Written by Monte Dutton Sun, 2019-02-17 12:04
I can’t imagine why NASCAR would run the Daytona 500, its biggest race, with one set of rules, and then abandon those rules for the rest of the season. It’s like telling the New England Patriots and Los Angeles Rams they have to play the Super Bowl with the players on the 2017 roster.
Okay, it’s not exactly the same because other sports have their biggest spectacle at the end, not the beginning, of the season. It’s not the Patriots and Rams. It’s like the Patriots and Rams. A simile, not a metaphor.
Written by Monte Dutton Tue, 2019-02-12 14:06
If the driver who (apparently) wins a NASCAR race is in a car deemed illegal afterwards, the outcome will be overturned.
Whoa.
In most sports, this would require no elaboration. It would go without saying. I know many will cite a recent officials’ call (actually, lack thereof) that affected the outcome of a game and the presence of one team and not another in the Super Bowl.
It’s really not the same thing. In fact, most of the time, when auto racing is compared to other sports, it’s not the same thing. One doesn’t have to cite apples and oranges. It’s ballplayers and drivers, or coin flips and caution flags, or high-sticking and driving below the yellow line.
Written by Monte Dutton Mon, 2019-02-04 11:02
When I started writing about NASCAR in 1993, occasionally what I wrote was the talk of the track the following week.
That’s because the weekly paper that then employed me was distributed at the track. Then along came Jayski, or, as it was then called, “Jayski’s Silly Season Page,” an online compendium of racing information that was updated daily beginning in 1996 by Jay Adamczyk.
Jayski changed everything. All of a sudden, what I wrote was widely known the next day. The site gave NASCAR coverage immediacy. It gave guys like me, by then working for the newspaper in Gastonia, N.C., attention much greater than ever before.
Written by Monte Dutton Fri, 2019-01-25 08:57
The Rolex 24 is this weekend. I went to Daytona Beach early a few years because I could rent a condo for a month for less than a motel room for 10 days, and I could hole up and crank out all the advance work back in the days when newspapers ran preseason NASCAR sections. I’d take all the transcripts and notes from the media tour back in the days when there was one of those, too. Then the Rolex 24 moved from the first of February to the end of January, and so there went the feasibility of going to it.
But I was there for the last February of Dale Earnhardt’s life, and I saw it all. The last February, windswept and chilly, was the happiest I ever saw Earnhardt, and I don’t subscribe to the theory that he had some premonition of his death. I think he was happy because he and his son had become closer. They drove together in a yellow Corvette during the Rolex. The greatest driving performance of Earnhardt’s life, in my estimation, was during the International Race of Champions two days before his last.