Too much fun?

By DAVID GREEN

At first blush, I can’t help but agree with surprise Budweiser Shootout winner Kevin Harvick. If you didn’t find this race entertaining, I don’t know what to suggest.

However, I have to confess a good bit of anxiety about the remainder of Daytona Speedweeks. Those cars appear to be a handful to drive.

I’m an old dirt-dobber, so the sight of cars getting sideways and twitchy is no big deal – not at speeds somewhere south of the low 100-mph bracket, that is. At 180-plus, now, that increases the pucker factor exponentially.

Not that it should be easy. Not that any dummy should be able to go out there and do what Harvick and the others did, with as little carnage as they produced. But 28 cars and 75 laps was scary enough. Imagine 43 and 200.

I know this is an apples-and-oranges comparison, but yesterday’s undercard, the ARCA race, provides an example of what I’m feeling. That race featured old-style Cup-type cars, with vertical front airdams and blade spoilers, not the new-generation Sprint Cup Series car. And it included a field of drivers whose experience level hardly compares to that of the Cup journeymen.

Quite often, ARCA events on tracks such as Daytona and Talladega are crash-filled, but even by those standards, yesterday’s 200-miler was a wreck-fest. One of the victims of one of the crashes alluded to the notion that some fans like to see crashes, and he figured those fans got their money’s worth.

In my mind, though, everyone except perhaps the most extremely morbid, blood-lust thrill-seeker would have gotten more than a little frustrated with all the yellow flags.

We won’t dwell on the very scary crash near the end of the race, in which Patrick Sheltra’s car was nailed at high speed by another car driven by Larry Hollenbeck, except to note that the more often these high-speed incidents happen, the more chances there are for one to turn tragic.

I don’t mean to be an alarmist, and I’m not predicting catastrophe. I’m not suggesting NASCAR or anybody “do” anything.

Everything will work itself out. It should be anything but boring.