May 28, 2008 - Royally Speaking

We all love a good list, especially in this interactive age where folks can press a button and poo-poo your said list with impunity.

As a matter of fact, NSSN has a special section coming out celebrating the history of midget racing and including the top midget driver of all time. Fans and readers sent in their thoughts and nominations, which were considered by a panel of pretty knowledgeable people. No matter who is No. 1 (I know, but I’m not telling), there will be substantive arguments for someone else, and that’s great. These lists are supposed to generate a discussion.

With that in mind, let’s look at the list of drivers put together by a panel of ESPN experts last week, ranking drivers from all disciplines, 1-25. And I was OK with everything until I got to No. 6 and found Richard Petty.

No. 6? The King? No. 6?

Now, I’m not saying Petty should be No. 1 — I’ll go with A.J. Foyt (who was also on the panel) on top of the list.

When you’re comparing drivers of different eras and different disciplines, there has to be room for conjecture, but the numbers clearly put Petty at the top of any group of NASCAR drivers, including — with all due respect — Dale Earnhardt, Sr. Earnhardt was ranked No. 3, which I suppose is symmetrical.

This is not an anti-Earnhardt rant. It may be a Ruth-Gehrig-type argument, but the numbers leave no doubt as to who the best was in Yankee-dom or in this case.

Even if we are considering some sort of off-track impact, Petty arguably has the edge. No one has embraced the fans more, setting the tone for all the drivers than have come after him.

But there is no arguing this: Petty won 200 races, 95 more than David Pearson in second place and 124 more than Earnhardt. He won seven Cup championships (tied with Earnhardt). He won the Daytona 500 seven times (nobody else is close.) In NASCAR’s record book, Petty owns 12 of the series’ 18 more significant records altogether and shares two of the others.

He certainly raced much longer than Earnhardt and for several of those years when NASCAR ran around 50 races a year. But had Earnhardt lived, he would not have raced long enough to come close to Petty’s victory total.

It’s not as if Petty was beating up on inferior competition in the 1960s. Do names such as Pearson, Fred Lorenzen, Fireball Roberts, Buddy Baker, Tiny Lund and Curtis Turner sound familiar?

Against a lot of those guys in 1967, Petty had the greatest season of any NASCAR driver — and maybe of any driver in any discipline. He won 27 races, including 10 in a row (starting at Bowman Gray Stadium and ending at North Wilkesboro) with 18 poles.

In the so-called “modern era” of racing (since 1972), Petty won four of his seven championships — under three different scoring formats. In that era, Petty beat the likes of Darrell Waltrip, a matured Cale Yaborough and a young guy named Earnhardt.

I know Earnhardt is a sentimental favorite for so many. I liked him, and I miss him particularly on testing days at Indianapolis, when I’d hang out in his garage, waiting for the lunch break.

“C’mon, let’s walk,” he’d nod, and we’d take off toward his hauler, walking and talking about most everything.

He was great, yes.

But Petty is the King. The name, and the numbers say so, all of them except that No. 6.

May 21, 2008 - Making My Indy Pick

Everybody who has been to the Indy 500 remembers their first one — unless that first time was part of a drunken stupor in the infamous Snake Pit.

Mine came late in life. I was in my first year as a sports columnist based in Indianapolis for a chain of papers in Hoosier-land. I grew up in the South, so open-wheel racing was mostly a curiosity, though I had covered an Indy Lights race in Savannah, Ga. in 1996.

Three years later, I’m at Indianapolis and some of those same faces from the Savannah race, including Helio Castroneves and Tony Kanaan, had also graduated to “the Greatest Spectacle in Racing.”

Believe it or not, the IRL and Indy 500 actually came to be without Danica Patrick. If she was there, she was a teen-aged spectator.

I went into media row, which was then located in the stands along the front stretch. The start of the race — Jim Nabors and I talked about this a couple of weeks ago (which was a treat in itself) — was my Indy 500 moment, the one I won’t forget.

Diluted field? Better drivers over in CART? None of it mattered when a half-million people started to cheer and made the hair stand up on my arms and neck.

Kenny Brack, driving for A.J. Foyt, won that day as Robby Gordon ran out of gas about a mile from the checkers.

I had picked Greg Ray, who was bullet fast, but could never last for 500 miles at Indy.

Lesson learned.

Some guys just know their way around Indy and know how to get to the finish line.

Over the next couple of years, Castroneves would win two Indy 500s. I was with him at a banquet after he won his first championship and reminded him that I’d picked him to win the Savannah race all those years ago.

He asked if I’d picked him to win Indy.

