Turn 3

Only as old as you feel

By DAVID GREEN

How about that Hershel McGriff? Eighty-one years young and still going, the 13th-place finisher in Sunday's Camping World West Series race at Portland International Raceway -- the oldest driver to compete in a NASCAR touring series event.

But not by all that much. After all, it was only two years ago that James Hylton, at 72, came very close indeed to qualifying for the Daytona 500. And at 74, he was entered in the Great American Race once again this year.

And anybody who does not recognize the name Charles "Red" Farmer should not, in my opinion, be permitted to call him or herself a NASCAR fan. We don't even know for sure how old Red is, but it's my understanding that when he ran his first race, in 1948 at Opa-locka Speedway near Miami, where he lived then, he was 16. That would make him 77 this year.

However old he is, Red beat up on some of the current Cup stars, winning a heat race and finishing eighth in the feature in the 2005 Prelude to the Dream at Tony Stewart's Eldora Speedway, and I once watched him beat the late, great Dale Earnhardt in a match race at Talladega Short Track. Red still races at TST.

Bobby Allison -- one of Red's colleagues in the famous "Alabama Gang" -- won the Daytona 500 at age 50 in 1988, just a few months before the crash at Pocono ended his career. Harry Gant had some of his greatest Cup Series success after turning 50.

About 12 years ago, "the racing farmer," Johnny Johnson of West Burlington, Iowa, got his first victory in the old NASCAR Busch All-Star Series for dirt late models -- at age 60.

I guess one reason I'm writing this is because of the attention 59-year-old Tom Watson got for his performance in the British Open this past weekend. Another is my participation in vintage stock car racing with the Kentucky Vintage Racing Association.

Most pertinently, though, I'm closer in age to all those guys -- even Hershel -- than I am to Kyle Busch and Joey Logano, and I feel compelled, in this youth-obsessed society, to brag on the old dogs a little bit.

Keep on keepin' on, boys!

Double your pleasure, double your pain

By DAVID GREEN

Double-file restarts -- a good thing, or a bad thing? Depends on your perspective. If you're a fan, chances are you love it. If you're a driver who benefits from it, ditto. If you're a driver who gets the short end of the double-file restart stick, or a fan of such a driver, well...

Reaction has been overwhelmingly positive to NASCAR's change of the restart procedure. Last weekend's race at Chicagoland Speedway brought out the first significant controversy stemming from the new procedure when Denny Hamlin made a banzai move from his outside second-row starting spot, splitting front row starters Brian Vickers and race leader Jimmie Johnson.

The result? Mark Martin took a lead he would never relinquish. Johnson, who prior to that time had established himself as the race favorite, became involved in a crash that took out him and Kurt Busch.

In an Observer follow-up story, "Everybody just started running into each other and it’s just stupid," said Busch’s crew chief, Pat Tryson. “That’s what everybody wants to see and they got what they wanted."

Is that, in fact, what NASCAR fans want to see? There's plenty of evidence to suggest that is precisely the case.

I've always believed that while there are some (perhaps a good many) race fans with a lust for wrecks, many (hopefully, most) of them want to see hard-fought competition that does not turn into chaotic carnage.

Double-file restarts certainly produce the hard-fought competition. Sometimes they also produce the chaos.

I'm not so sure that the format is to blame, though. Regardless of the rules or circumstances, it is up to the drivers to drive their cars.

Under the old format, Hamlin would've had no opportunity to make the move he made. If Johnson did not make a clean getaway on the restart, the driver on the outside of the second row would've had the same opportunity Hamlin had and could conceivably have made a move to the inside of Johnson after the two cars crossed the start-finish line.

The move might have been even easier, as the car on the inside of Johnson would have been (a) lagging behind the leader's pace and (b) in all likelihood, slower than the race leader.

The mayhem might or might not have ensued.

