be hearing Helton say at Daytona, "We lost Dale Earnhardt." The irony was not lost on us that the man you’d gotten his fellow drivers to shut up about safety lost his own life in a crash, which in turn accelerated NASCAR‘s safety push. Even in death, Earnhardt set the agenda.
Of course, you wouldn’t have known all that watching “3,” because it was a made-for-TV movie, albeit a very good one. The trouble is, Earnhardt the man really was a character bigger than you could create. And way too big to be captured on
If only he were here to cuss out Nascar now!
Ping to a couple stories posted above.
The J.R. one is quite good re: Sr.
Damn.
thanks.
Unofficial Race Report: Fontana
Date Created: 25 Feb, 2005, 04:47 PM
Today's Unofficial Race Report comes to you from a cruising altitude of 41,000 feet, where the discussions up until now have ranged from girls to custom cars to the possibility of California breaking off into the ocean. And, more importantly, if California did break off into the ocean, would it take Hawaii with it?
It's a long trip back to North Carolina, so I've got my trusty Mac Powerbook up and running. Jimmy Elledge, crew chief of the #41 Target team, is now playing Texas Hold 'Em on his computer. Dale Jr., donning a ratty Cleveland Indians baseball cap, is whistling the theme song to Dallas as he pops in a DVD of season one of the longtime running TV series. J.R. Rhodes is reading the latest issue of US Weekly.
We have one other passenger with us -- Killer the Dog -- but he presently is up in the pilot's cabin enjoying the company of the two gentlemen flying this airplane, a nauseous fact to say the least. It should make for quite an interesting obituary if Killer mistakens the throttle for a milkbone.
"I was haulin' ass there at the beginning," he says to his sister Kelley -- also Jimmy's wife -- on the phone. "I went from like 40th to 25th in no time and was comin'!"
An unofficial pause in this report to laugh hysterically at Killer, who has since made his way back from the pilot's cabin and is fighting hard to stay awake, but it's not working. We laugh as we watch his eyes grow heavy, his head start to lean, and his body nearly crumble off the seat. He catches himself, wakes back up, and acts like he meant to resituate himself, much like the guy in the back of the classroom who could never stay awake in class.
* Wonderful news from the pilot -- it's snowing in Charlotte. Ought to make for a semi-adventurous landing. Killer, get up there and see if you can help your boys out.
It's really terrible, I agree!!
I hate their commercials for this show too, the music hurts my ears.
Poker tournament Nascar drivers...
SPEED broadcast schedule:
April 7 (9 p.m. ET, 1 hour)
April 14 (9 p.m. ET, 1 hour)
April 28 (9 p.m. ET, 1 hour)
May 5 (9 p.m. ET, 1 hour)
May 12 (9 p.m. ET, 1 hour)
May 19 (9 p.m. ET, 1 hour)
June 2 (8 p.m. ET, 2 hours)
Cool! Wish I was playing alongside them!
I'll be watchin' to get a feel for their mindset.
HEY, I'm up to 42nd!!!!!!!!! I match our league rank. For a bunch of race fans, we sure are lacking. :(
Honestly, I think they have more to worry about from the roads than the bad boys. Unless one of them is a Nascar fan and wants a REAL car as as souvenir.
Qualifying is still scheduled for Friday in Texas, no "happy hour" is listed.
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