In harm's way

By DAVID GREEN

Everybody knows poor Jimmy Watts by now. Most of us probably agree that chasing that errant tire out into the infield grass between Atlanta Motor Speedway's pit road and front straightaway was a bad idea.

Some of us are old enough to remember when pit road was part of the front straightaway at major speedways such as Indianapolis and Darlington. We also remember the crowd of photographers, journalists and others who crowded into the grassy area inside Daytona's trioval at the start of the inaugural Daytona 500.

Those old days were plenty dangerous. It's a wonder we never had a major catastrophe before they started clearing that trioval area, and there were more than a few tragedies on curbside pit roads, including a triple fatality at Darlington in 1960.

I offer no advice to NASCAR on how it is handling the matter of Watts' status as a pit crew member. However, I think they might have handled the incident a little differently as it affected the race.

It's part of the game if one car or a handful of cars benefit or become victims of a serendipitous caution flag that waves for a competition incident. That's racin'.

However, when there's an artificial cause for the yellow -- such as Watts' ill-advised decision -- I think the impact on the race should be mitigated.

Freeze the running order; let cars that were going to pit in the next few laps go ahead and do so. Give back the lap lost by drivers who pitted under green just before the incident. Restart the race with the cars that were in contention lined up in similar positions to where they were before the sequence of events during which the race was interrupted.

Sure, that would require judgments to be made by race officials. They should be capable. I don't usually have many good things to say about basketball officials, but the crew working the Oklahoma-Oklahoma State game in the Big 12 tournament Thursday sure got it right when the timekeeper screwed up. They used common sense and declared the game over, after a very brief check of video replays.

For the record, I think Kurt Busch would've won anyway. He had a great car and a great day. This is about making sure that a deserving driver is not unfairly penalized by actions necessitated by something that is outside the bounds of normal racing action. I believe some were victimized at Atlanta.

It's not that big a deal. It happens very infrequently. Besides Watts' bad decision, I can remember only a few incidents -- the time at Pocono when the drunk fan ran across the track in front of the oncoming cars of Kyle Petty and Davey Allison, or the time when, during an ASA event in Anderson, Ind., an idiot roared onto the track in his Corvette just past the halfway mark of a 400-lap race.

I still think it deserves consideration as part of race policy.