All things considered, I give the double-file restart procedure a thumbs-up. The best thing about the change is that it got the "tail end" cars where they belong -- at the tail end. And with the lucky dog rule, there's no good reason for lapped cars to get any opportunity to make up a lost lap via an up-front starting spot.

The format may put drivers in a position to create wrecks. But it's still up to them whether to do it or not.

Quality of product

By DAVID GREEN

Previously on Turn 3...

The matter of a crisis of leadership was the primary topic. We were to resume our discussion, focusing on the quality of product, yesterday, but I'm a day late in doing so. No excuses, other than sloth.

Turns out that may be a good thing, though, because Saturday night's Coke Zero 400 gave us good material to use in discussing the quality of the NASCAR product. It was the gol-durndest finish to a race I've ever seen, and I have seen quite a few of them.

I shouldn't have to sell the notion of races not being entertaining in this venue. A majority of the posts I read on this subject are critical. It is a topic of discussion among all major forms of racing except the straight-line form, and this is the first time I can remember that Formula One, IndyCar and NASCAR were all suffering from such a public relations malady.

Over the past couple of decades, NASCAR has shamelessly hyped the competitiveness and entertainment value of its product. In my opinion, it wasn't so much the product as it was the players. It was character-driven.

During the past decade, the Indy Racing League established itself as the series with the most to brag about, with split-second, side-by-side finishes the norm. In this case, it was most definitely the product, as the IRL was struggling to develop characters fans could get excited about.

Perhaps F1's dilemma is the most shocking, because for years and years, fans of that discipline would look down their noses at other forms of racing, especially stock cars, and explain how we hicks in the Colonies weren't sophisticated enough to appreciate the subtleties of "real" racing.

Now, those same folks are in a dither as a good many of their fans (the supposedly sophisticated ones) are yammering about how there's "not enough overtaking."

I just wonder what kind of consensus might be obtained in a scientific survey of race fans, asking them just what would satisfy them in terms of the product?

For some, it is statistically quantifiable -- number of leaders, number of lead changes, number of cars on the lead lap at the finish, margin of victory, and so forth. X number of all of these would be required for these fans to believe they had gotten their money's worth when the race was over.

For others, it's more abstract than that. The numbers don't matter so much as the closeness of the competition, and that might mean a nip-and-tuck dogfight that does NOT produce a lot of lead changes, for example, but does feature a furious effort to make a pass.

It's safe to assume that a good many fans want to see an exciting finish; NASCAR believes so, anyway, and the green-white-checkered finish rule is evidence of that.

And, let's be honest -- for some, it's how many wrecks there are and how spectacular they are.

Last night's race at Daytona should have satisfied just about everybody, if all race fans' preferences are explained by the summaries above. Perhaps the statistics were a little short, particularly with regard to number of leaders and number of lead changes. Perhaps much of the race, during which Kyle Busch or Tony Stewart were pulling the train lap after lap after lap, was short on the "furious effort to pass" standard.

But overall, I thought it was a quite entertaining race with a spectacular finish.

Regardless of any consensus or individual fans' opinions, I don't believe there is any magic formula to produce a "good" or entertaining race. I also don't think there is any significant difference in the overall quality of races now and in past years, with one exception -- technological advances have made racing more and more technical in nature and have raised speeds, even in the face of some 25 years of concerted efforts to keep them within limits.

The faster the cars go, the narrower the groove on any track becomes, the more fragile drivers' control becomes, and the more dramatic the consequences of any mistakes they may make.

Another problem is unrealistic expectations on the part of the fans. In nearly 50 years of being an avid observer of racing, I've seen lots of races that did not measure up to any of the standards I described above. I'm perfectly OK with that.

There are things that organizations can do to enhance the product. NASCAR's new two-abreast restart rule is a good example of that.

But nothing they do is going to make every lap or every race fit any specific criteria. Race fans like me are fine with that.

