motorsportmania

#NASCAR – So Smoke does it again, even if Carl did run him hard on what seems to be a Ford track. Good to see the top two finish one and two though. Phoenix and Homestead to go now and only three points in it at the top. Not going to jinx either guy by making predictions here, so good luck to both.

The big news of the weekend was Ugly Brother jnr. Now we don’t like the Busch boys here simply because of this kind of thing. Ugly Bro snr upset us way back when he punted Mr Excitement out of the way to win at Dover (and got a punch in the face for his trouble – see that’s the way to settle these things, face to face, not on the track). So what’s our take on events in the truck race?

Well, he lost his temper and wrecked The Sheriff good and proper. Now that was wrong in any way that you want to look at it: This is racing, not a demolition derby for a start. Two people have died in top-level racing in recent weeks for goodness sake, so don’t wreck someone on purpose. Next up he did under caution! We think that NASCAR did the right thing here in sending out a message that this sort of behaviour is unacceptable.

Now we don’t like these two boys as we say, but we do respect their abilities as race car drivers. Both are good at what they do when they run clean, and the younger one especially so. Look at his win record. OK so he has been racking up a lot of these in the trucks and the Nationwide where you could argue that there is less opposition, but the kid can drive and race. We’d like to see what he could do with an F1 car, but he needs to curb that temper. Road rage is just not on anywhere.

We also do respect the apology that he put out. He’s not stupid either, and he let down his crew, his fans and sponsors as well as his family and himself on Friday night. Just because we don’t like him doesn’t mean that we don’t feel for him. At a time when the sport is still reeling from recent tragedies what he did was really dumb and adds ammunition for people who oppose the sport that we all love and that provides him with a good living. We sincerely hope that he has learned his lesson and can go forward with that great talent harnessed to winning races and championships the right way.

As a closer to this, rather lengthy, round-up, we’d also like to be critical of NASCAR a little. Yes they did they right thing in parking KB, but they do encourage rivalries to hype up the racing. It is hard to draw the line as to what is and what isn’t acceptable, but there is no way that they should be allowing these people to use their cars as weapons against one another. If they really want to create something for “the show”, put a ring up on the grass by the front stretch after ever race and put any pairs who want to square up in there, helmets off, to sort it out like men in front of the crowd. Or they could just shake hands and walk away….

Filed under: Drivers, NASCAR, Tin Tops | Tagged: autoracing, media, motorsport, NASCAR, racecar | Leave a comment »