Guest Column By Cathy Elliott

Note: Media outlets may use this column in their publications, free of charge.

The racing season, even with the successful implementation of the Chase for the NASCAR Sprint Cup format, still relies heavily on consistency. Strong finishes in the first 26 races can pretty much guarantee that a driver will be in the championship battle during the final 10 weeks.

So I must admit to some eye-rolling at times when, at the end of a given race, the second-place finisher was interviewed and came across as being slightly peevish over the fact that he didn’t end up just one spot better.

When you’re in this thing for the long haul, working systematically to compile a points total that will ensure your inclusion on the Top 12 list at the end of the year, what’s the problem with second place? What are you complaining about? Second place is pretty good, right?

Wrong. In addition to being disingenuous, this attitude is downright dumb.

This was driven home to me a couple of weeks ago, on one of the most ignominious days of my NASCAR life, when I scored second place nationally in the Buzztime Race Day Trivia game.

I have to tell you in all honesty, this was galling. Second place in Race Day Trivia? Am I not supposed to know my stuff?

Buzztime Trivia, in case you haven’t seen or played it, is a national trivia game network that serves over 3,000 bars and restaurants in the United States. The questions – usually 15 per game – appear on a television screen and you answer them at your table on a little box called a Playmaker.

Your login name is limited to six letters, and frequent players, sometimes referred to as pointy-headed intellectuals by their nearest and dearest friends, generally either use their actual names, or come up with some sort of goofy acronym. Mine, for example, is UNCSU. (Part of the fun of acronyms is trying to figure out what they mean, so you’re on your own with that one.)

The games are themed, making it fairly understandable why I might consider Race Day Trivia my personal domain of dorkdom. After each game, the top 20 individual winners are broadcast in a “Network Rankings” summary. At any given time, you are going head-to-head with thousands of players all across the country, so if you finish in the Top 20, that’s not too shabby.

Yeah, right. That’s the kind of platitude you hear falling from the lips of some girl who regularly punches in at the top of the clock. When the same girl finishes in second place, she sings a slightly different tune.

I guess I could better accept my second-place citizenship had I been playing against the likes of Jeff Gordon (4TIME), Dale Earnhardt, Jr. (FANFAV) or somebody like that. But I’m pretty sure neither of those guys was bellied up to the bar at a wing joint, hunched protectively over their trivia boxes, because I happen to know for a fact that both of them were at Texas Motor Speedway on the day in question, preparing to race.

The same thing applies to the NASCAR beat writers, and the TV and radio broadcast professionals. I would expect my brain to be bludgeoned by someone like the Charlotte Observer’s David Poole, FOX broadcaster Darrell Waltrip or MRN’s Eli Gold, but to be bested by someone calling himself (or herself) “LGTWGT” is a cross I cannot bear.

Perhaps I’m making too much of this, being weighed down as I am by the enormous chip now resting miserably on my shoulder like a second evil head (I’ve even given him a name; I call him CHIP), but I’m thinking LGTWGT could well be an acronym for Lightweight.

So what we have here is a situation where someone named Lightweight, hanging out on a Sunday afternoon at some watering hole in Topeka with a name like Losers Lair, knows more about NASCAR trivia than I do.

Even worse, he (or she) proved it, in front of a national audience. 

This is in equal parts unbearable and eye opening.

Competitors compete. It is more than what they do; it is who they are. The driver in 43rd place on Sunday afternoon is trying just as hard to work his way to the 42nd position as the second-place guy is to pass the leader. The inability to accomplish that is simply unacceptable.

So from this day forward, when I’m listening to the second through fifth place finishers being interviewed after the race, I will not shake my head in disgust if they sound more than a little disappointed. Instead, I will nod vigorously in agreement.

While it is an amazing accomplishment to be one in a group of only 43, and truly phenomenal to be one of a mere 12, in the end, there is only one spot on the list which provides total satisfaction.

Dorothy Gale may have gotten it right when she stated that “There’s no place like home,” but the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series wasn’t racing in Oz back then.

Had that been the case, Dorothy would no doubt have realized what NASCAR’s superstars have always known: There’s no place like first.

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Guest Column By Cathy Elliott Note: Media outlets may use this column in their publications, free of charge.

In a popular restaurant in my area recently, I was enjoying an order of fried pickles when I overheard a couple of guys conducting an animated conversation about something called a sway bar.

 

 

This raised several issues. First, when I hear the word “NASCAR” whiz past my head in any type of public setting, my ears prick up in much the same way as my dog Clancy’s do when the carpet shampooer shows up at the kitchen door. So technically I guess you could say I wasn’t really overhearing this exchange. Okay, I admit it; I was actively eavesdropping.

Second, yes, we do deep fry our pickles in the South, slap them in a basket with a cup of dipping sauce and call it an appetizer. Sometimes they even achieve vegetable status.

Third, although a lot of folks seem to have some pretty definite opinions on sway bars these days, and don’t mind sharing those opinions with you loudly and at great length, they seem unclear on the actual specifics of the subject.

