Click here to follow us on Twitter @circletrackplus   Click here to like us on Facebook 

I've been upbeat ever since last Sunday, and it's hardly a surprise because Martinsville Speedway always leaves me sanguine.

It's a track where one driver, Kyle Busch, leads 352 laps, and it doesn't bother me much. I sort of wish I was there because I wouldn't be limited to what TV chooses to show me, but it's still fascinating to watch all the beating and banging throughout the field. NASCAR couldn't mess up Martinsville if it tried, and I suspect it has.

So Busch dominated the race. He's a great driver. His last three victories have occurred at tracks where he'd never previously won. He'd never even won a Truck race at the .526-mile paperclip, and for Busch, that's hard to, uh, not do. This time he swept the weekend, which no one had ever done before at the track, in part because relatively few have ever tried.

It was just a matter of time. Good for him.

It's okay if people complain. I also get tired of people complaining about people complaining. It's the price you pay for a free society. People have the right to their opinions. It seems like, if there are 18 cautions, fans scream that it's wrong to go to a race to see the wrecks. People never complain that there are too many hits in a football game. Then, when eight caution flags wave, they say the race was boring.

It's hard to make a race exciting when people don't pay attention to what is actually going on. Of course, it's boring, Sparky. You're too busy tweeting. Watch the damn race.

I got to thinking about the ridiculous opinions people express. Some of these people are race-car drivers, who sit behind a microphone on Friday and get all hot and bothered about the notion that too many races are boring for the first two and a half hours. Sure, the finish was great, but what about the rest of the race?

Hey, look, I don't know what you're watching, but I can assure you that every driver out there runs as hard as he possibly can, every single lap. It's not like, in the old days, when just two or three drivers won every race, and one of them lapped the field.

These, of course, are drivers who never heard of Bobby Isaac till he got elected to the Hall of Fame. Plus, since nowadays it is almost impossible for anyone whose crew chief has more than a good country raising and an eighth-grade education to avoid getting back on the lead lap by wave-around or free pass or some other NASCAR giveaway program, the refrain rings particularly off key.

I'm among the few, the proud, who actually watched Bobby Isaac race, not to mention Pete Hamilton, Lee Roy Yarbrough, Sam McQuagg, Dick Hutcherson, and innumerable others who were every bit as accomplished as Paul Menard, compete.

I've seen three drivers who raced wide open every single lap: Buddy Baker, Cale Yarborough, and Junior Johnson. Johnson's final year occurred when I was seven. I watched him race live at Bristol. The memory lingers, probably more vividly than anything that happened two days ago.

It's okay to pace yourself. Ned Jarrett won that long-ago race at Bristol. He paced himself. It's okay to play it smart. It's okay to lose a few battles if it leads to winning the war. Few things tick me off more than the fancy-pants drivers of today disparaging the heroes of yesteryear.

I loved it then. I love it now. It's not better now. It's just different. Money, in the end, is relative. Comparatively, Petty Enterprises and Holman-Moody were as well-funded back then as Hendrick and Gibbs are now. Danica Patrick has more resources than J.D. McDuffie ever did, but, grading on a curve, she doesn't do any better. It's no discredit to Patrick. It's a credit to McDuffie, rest his cigar-chewing soul.

Martinsville takes me back in time and allows me to cut through the nonsense of the folks who glorify the present. A big reason is that they aren't making money off the past. Not directly, and if it's not direct-deposited into a bank account, they put no stake in it. Or, more literally, value in it.

The fact that McDuffie seldom spent Easter in the Cayman Islands doesn't mean he wasn't every bit as good a driver.