July 8, 2007
By Kim Roberson

Kim Roberson

What a crazy race weekend! No racing today (unless you plan on watching the IRL at Watkins Glen)….lots of racing yesterday (a rare double duty race day)….Mother Nature wreaking havoc on Friday. And then the finish last night...if you blinked, you missed the closest finish in history as Jamie McMurray beat out Kyle Bush by hundredths of a second. Now that was exciting!

How ironic is it that Daytona has been relatively rain-free for weeks, and then on Friday, with 14 cars to go in qualifying for the Cup series, the heavens opened up and not only rained out qualifying, but the Busch race as well. I don’t know that I have ever been so angry at the heavens for pouring on a track (and we certainly have had plenty of times this year to be angry at the rain), because not only did it cancel qualifying when the light at the end of the tunnel was so close…it nullified great qualifying runs by Boris Said, Jeremy Mayfield, and Michael Waltrip…the latter two desperately wanting to get in a race on time because it has been so rare this season.

The tag team effect between Mother Nature and the top-35 rule merged to be brutally unfair, with cars that were already out of the race (Vickers) suddenly getting in, and cars that were locked into the race (Said) being booted out. With as few of teams as were left, you might have thought NASCAR would have floated them to the gap time between the Busch and Cup races to give everyone a fair chance of actually getting in.

One has to wonder why NASCAR sets qualifying at Daytona in July for a time when you know you are tempting fate with rain. I grew up in South Florida, and we joked you could almost always set your watch to the fact it would rain at about 3 o'clock every afternoon in the summer. If the qualifying time and race time don’t match up to begin with, why not bump qualifying to an earlier hour and avoid the threat of being washed out?

Boris Said, who only runs a handful of races a year, said when qualifying was cancelled he now has the circuits “most expensive show car” because they built the car for this race, and it can never be used again due to the changeover to the Car Of Tomorrow. Qualifying used to be fastest 36 with seven provisional’s. With all the problems the top-35 has caused this year for the teams who are outside of the top-35 yet consistently put up faster qualifying laps than those locked into the race, I hope NASCAR takes the next few months to reconsider how they are going to deal with how teams get into races in 2008 and beyond.

It was a nice treat yesterday morning to wake up and instead of having breakfast watching Wimbledon, I had breakfast watching the Busch race instead (however with Steven Wallace taking out David Reutimann, as I munched on my Kellogg’s Special K just about gave me heartburn). It was a beautiful morning, and I can only imagine how nice it must have been for those infield campers to wake up, meander out to fire up the grill for breakfast, and then head up top to enjoy their food and watch the race as the sun made its way through the morning sky. I was actually surprised at how wreck-free the race ended up being considering the cars were set up for night racing and not day racing, and Kyle Busch won in his 100th start in the Busch series by dominating the field and finding a way to do it running alone at the front of the pack. While it might not have been exciting racing, it was good, clean racing.

After the race, I had the time to hop in the car and head down to Charlottesville to watch the Cup race…and the last hurrah for the “Car of Today” at a restrictor plate track. A lot of the talk I heard during the week centered on the fact that because there would be no future for the cars, there would be no need to bring them back “alive”. It was expected that last night's race would be much along the same lines as the All-Star Race…go out, race all out, don’t worry about bringing the car back in one piece because it won’t be needed again, and do whatever you need to do to get to the checkers first.

Tony Stewart was looking to tie David Pearson with back to back to back wins at the Pepsi 400; Clint Bowyer was hoping that Karma and the 07-07-07 date would help the 07 car finish on all four wheels, not on fire, and in front of everyone else; Dale Junior was hoping to show that he still has what it takes to win at the place where DEI was so dominant just a few years ago; Kevin Harvick was hoping to repeat his success from February and Mark Martin was hoping to revise the finish from just five months ago.

In the end, it was a finish befitting of the final race for a car style that has given us so many exciting finishes since it was initially introduced over a decade ago.

Another quick note about the coverage last night…it was so nice to have a race where we didn’t have to deal with commercials every five laps. Sure, we had “ads” with Jeff Gordon and the guys up in the booth, however TNT found a way to broadcast the entire race with limited interruptions, something the fans have been begging for for years. Sure, it was no split screen like ABC does for the IRL (and NASCAR claims they could never justify that kind of coverage to its advertisers), but they found a way to get in the sponsor plugs, and keep the race interruptions to a minimum.

If they can do it, why can’t everyone else find a way to do the same thing?

I hope everyone has a great Sunday, finds a way to recover from the racing double header we were treated to yesterday, and we’ll see you back here again next weekend.

The thoughts and ideas expressed by this writer or any other writer on Insider Racing News, are not necessarily the views of the staff and/or management of IRN.