Feb 18th, 2009 – As the Cars Turn
Is there any other sport that better encapsulates the times we are in than stock car racing?
Just look at this past weekend’s signature event.
Labeled the “Great American Race,” Sunday’s Daytona 500 wasn’t great, and could hardly be called a race. But one thing it was for sure, it was American.
The past few decades of overindulgence by U.S. of A. has led the world into this downturn spiral, so there was something obscenely poetic about watching Fox’s over-the-top broadcast of the event.
Seeing the train of gas guzzling cars rumble by, endlessly turning left at psychotic speeds, all while making the globe just that little bit warmer, it was a day-long testament to all of our recent excesses.
Suffering its own attention depression for the past number of years – 2009 is shaping up to be worse. NASCAR’s manufacturers are facing bankruptcy, cars are racing with less and less sponsorship decals, the drivers are mostly nondescript and for the first time in 40 years, there was nobody in the field named Petty.
They can’t even get the uber-popular commander-in-chief to give them a boost because he’s a black guy, something more rare in stock cars than a college degree.
This was supposed to be their showcase – a shot in arm to its diminished brand, but instead they got a Matt Kenseth foreshortened win as a result of a downpour – but mostly because of the sport’s poster boy’s hissy fit at nearly 200mph.
Dale Earnhardt Jr. has been the fan favorite since, well, he was spawned from the loins of Dale Sr. Yet even the most ardent Earnhardt-ers must be scratching their bristly chins after their hero rear-ended Brian Vickers, causing a wreck that knocked the race leader, Kyle Busch, out.
Busch who had led 88 of the 100 or so laps up until that point is the racer everyone loves to hate, and looked like a shoe-in for the win. Afterwards he was all classy-like saying, “It was just unfortunate that two guys got together that were a lap down and were fighting over nothing.”
After the crash Fox commentators pointed out in Saturday’s Nationwide Series race, Jason Leffler was penalized five laps for doing exactly the same thing Earnhardt did.
Earnhardt wasn’t having any of that – going so far as to blame the guy he hit. “Penalize me? For what? I got ran in to and sent below the line,” he said. “What the hell? I don’t want to go down there. I didn’t aim to go down there. I got sent down there. What the hell am I supposed to do? Then what am I supposed to do? Stay down there? No. I got to get back up on the racetrack.”
Of course Junior, who has the powers that be in his pocket, got off without so much as a hand slap.
Now, with a couple of days to sink in, the recriminations are streaming in from all over, even the NASCAR press who have previously been Earnhardt’s largest apologists.
What NASCAR needed was a great American race, one that would have been talked about for years.
What they got instead was a very public spanking in the press with the story being more about what’s wrong than what’s right.
Sound familiar? It should because that’s pretty much the same story line for every other American industry – be it banking, housing, the economy, Detroit…
So much for NASCAR being Sunday’s great escape.
Cheers – Gavin McDougald – AKA Couch
