Running 2018 NASCAR thread

Just a personal note: When Loudon opened, I was assigned as the columnist (our auto racing writer left before I did for a college teaching gig). For about 10 years, it was one of my annual highlights. Great guys on the beat and everyone in NASCAR couldn't do enough for us damn Yankees they were so tickled pink at their success. I have probably watched about 30 laps of this season. Much of that is due to the retirements, etc. of the guys who were on top when I covered it. But another substantial part is that I've lost the plot due to incessant rules changes and have little to no interest in picking it up again.

 

Isn't Paul Menard another example? I assume Wood Brothers Racing keeps him running thanks to the Menards sponsorship, but I admittedly don't follow Nascar much anymore.

 

I don't think I have watched any this year. If I did, it was Daytona and it was just a few laps. I grew up on auto-racing, but it was CART/IndyCar and USAC sprints and NHRA over Nascar.

For most of my life I have been a casual fan of stock car racing, though. I used to tune in to 4 or 5 races a season and go to a Nascar race every few years. My interest has waned more because of the rules and format changes than retirements, I think.

I still pay a good bit of attention to IndyCar, although a lot less than I used to, and a surprising amount of NHRA. That's mostly because one of my childhood friends has become one of the top builder/drivers in the competition eliminator class.

 

Like many on this board, my interest in NASCAR has taken a steep nosedive in the past few years, but this sure caught my attention: The very successful partnership of Jimmie Johnson and Chad Knaus is over:

Johnson, Knaus address split, future

 

In my time in the garage I remember seeing a one-off sponsor in particular, going back to drivers who maybe shouldn't be out there back in the thread.

The driver was telling them repeatedly he was so sorry for putting it in the wall as they walked backed through the garage. Felt bad for the driver. Think it was at Daytona. Cup race.

I think he made it 15-20 laps. He wasn't awful, but yeah, it was in the wall.

 

Basically from the fire at Sears Point (where he saw his dad telling him to get out of the car) and the hit at Kansas that would have killed him before HANS, Junior's health has been an issue, and yet it seemed like everyone in NASCAR, from the officials to Rick Hendrick, was willing to sweep the concussions aside. The Junior who slurred his speech and couldn't remember specific events scared the crap out of me. Ricky Craven was another. That's on NASCAR's dumb-ass "any doctor can sign off" rule.

I'm so glad Dale's priorities are finally in order, and more glad he's around to enjoy the rest of his life. NASCAR has the right to brag about the fact that nobody's died in Cup since his dad, but there's a lot of drivers who are here only because of the folks who invented HANS, SAFER and better seats and belts. Unfortunately, there's also lot of ex-drivers with messed-up brains because NASCAR wasn't proactive enough before then.

 

Wasn’t Indy the first track to put them in?

Jerry Nadeau sure wishes they’d had them in Richmond.

 

Ernie Irvan. Jeff Purvis. Sam Ard. The number of drivers whose careers were ended and lives changed by brain damage is NASCAR's dirty little secret. Similar to the number of IndyCar drivers who suffered major foot injuries in the 1980s before they pushed the cockpit back behind the front wheels and added shielding in front of the pedals. Shameful that safety improvement comes at such a price.

 

Shameful, but auto racing is hardly the only industry that that has happened in. Thinking of airplanes in particular, where every major crash usually leads to some better understanding of how things can fail. That, in turn, leads to ways to do it better whether it's in the equipment or procedures so that it doesn't happen again. Almost every big engineering disaster usually has a silver lining at the end, where that particular failure is fixed in the next version.