March 25, 2008 - Get New Era Started Right

The IndyCar Series season will finally get under way Saturday night at Homestead-Miami Speedway.

The American race fan will get its first look at the unified open-wheel racing world. Twenty-six cars are entered in the event, with representatives from the former Champ Car World Series now joining the IndyCar Series mainstays. For the record 17 cars will come from IRL teams, with the remaining nine fielded by transitioning teams from Champ Car.

While we, and most everyone else, expects the Team Penske, Target Chip Ganassi Racing and Andretti Green Racing to continue to dominate the series, at least through the early part of the season, Newman-Haas Racing and KV Racing should get up to speed in a hurry and be contenders by the time Indianapolis rolls around.

But it’s Homestead in prime time on Saturday night, and it will be an important race for the series and its competitors, as corporate America and the ticket-buying fans of both open-wheel series will experience the amped up IndyCar Series for the first time.

And the IRL knows it and is promoting the race as “a new era for open-wheel racing.” That’s a good approach, but no doubt the series will need to deliver.

It’s a fact that is not lost on the competitors.

“I’m extremely excited about having one series again,” said two-time Indy 500 winner Helio Castroneves. “I have always been outspoken about that. One strong open-wheel series is going to be the best for everyone, not only for the drivers, not only for the teams, not only for the press, but especially for all the fans.”

The series will need the close finish it got in 2006 when Dan Wheldon beat Helio Castroneves by .0147 seconds, not the more than six-second romp that Wheldon enjoyed in 2007.

A good finish with plenty of close racing among drivers from several teams would go along way toward the continued success of the series.

March 18, 2008 - Good Sports?

I’m not just an auto racing enthusiast, like many NSSN readers, I am a fan of other sports. Has anyone noticed that coverage of sports on television, the Internet and even in print media like NSSN, rarely has anything to do with what happened on the race track or on the field.

Baseball. It’s steroids first, then somewhere after the obligatory mentions of Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens comes the recap of what happened on the field.

In football, it is video-taping the other team from the sideline.

It seems only in recent years that it has been labeled “cheating,” and athletes are ostracized for it. In baseball, players have always stolen signs from the opposition and catchers have always framed the strike zone in an attempt to get marginal calls from umpires.

At the race track, competitors have always looked for new ways to make their cars go faster, exploring “gray areas” in rule books. Only since racing has gained national media exposure like other sports has it become looked down upon.

To me it’s sad, no matter how many games Roger Clemens has won in his career, most will remember him as a cheater, and no matter how many championships Chad Knaus wins in NASCAR, his legacy will be similar.

And, I for one, can not get past the irony that in a country where the President openly lies to the people, that the rules violations of athletes receive as much attention as anything else.

It seems we may never again read about a dominant performance of a pitcher, or of a racing team, without wondering if the athlete or the car in the case of motorsports, were on the up and up.

And that’s a little bit sad.

March 11, 2008 - From The Mailbag

Wendt asks if “NSSN is a racing paper or an anti-racing publication?” His complant — “the complainers.” Wendt, who says he’s been active in racing for 52 years, accurately observes that most of what is written in the Public Forum section and many of the columns in NSSN have a negative tone.

Well, I think in today’s society people like to complain. They would rather talk about the five things that are wrong than the 10 things that are right. I think we in the media, whether we cover auto racing, football or the Presidential campaign, need to do a better job of reporting the positives as well as the negatives.

I also believe that many NSSN readers and writers are stuck in the 1950s and 1960s and are convinced things were better then. In many ways, they probably were. We get hundreds of letters complaining about television coverage, years ago there was no television coverage to complain about, so some should clearly stop and ask themselves which way do I want it.

But it’s controversy and complaining that gets people to watch TV and in part gets them to read our Public Forum section. If you think the letters in Public Forum are from complainers, you should see some of them that don’t see print — and a few of the columns for that matter.

And some of the things that race fans can come up with to complain about are amazing. Right now, we have a letter claiming Darrell Waltrip has been bought and paid for by Toyota; we have one complaining about Kyle Petty’s pony tail; and several that compare Tony George to — Well, to quote “Saturday Night Live’s” famed Church Lady: “Satan.”

There’s a pile that hate NASCAR for one reason or another, which in most cases boils down to an unwillingness to accept change, whether it be The Chase, Toyota or the Car of Tomorrow.

From the creative side, one writer calls Jack Roush the Rat in the Hat, and another says Kasey Kahne deserves duds, not Buds.

Wendt is not the only writer questioning the “complainers.”

Buddy Gutierrez of Tampa, writes “I get it. Some people don’t like anything about NASCAR the way it is today. What I don’t get is why they keep watching races on TV, going to the race tracks, listening to races on the radio, and complaining to NSSN.”

How does Wendt suggest the racing community deal with the drastic changes in the sport which cause many of the complaints? His closing line reads, “Quit complaining, let’s race.”

March 4, 2008 - What's In A Name? A Lot, Really

One wonders if the good sense shown (finally!) among the open-wheel racing contingent by forming a single unified open-wheel series, will have some kind of effect on those running other racing organizations around the country.

In some cases, it may not require unification as much as a clarification. Case in point, the confusion that follows the ASA brand. Now, I know that the ASA Late Model Series is run out of Michigan by Ron Varney and that ASA Racing is operated by Dennis Huth out of Daytona Beach, Fla.

The ASA Late Model Series sanctions the ASA Late Model Series Challenge Series and the ASA Late Model Series North and South divisions. Meanwhile, in addition to its membership track program, ASA Racing sanctions the ASA Midwest Tour, ASA Southeast Asphalt Tour and ASA Northwest Tour. All six of those series run late-model stock cars with similar rules packages.

As well, the logos for the two organizations are similar and some drivers compete in both divisions. Whenever we at NSSN receive communication (press releases, etc.) from either organization, we have to stop and think, “Now, which one is this.” If we’re confused, so must be the fans, particularly in the Midwest where the ASA Midwest Tour and the ASA Late Model Series share common ground.

Wouldn’t it make more sense if the two organizations had two completely different names. After all both do terrific work and put great products on the track, which would make them successful under any name.

Oh, and in case you’ve forgotten, these two organizations have sued one another over the use of the ASA name, which was made profitable by ASA founder Rex Robbins.