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Danica still a work in progress in the IRL

By DAVID GREEN

Five years have flown past since Danica Patrick burst onto the scene by becoming the first woman to lead the Indianapolis 500. "Danica Mania" has cooled a bit, but the 27-year-old is still one of American auto racing's hottest commodities.

For sure, there's anything but a consensus about Patrick's talents as a driver. She is without a doubt pretty good; you just don't go out and lead the Indy 500 and finish fourth as a rookie without having some idea of what the job entails.

Critics, though, have plenty to work with. She has only one career victory; she has moved from team to team, always seeming to have conflicts with one group and opting for greener pastures elsewhere; she is confrontational with competitors and even teammates and can be testy with the media.

All that aside, she is one of the top commodities in sport right now.

The IRL IndyCar Series is in NASCAR country at Richmond (Va.) International Raceway tonight, and Danica's visit comes at a time of great curiosity about her future. A NASCAR ride is one of the possibilities fans are pondering.

In Paul Woody's story in the Richmond Times-Dispatch, the writer concludes that Danica should take advantage of the chance to switch to NASCAR.

Here's hoping that she doesn't.

I hate it that big-time racing has evolved past the point at which drivers could try their hand in other series without turning their backs completely on others. But that's the world we live and race in nowadays. That makes decisions such as the one Patrick is facing so much more important.

Dario Franchitti was fortunate to come out of his NASCAR struggle with a top IRL ride. I'm convinced Franchitti is a better driver than his NASCAR resume suggests. The number of people who have excelled in multiple disciplines of motor sport is very small indeed. But his stock car racing endeavor was a flop.

The bottom line is that Danica does not have the kind of success in IndyCars that Franchitti and several others have achieved. Once she conquers the IRL -- by becoming a consistent winner and, if not champion, at least a contender -- then she can take a look at other challenges.

Until then, it's hard to defend charges that she's exploiting her celebrity because she doesn't really have the talent.

I'm one who believes she has talent. Moving to another series would be the worst way to attempt to prove that she does.

The rise and fall (or not) of dictators

By DAVID GREEN

Remember the old days, when Bruton Smith would grumpily suggest that an alternative to NASCAR might be a good thing for stock car racing, and made veiled threats (or promises, if you prefer) that he might be the one to start a new series?

Remember what happened a little more than a dozen years ago, when Tony George did what Bruton talked about doing and started his own IndyCar series in competition with CART?

Well, now Formula One faces the prospect of a breakaway series.

What were Bruton's complaints, other than the prospect of lost revenues for races NASCAR would not grant to the Speedway Motorsports Inc. chairman, who then had to purchase tracks such as North Wilkesboro and Rockingham to move their races to his new speedways?

To sum it up, dictatorial leadership of NASCAR.

Indeed, the sanctioning body had all but celebrated that fact. Founder Bill France said in an interview not long before his death in 1992, "I may have been a dictator, but I was a benevolent one."

What was Tony George's concern when he formed the breakaway Indy Racing League?

To sum it up, dictatorial leadership of CART -- not by an individual, but by a committee of race team owners.

What are the complaints of Formula One Teams Association (FOTA) members about F1 racing?

To sum it up, dictatorial leadership -- by European auto club president Max Mosley and commercial rights holder Bernie Ecclestone's Formula One Management (FOM).

Ah, those dictators. The most infamous ones would have to be Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin, but we've had many -- Saddam Hussein, to name a more recent figure. Many of them, beginning with Caesar in modern civilization, get their comeuppance.

All these scenarios -- the one that didn't happen in NASCAR, the one that did happen in Indycar racing and the one that looms in F1 -- have a common ingredient, I believe -- arrogance and greed.

As is the case with any discussion such as this one, observers may spin the facts to suit their own opinions. From my standpoint, NASCAR's desire to control a majority of its venues was profit-driven. There's nothing wrong with making a profit, unless you're a hard-line socialist, but it's a fine line between good business and gouging.

Many CART sympathizers will reject this, but I assign primary arrogance and greed in the IndyCar feud to CART's rule by committee. Drivers of the caliber of Jeff Gordon and Tony Stewart couldn't get rides in CART, which -- along with the Indianapolis 500 -- should have been natural career destinations for both. IRL came along too late for Gordon and too late to hang onto Stewart.

It's hard to find a good guy in the F1 debacle, given the obscene amounts of money thrown around in that sport, even in recessionary times. But most observers, I believe, see Mosley as a bogus pervert and their nickname for Ecclestone is the Evil Dwarf (Bernie is a jockey-sized man). The sympathies of most fans, I suspect, are with the glamour teams such as Ferrari and McLaren.

Will FOTA actually go ahead and establish its own breakaway championship? Will it succeed because of its assets (the aforementioned glamour teams), as the IRL did because of Tony George's trump card, the Indy 500?

Would American stock car racing be better off now if Bruton or somebody else had actually gone head-to-head with NASCAR?

Three questions without answers, at this point. We'll have to wait and see about the first two and we can only speculate about the third.

