From the "Don't You Wish You Lived Somewhere Else" file comes this little tidbit from the NASCAR headquarters in Daytona Beach:"By the end of the month, (a dozen short tracks will be up and running as) NASCAR’s national program for short tracks gets off to a roaring start."
Yep, that's right, while we sit here in the northeast wondering if we'll see enough snow melt and the grounds dry enough to permit our local tracks to open their gates by, oh, I don't know, July, tracks across the country are already going racing. Greenville-Pickens, which hosts the NASCAR Camping World East Series later this spring, is among 3 southeastern tracks slated to open this weekend.
Kind of makes you long for straight-up time trials, single-file restarts and leader infallibility, doesn't it?
And while we sit up here arguing about whether Super Late Models are truly super or whether any short track promoters around here know anything about promotion, in other parts of the country, they're racing. Instead of arguing about last year, they're arguing about the here and now, about Twin 50-lap Late Model features — and getting into honest-to-goodness fistfights in the pits!
Lucky them!
That being said...
* Don't put too much stock in the whole Goodyear tire outcry following Atlanta. There were no catastrophic tire failures in the Kobalt Tools 500 last Sunday, and that means only 1 thing: The tires did their job.
Racers may not want to hear this, but if a tire won't go as fast as you want through the turns, slow down. That's kind of what racing's long been about -- he who can go fastest in the given elements wins. I know racers have been whining since the first test session prior to the first practice prior to the first race ever held, but it's the safety that's most important.
*Wait -- CART and IRL merged? We misssed this?...
* I changed my mind. I think "Gypsy Biker" is the best track on the Magic CD. (Yep, I still buy CD's. Not out of purism or principle, mind you, but because The Godfather backed out of a promise to toss his old MP3 player my way. What a weasel!)
* Josh Beckett's back has me worried. But I'm not as worried as if I were a Yankees fan. After all, that team has itself so concerned with the Rays (read: base-brawl) that they've forgotten there are bigger fish to fry.
And, BTW, doesn't a spring training fight bring new meaning to the term "bench-clearing?" What were there -- like 150 guys in each dugout for that Yankees-Rays game on Wednesday?
* Just 39 more days until the scheduled ACT/True Value Modified Series opener at Lee USA Speedway.
And 139 more days until the weather actually permits them to race.
9 comments:
It's great that there racing down there already, BUT check out Bowman Gray's race schedule. They don't open until April 26th, maybe they have huge crowds every week because they don't race from March thru November. Hmmmm maybe there onto something. I think if a track up north we're to run from May thru Sept. (that's 18 weekends)they'd have better crowds and car counts.
PASS South opens at Hickory, not Greenville, big guy.
Whoops!
Uh, you mean, there's, uh, like, a difference?
TB
Here is another little tidbit I picked up from the BBC the other day. When I heard this I nearly drove off into a snow bank on I-91. In an interview Patrick Head (part owner & engineer with the Williams F1 team) proposed F1 go to handicap starts (point leaders start out back - just like at any Saturday night short track) for their grand prix!!!
My gosh, when Bernie Ecclestone hears such blasphemy he’s likely to throw the Williams team out on their ear (it is fun to imagine Hamilton and his good buddy Alonso starting on the last row of a grand prix on a rain slick track).
Just imagine – F1 with handicap starts – now that would be something!
On the other hand I’m not ready to give up what has been the best snowmobiling season in many, many years – thank god for global warming!!
Zach,
You're really coming into your own with this whole blogging thing. Keep it up, I think you're going to make something of yourself some day.
No, the Goodyears did not do their job. That they didn't have as many failures as at Vegas means nothing, because the Goodyears as usual did not allow the cars to race.
Now one should not let the COT get off scot free here, because that fiasco's unworkable design made the cars unraceable as well.
As far as the Red Sox go, unlike most New Englanders I'm not obsessing over them - I'm more concerned with the New England Surge CIFL team - they had a fun season last year and I want them to go all the way.
Hmmm monkeesfan... pardon my ignorance...but what exactly is the "CIFL" ?
Never heard of that one?
I also suspect most "rural" New Englanders like myself might associate the term "Surge" with a local service company that goes around "freshining" our dairy cows?....Hehe!
tenbomber, CIFL stands for Continental Indoor Football League. It's an indoor league along the lines of AF2 where the Manchester Wolves play. The CIFL has a New England team, the New England Surge, who play in Worcester, and in thei debut season last year went 8-4, made the division playoffs, but lost to the Rochester Raiders. It was New England's third straight loss to Rochester, including an epic 49-40 defeat at the DCU Center last June that helped Rochester win the division.
If you get a chance, check them out.
BTW, I also still buy music on CDs. I'm kind of slow to adapt to new technologies when the old ones still work well. Plus I have a CD burner to dub old MRN racecasts, New England Patriots radiocasts, and Whiner Lines as well as music to listen in my car.
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