Junior got himself a great race to make his telecasting debut.

“Earnhardt. Dale Earnhardt Jr.” It’s a Southern-friend take on “Bond. James Bond.” Not a vodka martini, “shaken, not stirred,” but in the timeless voice of Harry Caray, “a nice, cold Budweiser!”

Dale Earnhardt Sr. (man, he hated being called Senior) never a met a man he didn’t initially distrust. His son is a citizen of the world, as disarming with a prince as a pauper. Another difference is that Junior is unafraid of being himself, while Senior couldn’t be anyone else.

Given the prosperity of a NASCAR team based in Denver, Colorado, it’s not nearly as outrageous to buy a jar of salsa made in, uh, New York City!

I assume you’ve seen the commercials.

Given the success of Barney Visser’s Furniture Row team, and how it turns upside down what most other turns have learned over the past two decades, I can’t help but wonder if the Pettys now wish they’d never left Level Cross, the Wood Brothers Stuart, and the Elliotts Dawsonville.

I was sort of amazed NASCAR held no Monster Energy Cup race on Father’s Day weekend, which has always been considered a prime spot. I figured it out. TV calls the shots, I suspect, and Fox owned the rights to both the United States Open golf tournament and the World Cup, and it had little programming room, especially since NASCAR races are sometimes prone to rain delays.

Of course, I watched the Truck and Xfinity races in Iowa, where, since they built it, people used to come. They hoped their support would draw a Cup race. It didn’t. Their civic enthusiasm waned, and now they don’t come anymore, by and large.

So I watched a good bit of the Open and the World Cup. The golf tournament featured that sport’s equivalent of many crashes. I decided on Saturday that Brooks Koepka was likely to win because he seemed to have more sense and composure than anyone else.

I think I may have sold Clint Bowyer short.

The inspiration of my two stock car racing novels, Lightning in a Bottle and Life Gets Complicated, was my realization, in the winter of 2016-17, that the racers of today don’t have much in common with those who were everywhere in the early 1990s, when I first found a slot in the media gypsy troupe.

Barrie Jarman became my intriguing hybrid, a kid from the wrong side of the South Carolina Upstate tracks, typical in some ways with his generation but a throwback to the heroes of yore.

The folk heroes – Dale Earnhardt, Harry Gant, Darrell Waltrip, Rusty Wallace, Sterling Marlin, Ken Schrader, Davey Allison, etc. – were everywhere back then. Now, they’re just cardboard cutouts, trying to build a “brand.” I thought Tony Stewart was the last buffalo on the plains.

The Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series season is now 38.9 percent over. Every week the winner of the race professes great – and, quite often, fake – humility over how he managed to succeed against a level of competition perpetually identified as higher than it’s ever been.

It is harder than ever to those who aren’t winning or who haven’t yet won. There are teeming masses of them. Three drivers have combined to win 11 of the 14 sweepstakes completed thus far. Usually, when I hear of something that has been “pro-rated,” it costs money, but “pro-rating” how many races Kevin Harvick, Kyle Busch and Martin Truex Jr. are on track to win is just a matter of operating a calculator located conveniently inside a mobile phone.