Well, it looks like the question I asked in my last paragraph last week was answered rather quickly. NASCAR indeed had second thoughts about their new policy on lug nuts.
Of course, this change of heart occurred after Tony Stewart raked them over the coals about it and they saw fit to fine him $35,000. Does their change in policy mean he doesn’t have to pay the fine? I’m sure it doesn’t.
The Driver's Council voted to pay the fine for him but Smoke has since said he didn’t want them to do that, asking NASCAR to give the $35K to charity instead. Word is that it will go to Autism Delaware; I guess Tony intends to pay the "donation" himself. Let’s see, that would be 3,500,000 pennies, right? Sounds like something Tony would do, but I think they’ve instituted a rule against paying your fine in pennies since Rusty Wallace had 500,000 pennies delivered to them several years ago.
I keep wondering what all this sudden crawfishing on NASCAR’s part means – “Hey, Tony, you were right, but we still don’t like you telling us we’re wrong.”
Don’t expect that to happen.
Kind of reminds me of an incident back in the early 1950s. I was still a teenager and I heard the information from a pretty good source (someone close to the officials) during a sprint car race at Salem.
This incident was before AAA dropped race sanctioning (after the 1955 season). Seems Troy Ruttman was suspended the week before by their Contest Board for calling AAA “…a son of a b***h organization.”
I noticed Troy was there with his car, and was practicing, so I asked my source what happened. This was before I knew anything about an appeals process.
“Well,” he said, “They called him in and asked him if he really said it, and he admitted that he had. They lifted the suspension, they said, because he told the truth.”
I walked away wondering if he’d told the truth by admitting he said it, or by saying it in the first place.
Paying due diligence by paying attention to the IndyCar race at Barber Motorsports Park Sunday I was interested in the problems Simon Pagenaud had getting around Conor Daly. The jam-up allowed Graham Rahal to gain ground on Pagenaud and quickly make a race of it.
Daly was the last car on the lead lap and was doing his best to not get lapped. It’s my understanding that the “layover” flag is merely advisory if the car it’s being shown to is still on the lead lap, but that car is obligated to move over if he or she is a lap down.
I had to get a kick out of Pagenaud’s comment later in the week that maybe IndyCar should take a look at NASCAR’s “Lucky Dog” rule for cases like this one.
As it turned out, Rahal got close enough to challenge, actually taking the lead after bumping Pagenaud approaching Turn 8, sending the leader off course. Rahal kept his car fairly straight and took over the top spot. Pagenaud said Rahal initiated the contact; Rahal said Pagenaud blocked him.
The three-man group of stewards saw it as hard competition with the race on the line and less than ten laps left.
Rahal said, “That’s racing.”
Pagenaud commented, “He gave me a good piece of driving. It was amazing from him, and I have to put my hat off for that.” He later added, “That was a late pass, not a corner where you can pass. I went off but in the end it made me really upset. I have to say I said I was going to pass him back, and that’s what we did.”
Pagenaud got the lead back after drawing alongside Rahal as they were in Turn 5 and they came up on Jack Hawksworth, who was at that point the last car on the lead lap. Already driving a mishandling car because the right side of his front wing had been damaged, Rahal apparently misjudged the slower car and broke off the left side.
As you can imagine, this made his car even more squirrelly with virtually no front downforce. As uncontrollable as it was, Rahal still hung on to finish second.
Personally, I thought it was great entertainment.
The next race on the schedule is also a road race, held at Indianapolis Motor Speedway on Saturday, May 14.
I can hardly wait.
Speaking of entertainment, I did manage to catch a replay of Carl Edwards’ “bump and run” on Kyle Busch on the last lap of the Sprint Cup race at Richmond Sunday.
Carl said later he would have expected the same kind of move from Kyle if the positions had been reversed. Kyle wouldn’t even discuss it.
The next race on the schedule is Talladega. Don’t expect any recriminations there. As a matter of fact, I suspect owner Joe Gibbs has already had long talks with both drivers.
This one also reminded me of a past incident… I was announcing at I-75 Speedway near Mt. Vernon, Ky. back in 2002 and there was a great race going on in the Late Model feature between Robbie Brown of Corbin, a local favorite, and the late Chris Harmon of Louisville, an old friend of mine.
Coming off Turn 4 on the last lap, Chris nudged Robbie just enough to get him out of the way. At the time it happened, knowing Chris, I was surprised that he would want to win that way, but he proved I was right about him. He backed off, let Robbie regain control, and accepted second place.
I explained to the crowd that he just wasn’t that kind of driver.
He told me later, “I didn’t want to win it that way, but I wanted him to know I could have.”