Crisis of leadership, quality of product

By DAVID GREEN

Turns out finances are not, despite the crippled economics sector, the biggest problem facing motor sport these days. It's leadership -- or, at least, the public perception of it -- and the quality of the product that is being provided to fans.

This is not strictly a condemnation of Brian France, but the fact that I feel compelled to insert that disclaimer says much about the subject of this post. Whether his policies are right or wrong, whether all the criticism he's taken is valid or not, the fact is that his qualifications and his judgment are suspect.

And that's only the cherry on top of the sundae, when the larger racing world is included in the picture. Tony George has stepped down as leader of the Indy Racing League and Indianapolis Motor Speedway and the Max Mosley-Bernie Ecclestone-Formula One Teams Association squabble gets uglier by the hour, it seems.

Thank goodness for the NHRA.

France was probably doomed from the start. He's hardly an eloquent or charismatic fellow; not that there's anything wrong with that, even for a person in a leadership position, but it has compounded his problems as he has been faced with slumping attendance and television ratings, going back a couple of years before the economic collapse, and he has taken all of the heat in the controversy over the COT.

Then there's the "third-generation rot" syndrome, as described by "Ice Cream" Joe Gruebel of Latrobe, Pa., quoted in a Pittsburgh Business Times article in September 2004: "You know what the old rule is. The first generation starts a business. The second generation runs it. And the third generation ruins it."

Add to that the general state of discontent evident among many NASCAR fans with cookie-cutter tracks, ticket prices, quality of television coverage, and so forth and so on, and you've got -- well, let's just say "an unenviable situation" for BF.

Ditto for TG, grandson of Indianapolis Motor Speedway savior Tony Hulman, who rescued the Speedway from ruin after four years of inactivity during World War II. George, named president of IMS in 1990, brought NASCAR to the famous track for the first Brickyard 400 in 1994 returned F1 to America on a new road course that incorporated a good bit of the history IMS oval in 2000.

He also spearheaded the effort to develop the SAFER barrier, first used at Indy in 2002 and now standard equipment at all tracks where the IRL and NASCAR compete.

But he was reviled by many for his formation of the breakaway IRL, which began operation in 1996 and which triggered a divisive feud in U.S. open-wheel racing that ended only last year.

And this week, he was effectively ousted from his positions of leadership in the two racing enterprises owned by the Hulman-George family, and from the Hulman & Co. (think Clabber Girl) corporation as well.

The biggest mess is in F1, where Mosley, fourth-term president of the Federation Internationale de l'Automobile (FIA), has been embroiled in controversy for some time. It was only last year that auto clubs the world over, including the American Automobile Association, were calling for Mosley to step down after a lurid sex scandal.

Mosley's heavy-handed manipulation of rules and his obsession with controlling costs and making F1 a leader in development of alternative, green technology was rejected by the majority of teams, including glamour outfits Ferrari and McLaren, and also by the European auto manufacturers, who called for Mosley to step down.

And so he would, Mosley promised, in an attempt to get the rebel teams to commit to the FIA-sanctioned series. But after they agreed, Mosley childishly railed at being described as a dictator by Ferrari and Formula One Teams Association (FOTA) chairman Luca di Montezemolo and threatened to run for a fifth term in October.

At this point, a separate championship, a'la Indy Racing League 1996, for the grand prix series remains a very real possibility in 2010.

It would be one thing if the racing action were enough to hold our interest and dissuade us from paying attention to the soap opera aspect of the sport. Sadly, that's not the case.

All three major series -- F1, IRL and NASCAR -- are all in a dither about how to improve the quality of racing, how to increase overtaking and on-track fighting for position. The IRL announced yesterday aero changes on its cars intended to help.

Whether the racing is any worse than normal is open to debate for anyone with historical perspective. For those who live in and only for the moment, yeah -- it's not very entertaining.

What to do about that? How to fix the racing, or at least modify the fans' perception of its quality?

Let's take that up on Saturday, OK?