New twist to an old feeling

By DAVID GREEN

In some five decades as a race fan/journalist/competitor, I can't remember a pre-season quite like this one.

I can't help feeling some of the same old anticipatory eagerness, the yearning to hear a high-performance engine straining to its limits, to see the flash of familiar and new colors, to smell the intoxicating aromas of motor sport, to feel the resonance of the high-decibel noise levels in my body's tissues (and the quivering caused by my own involuntary response to all that sensory stimuli).

At the same time, I am anxious and concerned -- about the state of the economy in general, and about the effect it's already having on racing.

I guess the only other time that compares would be 1971-72, when the sport was facing the loss of participation by the auto manufacturers. I wasn't old enough to remember the 1957 withdrawal of the car companies, but I know the sport wasn't quite as big or as dependent on factory support then as it was in the early '70s.

But in '71-72, I was just getting my own racing efforts under way, and while I noticed what was going on in Grand National racing, I was more concerned about the local dirt track.

There was also the distraction of my status with the Selective Service. For those who are old enough to remember, my draft lottery number was the same as my racecar -- 27.

I remember the transition, about a decade later, from big cars to mid-sized ones. There was, if I remember, almost as much controversy then as there has been about the COT.

The crux of this pre-season's discontent is both internal and external. Dissatisfaction with the sport is evident in online forums such as this one, but would be signaled also by the lower attendance and television viewer numbers that have been reported the past two seasons. And then there's the recession.

It's impossible for me to determine just how serious this economic dilemma is going to be -- whether it's going to be October 1929 redux, or whether the U.S. and the global economy are strong and resilient enough to just keep rolling.

For sure, hard times have already hit thousands of out-of-work people, within the racing community and in the overall job market. But the question remains, just how bad is it going to get?

Within the racing community, the signals are just as mixed. On one hand we hear business-as-almost-usual optimism; from other sources, we hear there may be as few as 32 entries for the Daytona 500. At this stage, it's hard to determine the validity of either extreme position.

So, all we can do is wait.

The anticipation is there, just like it has been for all these years. But it has a little different feeling this time.