I’d picked Jeff Ward, who was runner-up to Brack in 1999 and had been fast all month in 2000, and ‘fessed up. Helio shook his head.

“You should’ve picked me,” he said with that Helio smile.

I told him I wouldn’t make the same mistake again. He’s been close this year all over the place, but he knows his way around Indy.

That’s why he’s my pick to win his third Indy 500.

May 14, 2008 - Fans Coming To Sarah's Rescue

My old friend Bob Kravitz, sports columnist for the Indianapolis Star, brought it to light recently that Sarah Fisher’s contracted sponsors for the 2008 IndyCar Series season had reneged on their deal.

That would be Florida-based Gravity Entertainment, the parent company of ResQ Energy Drink, and ResQ.

Without funds for May and the two other races Fisher’s fledgling race team had planned on running, fans of the three-time IRL Most Popular Driver winner have attempted to come to the rescue, so to speak. Fans have raised money, handing Fisher personal checks and cash at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway.

It would appear that energy drinks are this decade’s dot-com. Here’s what happens: Some small company gets some capital, a recipe and starts to produce an “energy drink” with the hopes of being first distributed and then bought by one of the big soda or food companies such as Pepsi or Coke.

The moral of that story is, of course, to get cash up front.

Fisher and her husband, Andy O’Gara, risked their life savings on Sarah Fisher Racing. Gravity Entertainment treated that like a punchline in one of its supposed movie productions.

Fisher told the Associated Press that her alleged sponsors were irritated when her fans started calling their offices with complaints about their non-payment. Though she made it clear that she did not ask for that to happen, she added nicely that she was a little "irritated, too." Nice.

Kravitz suggested Fisher needed a collection agency. I’m thinking maybe she needs a little muscle, if you know what I mean.

Seriously, I hope the folks at Gravity and ResQ keep their kneecaps intact. But I also hope the race fans they hoped to reach — and did reach with a big splash when signing on with Fisher — remember their names and act accordingly.

Then, one day, I hope the powers that be in those companies find their checkbooks. After all, a January announcement on the company’s Web site proclaims the start of a NASCAR Sprint Cup team to begin a very limited schedule this year.

If you thought it was tough to write a check for May in Indianapolis, just get a load of what it will cost to go Cup racing.

I’ll be holding my breath for your big debut.

In the meantime, Fisher has scrambled and found a couple of sponsors for Indy, including IUPUI’s new race-engineering program and Kansas-based Hartman Oil.

Fans can help, too.

Just follow this link to Fisher’s site and you’ll find instructions for making donations.

For the price of an energy drink or two, you can help someone who deserves it.

May 7, 2008 - Getting The Picture With T.

When you cover stock-car races these days — or any time over the past 50 years — one of the bonuses is getting to see T. Taylor Warren.

A lot of NASCAR fans wouldn’t know T. Taylor Warren if he hit them with his camera, but he is THE photographer in NASCAR, starting with an old-school medium-format camera in the 1940s and moving right along into the Car of Tomorrow era with a high-tech Nikon digital SLR.

He took what is still the most significant photo in NASCAR history — the photo finish that eventually named Lee Petty the winner of the first Daytona 500 when he edged Johnny Beauchamp at the wire.

I had the chance to eavesdrop on an interview Warren did with Martinsville Bulletin sports writer Drew Eary after Warren had been presented the H. Clay Earles Award, which is given to persons making an impact on NASCAR through their life’s work, and the Doug Agee Award, which is given annually at Martinsville in honor of Agee, who helped forge the longstanding partnership between Martinsville and Goody’s.

Like our own Chris Economaki, Warren has probably forgotten more about racing than most of us will ever know.

At 83, slowing down doesn’t seem to be much of an option for him either — this, despite a small stroke he suffered a short time ago. Warren braved an unexpected chilly weekend in Martinsville. A few weeks later, I caught up with him again at Rockingham for the ARCA Carolina 500 as Rockingham Speedway reopened. No doubt, Warren was there the first time “The Rock” opened its doors, it’s only fitting that he would be there for the second.

But why do it?

“In your early days you had to keep coming back,” Warren told Eary. “If you shot one (event) you had to bring (the photos) back next race to peddle them. Now it’s the people that I meet and my friends that I know at the track.”

I’m roughly half his age, and Warren is an inspiration — as he should be for just about anybody. I hope to be that vital at that age. I hope to still be doing something I love. As an amateur photographer of sorts, I'm amazed that he is still looking for great pictures through his viewfinder week-in and week-out — and getting them.

And the next one may be the best yet.