Brand names: Important, or not?

By DAVID GREEN

News of General Motors' termination of support of second-echelon NASCAR racing Friday has elicited some discussion, much of it speculating about the status of factory-backed Chevy teams in the elite Sprint Cup Series.

Friday's news was hardly surprising, except perhaps in that the cutback was limited to Nationwide and Camping World series teams. Chevy was the last of America's Big Three companies to pull the plug on the two lower series, following fiscally faltering Chrysler and the healthiest of the U.S. companies, Ford.

I found an interesting contrast in some of the coverage of this story and reader responses to it. Dale Earnhardt Jr. and Tony Stewart were singled out for expressing their loyalty to Chevrolet, Earnhardt for his insistence on a Chevy ride when he became a NASCAR free agent and Stewart for returning to the GM fold when he left Joe Gibbs Racing after one season in a Toyota.

Both drivers offered thoughtful comments about the state of the economy in general and the financial straits of American auto manufacturers in particular, and Stewart was particularly eloquent in noting the impact of the recession on so many Americans who have lost their jobs.

In stark contrast were the remarks of some readers who dismissed the notion of brand names being significant in today's NASCAR racing, most of them packaged in criticism of the new-generation racing stock car.

So -- do brand names matter, or not?

GM and Chrysler did not go broke because they wasted large sums of money using auto racing as a marketing tool. Some people -- ordinary people, not just guys like Earnhardt and Stewart -- do still have brand preference and they don't care that Jeff Gordon's Monte Carlo never saw an assembly line. The minimum number of pieces of hardware that are Genuine Chevrolet parts are irrelevant. It has a bowtie on it, and that's good enough.

Ditto for many NASCAR fans who drive Ford Explorers or Dodge Ram pickups or Chrysler minivans. They buy into the notion that the car company is interested in the sport they love to watch, if in no other way than helping race teams compete, and that resonates with them.

My suspicion is that there are more of those fans in the upper ranges of the demographic chart measuring age. Younger people with strong brand preference likely grew up in staunch Ford, Chevy or Mopar homes and picked up on the fervor.

I think that's less important to drivers of Toyota Camrys. Toyota got into NASCAR in hopes of changing its image in order to appeal to younger NASCAR fans, or hopefully luring away some of those second- or third-generation fans from brand-oriented families.

The sport and the production automobile have evolved in different directions. I'm very much into nostalgia -- that's why I participate in vintage stock car racing -- and if there were an abundance of 1964-69 vintage Ford Galaxies, Fairlanes and Torinos, Dodge Coronets and Chargers, Plymouth Belvederes and Super Birds, Chevrolet Impalas and Chevelles, I'd be all for replacing the Car of Today with them.

Of course, I'd also be in favor of being 20 or 25 years old again, as long as I could keep all the life lessons I've learned since I was young and dumb. (Yes, I know -- "young and dumb" is a redundancy. My apologies to all you experience-challenged flatbellies out there.)

It's not gonna happen, neither the reappearance of those golden-era racecars nor the loss of my arthritis and about 60 pounds.

So that leaves us with the COT, the fragile state of the traditional U.S. auto industry and modern NASCAR racing. My assessment is that brand names still matter, and are pretty important to some of us, and matter not at all to others.

Mayfield v. NASCAR heats up

By DAVID GREEN

Did he, or didn't he? Or, as some cynics have suggested, does it matter?

Is Jeremy Mayfield a drug user, as NASCAR claims urinalysis results indicate, or not? Does the truth matter?

The pursuit of truth is the mission of the journalist, and quite often it is an elusive, if not impossible, quest.

Prominent among examples of this is the assassination 46 years ago of President John F. Kennedy, the details of which have never been proven to the satisfaction of a good many Americans.

It's a baffling case. One would think NASCAR would never have taken such dramatic action against Mayfield if the sanctioning body did not believe it had an airtight case. At the same time, it's hard to believe Mayfield would be so vehement in his denial of the charges if he did not truly believe himself to be innocent of them.

The obvious extrapolation of that logic is that one side is obviously and completely wrong, regardless of how the litigation turns out.

Just as obviously, whichever side loses stands to lose a great deal.

If NASCAR loses, Mayfield is not likely to let the organization off lightly. His personal and professional reputation has been severely, perhaps irreparably, damaged. That's bad enough for any individual, but especially costly for someone with the public-figure nature of a professional athlete or other celebrity. If I were Mayfield, and I were to win this case, I wouldn't be satisfied until I owned a good chunk of the France family fortune.

If Mayfield loses, he loses what credibility he had left -- and, it seems to me, he leaves himself open to criminal prosecution for any violations of law that might have been involved in acquiring or using whatever substance it is that he's supposed to have used.

That last phrase sums up the rock in my shoe about this whole matter. We still don't even know just what it is that Mayfield is accused of using.

When all is said and done, we still may not know the truth of what happened. But we will know what the legal system has determined to be the truth. And we will know what that has cost the loser.