EternalEmperor.com

With the first night race in Atlanta approaching, there is only one thing for certain on Sunday night.  That would be a chance of a rain delay.  I am starting to see these rain delays and rescheduling of races as a nice reminder of how out of control the real world is.

In our world we sit around happily in control of our lives and our environment, happily ignoring the things we have no control of.  When it comes to racing the multi-million dollar operation that is a weekly televised race is as subject to the whims of the weather as any ancient hunter on the great plains.  We are forced to live at the whims of nature.

I know other sporting events must do the same but really, who watches baseball.  And football only stops the game when there is lightning.  Something about not wanting to see millionaires being lightning rods on live TV.

So, when it comes to Sunday night and I settle back in my recliner ready to watch the first night race I will be ready for the hours of banter and explanations of how long it takes to dry the track.  Even the 10 minute discussion about how the track dryers use jet engines and make the track slick due to the residue from the jet fuel.   It is just part of being a race fan.

And oh, it is a 20% chance of rain right now.

I have long been a proponent for NASCAR racing in the rain.  Ask anyone that has been unfortunate enough to be around me when it starts to rain at a race.  I am ready to admit I was wrong.   There is no need to put on rain tires and a windshield wiper to have $100,000 racing cars smash into each other.  It is not good racing, it is just luck.  While it might be fun for a demolition derby fan that was a horrible end to a race, Sunday.

The drivers and fans would have been better served by a 1 hour delay and drying the track than to have the wreck fest ensue.  I am sure Carl Edwards would differ, since he won, but he might be the only one.

Racing in the rain is something that Formula One does well, but even they have silliness when they have to put on the rain tires.

NASCAR is about drivers and pit crews doing their best with equal equipment.  The wet race track just adds too much randomness to the racing.  It gave the ESPN folks a story line to discuss all day.  I am sure they are happy for that.  Actually having to know something about racing is too hard for that crew, so they really come alive when they have some controversy to talk about.  In this case, “Would NASCAR use the rain tires?”

NASCAR big wigs, ignore folks like myself when they say they want to see the racing no matter what.   You should have ended the race or at least delayed it for track drying.  We fans have no idea what we are talking about.

If Suspended NASCAR driver Carl Long is standing helmet in hand at Atlanta Motor Speedway when they come back in the fall, I will drive out there just to help him pay this fine.

The 12 race suspension for an over sized engine being reduced to 8 races does nothing in this case to help the small time driver owner who does not even build the engines he uses. If NASCAR can prove that the oversized engine gave him a competitive advantage then I think the $200,000 fine would be fair.

However he did not make the race, his record is not impressive over his career with an average starting position of only 36.9 and a career winning total of only 1.4 million dollars since 2000. This fine is a death sentence for his race aspirations. I am no expert but it seems to me that the engine manufacturer should have been the one on the hook for all this.

All that said, NASCAR may know something here that they are not telling us, but then NASCAR has always been an overly secretive organization. Their rules are rarely obvious and always open from interpretation, so when they drop the hammer on someone we must assume that this person has done something severely wrong. This kind of corporate secrecy has served the sport well over most of its life, but with the free flow of information today it only seems suspicious.

I will admit that I don’t know Carl’s career as well as I know some of the other drivers, but something about this story seems wrong. A small team being effectively executed because of a problem that requires and engine to be torn down to detect just feels wrong. I have to ask, so what did he do to make NASCAR mad? If they are not mad at him, then they will soon be looking like Formula One with fewer and fewer cars running every race. Small teams will be tossed aside because of shrinking budgets and ridged requirements. More and more microscopic violations will be hard to avoid.

Racing Tales

I decided to put all the NASCAR science fiction stories into a collection called racing tales. The collection is planned out to be:

The Spotter, The Sponsor, The Jackman, and Lifter. There is a possible 5th on but so far that story has not taken shape enough to name. I will put up each story on their own as they are finished in PDF, HTML and Mobi format for the kindle. When the entire collection is complete I am planning to put them in my lulu store and make them available in the Amazon kindle store. If you own a kindle and are not sure how to put a Mobi file on your kindle, drop me an email. I will help you out.