I discovered this the old-fashioned way; I asked. I can always tell when someone isn’t quite up to speed on the pesky details of whatever is it he’s talking about, because when a pointed question is posed, like in this case –”What exactly IS a sway bar, anyway?”– the answer invariably goes something like this –”Oh, it’s just technical stuff.”

This response, generally delivered in a mumble with downcast eyes and ranking just slightly higher than my personal favorite, “Don’t worry your pretty head about it,” on the SOD (Scale of Dismissal), has been forwarded to dozens of international reading-between-the-lines experts. All of them have returned identical translations. “Well, it’s just technical stuff,” really means, “I don’t have the slightest idea.”

We all know how frustrating, and sometimes downright infuriating, it can be to attempt a conversation with someone who hasn’t a clue what you’re talking about. Sway bars have been at the forefront of racing news recently, for reasons which have been outlined clearly and concisely by our many great NASCAR beat writers and therefore don’t bear further explanation here.

Still, I am exasperated. How can I engage in any sort of educated exchange on the topic of sway bars when I wouldn’t recognize a sway bar if I passed one on the street? It’s like trying to write a review of a movie that you haven’t seen, based solely on what you’ve heard other people say and your general opinion of the starring actors.

So, with curiosity gripped firmly in one hand and “Engine Building for Dummies” held tightly in the other, I embarked on an epic quest like those which have intrigued adventurers, explorers and mythological figures with unpronounceable names since time began–to actually try and figure out what the heck all the fuss is about. What is a sway bar, and why is it so important that many hours of racing-related TV and radio programming have been devoted to it?

Let’s get some of the obvious, and obviously silly, things out of the way. “Sway bar” doesn’t refer to one of Mowgli’s tropical cronies in “The Jungle Book.” It isn’t an aerial circus prop, so you’ll never hear anyone singing, “He flies through the air with the greatest of ease, the daring young man on the flying … sway bar.”

It isn’t a famous gourmet food shop in Manhattan (that would be Zabar’s), nor is it some cute local hangout up the street with a great Happy Hour special on fried pickles.

According to our increasingly good Internet information source Wikipedia, the definition of a sway bar is “an automobile suspension device. It connects opposite (left/right) wheels together through short lever arms linked by a torsion spring. A sway bar increases the suspension’s roll stiffness—its resistance to roll in turns, independent of its spring rate in the vertical direction.”

Huh? Is that even English?

There are a whole bunch of additional words in this lengthy definition that make about the same amount of sense to me; namely, none. All I’ve been able to figure out is that a sway bar is a gadget designed to keep a car from “rolling,” or pulling too much to the outside, while traveling through a sharp turn.

Roll is bad. It can actually make your car flip completely over in certain conditions. The sway bar helps to distribute weight evenly. There’s a lot of technological mumbo jumbo involved, but boiled down to its bare bones, it balances you and keeps you stabilized. If you’re driving a race car through a turn and you can maneuver with a minimum amount of lateral movement, and keep going straight ahead rather than side-to-side, it can help get you out in front of the other guys.

Which is the whole point of a race, right?

It goes back to the old mousetrap mentality. Build a better sway bar, and it can help you gain the advantage over your competition. This is why deep, dark sway bar secrets mean so much to those who develop and keep them, and helps explain why some folks would get upset if a “special” sway bar went missing.

But here’s the real question, in my mind at least. How much does detailed information such as this really matter to a race fan? Is a baseball game made more enjoyable by knowing how many stitches are on the ball, or is The Masters more beautiful to watch after learning how many azaleas are in bloom at Augusta National?

The answer? Probably not. Like the inability to see the grandeur of the forest because of an obsession with a couple of trees, we run the risk of being so focused on a single mechanical part that we might miss all the fun and excitement of the collective engines’ roar. What a shame.

On the other hand, learning something new is never a bad thing. While becoming casually conversant on sway bars, I also ran across a fair amount of information about torsion.

What exactly IS torsion, you ask?

Oh, it’s just technical stuff. Don’t worry your pretty head about it.

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FORT WORTH, TX. – Carl Edwards must know how the West was won… state by state.
 
     He won in California. He won in Nevada. And, Sunday, he won in Texas.

     The back-flipping Edwards is on a roll.

And he’s doing it without his regular crew chief, who is sitting out a suspension for rules violations earlier in the year.

     Running either at the front, or just behind Jimmie Johnson and Kyle Busch most of the race, Edwards took the lead on lap 214 of the 339-lap Samsung 500 and practically held it the remaining distance.

     Edwards held off Johnson and Busch in a two-lap shootout after the day’s sixth and final caution with four laps remaining set the stage for an exciting green, white, checkered flag finish.

     Both runner-up Johnson and third-place Busch put up sterling efforts in trying to win the race at this 1 1/2-mile tri-oval Texas Motor Speedway.

     Rounding out the top 10 were fourth-place finisher Ryan Newman, winner of the season-opening Daytona 500; Denny Hamlin, winner of last weekend’s race at Martinsville; veteran Jeff Burton; Tony Stewart; Mark Martin; Matt Kenseth and Clint Bowyer.

