CP MOTORSPORTS – MONTE DUTTON: NASCAR WAS NOWHERE AND EVERYWHERE AT THE SAME TIME

 

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As impossible as this is to believe, the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series did not hold a race on Father's Day weekend. It took some time off, presumably so that the stock car greats could acclimate themselves to their first road race of the season but more likely because they needed to try on their new bathing suits.

Odd. People seldom bathe in bathing suits. They drive on parkways and park in driveways but seldom rest in restrooms. Lots of them ain't got no sense. Some of them ain't no count. The English language. Can't live with it. Can't live without it.

This was the pause that refreshes. It was pretty smart, though. What with NBA Game Seven, the 24 Hours of Le Mans, the United States Open, the College World Series, some international soccer tournament that was apparently held at the Copa, Copacabana, hottest spot north of Havana ... it was a time to send the rich folks to the Caribbean and Trucks to Xfinity, also known as Iowa.

I don't know, but I been told, racing in Iowa's got a lotta soul. Okay, no one told me that.

If William Byron handed me a Spicy Chicken Caesar Salad in the Wendy's drive-through, I wouldn’t know him. To my heavy eyelids, he looks just like Ryan Cody Dakoda Reed Kligerman. He's 18 years old, and he's taken 37.5 percent of the Camping World Trucks he's driven to either paydirt or the Promised Land, so I concentrated on him throughout the race in the town where American blue cheese was first perfected, Newton, Iowa. (I saw that on Aerial America.)

Now I know two bits (that’s a quarter) of information about William Byron. He's not descended from the poet Lord Byron, and I haven't sat up and taken notice so much since Chase Elliott won a (then, I, uh, think) Nationwide race at Darlington. The second-string series, you may have noticed, has expanded from being merely Nationwide. Now it stretches to Xfinity, which, as might have been said in the movie Days of Thunder, must be somewhere up near Wilkesboro.

Byron may go to Xfinity next year. Now his life is but a Camping World.

Meanwhile, a Chase may make the Chase. It all makes sense in the end.

On Sunday, it was just another Xfinity victory for one of those substitute teachers who won the Indianapolis 500, Sam Hornish Jr. Those guys are a dime a dozen.

What I learned about sports during the Great Cup Off Week was that every single one has similarities to NASCAR. For instance, the Fox announcers at the Open did some pussyfooting around about a "rules violation" that was likely the most NASCAR thing in the history of golf.

Come to think of it, it was the only NASCAR thing in the history of golf.

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