Well, well. What have we here? A hint of an old-fashioned driver feud?
In this day of double-dip vanilla, artificially sweetened, bland-as-a-bowling-league NASCAR–an acronym that now might as well stand for National Association for Squeaky Clean Auto Racing?
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Between Jeff Gordon and Tony Stewart, the two best young drivers in the league?
Get out of town.
“You’ll never get a controversial quote out of Jeff,” his stepfather, John Bickford, once said. “He can process a gigabyte of information a second. I trained him that way.”
Training Gordon couldn’t have been easy because Bickford also admitted “Jeff’s had a temper since he was a little kid. He used to get into fights.”
Yet so careful was Gordon with his public utterances that the public began to wonder whether he was Walt Disney Productions’ highest achievement yet in audioanimatronics.
Stewart’s tongue and temper would venture off the party line occasionally, but then his head coach–er, car owner–Joe Gibbs would explain what the spirited youth really meant.
It has become inappropriate to embarrass the sport’s lifeblood, Corporate America, which,being quite boring itself, demands the same phony manners from its representatives who drive in NASCAR’s elite series.
The glitch in the monumental marketing plan is that drivers still, on rare occasions, display this really annoying trait when they’re racing: They become, for a moment, human.
So it was with Gordon and Stewart, on only their second lap through the esses (squiggly turns) at Watkins Glen, N.Y., last Sunday. Their two cars entered space adequate for only one, and neither would yield–which used to be the sort of encounter that separated NASCAR from the rest of motor racing.
Lo and behold, they wrecked (good thing the Wall Street exchanges were closed or investors might have reacted with dismay to this display), and both spent the rest of the race playing catch-up.
Afterward, Gordon said to Stewart the most interesting thing he has said since he arrived in the public eye: “I’ll slam you into the wall the first chance I get.”
To which Stewart replied, “Come over here.”
Nothing came of it, of course, other than a little more bickering. But it amounted to a glimmer of hope that somewhere deep in NASCAR, there is still a human heartbeat.
To get where it is today, NASCAR once was raw-boned, rough-hewn and real. Slam-bang payback on the tracks and occasional fistfights in the garage were not uncommon. Nobody ever got hurt in these feuds that kept the sport so clearly human.
The most fascinating career, week in, week out, in the history of the sport was that of Bobby Allison, who always seemed to be feuding with somebody. Always–right up until the final instant of his career in 1988, when he sustained life-threatening injuries at Pocono. On that particular day, Allison was gunning for Darrell Waltrip (though that didn’t cause the wreck), or so Waltrip believes.
So it had gone since the evening in 1966 at Winston-Salem, N.C., when Allison and the late Curtis Turner wrecked one another repeatedly on the track until both crippled cars slid into the infield, and there they rammed each other nose to nose until “there was nothing left of either car but the steam from the radiators,” as one observer recalls.
From 1967-71, Allison and Richard Petty slammed and banged at tracks across America at a junkyard-engorging rate. To this day, in retirement, they carry on.
A few years back Petty was ticketed for rear-ending a left-laning motorist who, out of spite, slammed on his brakes in front of “the King” on Interstate Highway 85 outside of Charlotte. Next race, in the garage area, the retired Allison, limping past car owner Petty’s transporter, couldn’t resist.
“Hey, Richard,” Allison shouted. “That guy on I-85 must have looked like me.”
“Naw,” Petty replied. “He was just acting like you.”
Allison fistfought on behalf of his brother Donnie with Cale Yarborough just after the finish of the 1979 Daytona 500. That was a paradoxical milestone. It was the point at which the mainstream public began to be fascinated with NASCAR. And it was the point at which some marketing mogul in some corner office decided the public wouldn’t put up with such behavior.
So NASCAR went to finishing school, cleaned up, got rich and forgot the old Texas football coach Darrell Royal’s axiom, “We’ll dance with who brung us” … and forgot William Faulkner’s life lesson about rapaciousness: Flem Snopes got respectable, and that was his downfall.
Father-sons act? Dale Earnhardt’s eldest son, Kerry, 30, will try to join his father and his half-brother, Dale Jr., in Sunday’s Pepsi 400 at Michigan Speedway.
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If Kerry makes the field–and assuming Big E and Little E do too–it will mark the first time a father and two sons have competed in a Winston Cup race since Lee, Richard and Maurice Petty all ran at Birmingham, Ala., in August 1960.
Park place: It’s understandable that Earnhardt Sr. appeared to have a bigger, more enthusiastic–and perhaps relieved–hug for protege Steve Park in Victory Lane at Watkins Glen than he did for Dale Jr. after Little E’s initial victory at Texas in April.
Park’s rise in Winston Cup has been far rockier than Junior’s. Park was the consensus leading candidate for rookie-of-the-year honors in 1998 before incurring multiple fractures, including a broken leg, in a crash during practice at Atlanta. Sitting out 15 races ruined the rookie season of the erstwhile short-track phenom from Long Island, and Park had been struggling ever since.
“They say it’s easier to win after you’ve won the first one, and I sure hope it works out that way for Steve,” said the elder Earnhardt. “Since his injury, Steve has been down on himself a little bit, and I told him if he’d just give it a little bit of time, everything would begin to jell. They’ve been waiting patiently for something to happen, and it sure happened Sunday at Watkins Glen. That was a big one.”
Hot laps: Groundwork is being laid for CART prodigy and 2000 Indy 500 champion Juan Montoya to be recalled to Formula One next season by Williams Grand Prix Engineering. Williams is expected to announce the release of 20-year-old Jenson Button this week, which would leave an opening for Montoya, 24, to pair with Ralf Schumacher (Michael’s younger brother) in the Williams-BMWs in 2001. Official announcement of Montoya’s move is expected during the U.S. Grand Prix weekend of Sept. 24 at Indianapolis. … Indy figures to benefit from the best world championship points race. Currently, McLaren’s Mika Hakkinen leads Ferrari’s Michael Schumacher by only two points, 62-60, with McLaren’s David Coulthard at 58.