    Kevin Harvick battled back to finish 11th after having a very bad-handling car in the early stages of the race. Dale Earnhardt, Jr., was 12th after running with the leaders at times in the first half of the race. 

     Rookie Michael McDowell, who walked away from an horrific qualifying crash Friday afternoon, finished 33rd.

     Four-time champion Jeff Gordon had a terrible day, finishing 43rd (last place).

Burton stays in first in the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series standings, and Harvick is second. Edwards climbed four spots to 10th, and Busch jumped two spots to third.

    The sport’s most popular driver — Earnhardt — led the beginning of the race from his pole position but his Chevy lost the handle quickly. Busch, Edwards and Johnson raced past him.

    It was a perfect weather day at the Texas track when Michael Waltrip spun in Turn 2 to bring out the first caution flag. It was a timely caution for Harvick, who had just finished telling his crew his car was really “screwed up. I don’t know how in the world it could be this bad.”

     Harvick’s team and others used the stop to make much-needed adjustments, including Earnhardt and Jeff Gordon.

     On the restart,  Junior’s team had their guy back out front with Johnson in close pursuit, just ahead of the younger of the Busch brothers. Johnson’s No. 48 Chevy took the lead on lap No. 48.

     Gordon, a four-time champion, was thrashing back in 34th spot in the third of four Hendrick Chevrolets, almost a second and a half behind his teammates. Casey Mears, in the other, was 24th.

    By lap 55, Earnhardt had dropped back to fifth spot, behind Johnson, Busch, Edwards and Greg Biffle.
 
     Gordon spun on lap 109, the second caution of the sunny day. Gordon’s spin ended a frustrating day when he pulled into the garage and told crew chief Steve Letarte, “We need to change everything and turn this into a test session.”

    Gordon has never had any luck at this track. It is is one of only two tracks on the NASCAR Sprint Cup circuit where Gordon has not won. The other is Homestead- Miami Speedway.

     The race started again on lap 113 with Kenseth out front, followed by Johnson, Edwards, Busch, Earnhardt, Denny Hamlin, Biffle, Martin Truex, Jr., Stewart and Kasey Kahne. 

    J.J. Yeley brought out the fourth caution flag when he bounced from the outside wall to the inside wall on lap 175.

     All the lead cars pitted, and Matt Kenseth resumed his lead. 

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By Reid Spencer
Sporting News NASCAR Wire Service

FORT WORTH, Texas (April 5, 2008) – In his seventh NASCAR Nationwide Series start of the season, Kyle Busch finally got a result befitting his performance.

Entering Saturday’s O’Reilly 300 at Texas Motor Speedway, Busch had led a series-best 345 laps without a win. After finishing second to Joe Gibbs Racing teammate Tony Stewart in the first two races of the season, a series of mishaps had blocked the Toyota driver’s path to victory lane.

That changed at Texas, where Busch ran away from the competition to post his first Nationwide win of the season and the 12th of his career. Though he had to survive a restart on Lap 194 of 200, Busch pulled away over the final seven laps and crossed the finish line 1.041 seconds ahead of runner-up Jeff Burton.

Series points leader Clint Bowyer finished third, followed by Bobby Labonte and Jamie McMurray. Brian Vickers, Dale Earnhardt Jr., David Ragan, Jason Leffler and Tony Stewart completed the top 10.

Busch, who had posted second-place finishes at Texas in 2004 and 2007, led four times for 126 laps, including the final 43. His winning average speed of 151.707 mph was a track record, eclipsing the 145.710 mph posted by Kevin Harvick in the 2006 fall race.

“This feels so good,” Busch said after he climbed from the winning No. 18 Camry. “It’s great to give (sponsor) DLP their first NASCAR win, and it’s great to bring Toyota to victory lane here. It’s so hard to win at this place. I want to thank my fans for sticking with me. We’ve been through some tough times in the Nationwide Series.”

Busch had opened a lead of almost four seconds when Kyle Krisiloff’s spin on Lap 190 brought out the fourth and final caution of the race. Busch and Burton remained on the track during the caution, while the 11 lead-lap cars behind them came to the pits for tires.

Busch said it was a difficult choice to stay out.

“It was tough,” he admitted. “I know four tires would be fast, but I didn’t know if I’d be able to get back through traffic.”

Burton initially second-guessed crew chief Pat Smith’s decision to not to bring him to the pits, but changed his mind after hanging on to the runner-up spot.

“Kyle’s car was really fast,” Burton said. “He was really fast on old tires. That said, holding the (second) spot was probably good enough. I don’t think we could have gotten past him.”

Notes: Harvick, who started on the pole after Thursday’s qualifying session was rained out, broke an axle on his first pit stop and lost 21 laps while his crew replaced it. He finished 34th. . . Stewart lost a lap with an unscheduled pit stop on Lap 71, after cutting his right rear tire. He had run over a lug nut on pit road during a green-flag pit stop on Lap 56. . . Fourteen cars finished on the lead lap.

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