Conservative Rumblings

Despite the rumors flying around this week (see Michelle Malkin’s post about it), an Obama campaign spokesman has stated that Obama will not be sponsoring a car in NASCAR.

BAM Racing has presented Barack Obama’s presidential campaign with a potential sponsorship deal in the Sprint Cup series later this year, but that doesn’t necessarily mean an Obama car will be burning rubber on the track sometime soon.

BAM team spokesman Rhett Vandiver told The Associated Press on Friday that the team has made a sponsorship proposal to the Democratic presidential hopeful’s campaign, and has made similar proposals to the campaign of Republican John McCain and at least one third-party candidate.

I’m not sure which would be funnier, hearing the crowd cheer when the car got wrecked or hearing the crowd boo when the car got introduced.

NASCAR, in the midst of an insane $225 million dollar lawsuit that threatens to ruin all the good PR they have built up the past few years, decided that the sportswriters needed something else to write about, and so they just handed Dale Earnhardt Jr. (just coincidentally the most popular driver in NASCAR in the midst of a 70+ race winless streak) a victory at Michigan.

Junior was stretching his fuel mileage by shutting his car off and coasting under the caution laps, but he did this by speeding past the pace car, shutting it off and coasting until the pace car caught up to him. This is against the rules in a major way; after doing it once he should have been penalized. Instead, NASCAR waited until he did it MULTIPLE TIMES, and then only warned him to stop! Junior even admitted that he knew he broke the rules, and next week, NASCAR made it a point to remind drivers that it was against the rules. Of course, that is only if you are NOT the most popular driver.

NASCAR’s giggling baby of a chairman, Brian France, must be tickled pink tonight that the media can focus on Junior breaking the winless streak instead of the ugly accusations in that lawsuit. The way they see it, 60% of NASCAR fans are Junior fans, so if they fix it for Junior to win, more people will be happy than mad.

And they say they don’t play favorites. Absolutely pathetic.

Enjoy the win Ralph. It’ll be a long time until NASCAR can fix a race for you again, and you sure ain’t going to win any on your own merits.

The former Formula 1 racer won his first ARCA race today.

I give kudos to the guy, because he is trying to transition to NASCAR the correct way, by working up through the ranks, instead of the standard open wheel racer strategy of jumping into the Cup series with zero experience and driving around like pre-schoolers on Big Wheels.

Congrats to her and the whole Andretti Green Racing team, but one fuel mileage win a legend does not make. Fuel mileage wins are more the crew than the driver, and any driver will tell you that, especially in the Indy Car series where there is not a lot of manual feathering of the throttle like there is in NASCAR. There wasn’t much racing to be done on her end after that pit stop, and she even said that in her post-race.

I really congratulate her team though, because they’ve been put through a rough time trying to get her to victory lane. It’s one thing when you put a bad driver in bad equipment, or a good driver in bad equipment, because either way, the results are going to be based on what the team puts into it.

But put a bad driver in good equipment (the case here), and you have probably one of the most frustrating situations in motorsports. I really feel for her team, for how many times she has hammered them and they’ve been blasted by the media, so my hat is off to them for getting it done today.

Now the challenge will be to avoid the Jamie McMurray Syndrome (McMurray won in his second NASCAR Winston Cup start, on fuel mileage, and then failed to win a race for five years). I still think she’s overrated. I hope for her sake she wins again this year.

Now that she has win under her belt, it will be interesting to see if her childish antics when she loses continue (no one wants a repeat of her temper tantrum at Michigan in 2006 where she stomped her feet like a little kid and threw her hands up in the air because she ran out of fuel).

I wish the media would focus on a female racer that really has talent AND a good attitude: Chrissy Wallace.

It’s about time. We’ve been waiting for this for two years now…it comes at the expense of Petty Enterprises, who may lose the driver of the 43 (Bobby Labonte) as well, but maybe this is the wakeup call Richard and Kyle need to turn the company around and stop riding around 8 laps down every race.

WELCOME, N.C. — Richard Childress Racing and General Mills have agreed to terms on a multi-year partnership for the world’s sixth-largest food company to sponsor the No. 33 Cheerios/Hamburger Helper Chevrolet beginning with the 2009 Sprint Cup Series season.
Doug Benc/Getty Images
Childress

The driver for the new ride will be announced at a later date.

Darrell Waltrip has a man crush on Kyle Busch. It is upsetting.

4:42 pm EST - I still love the Dale Jr. AMP Gorilla commercial. “Sweet mother!”

4:38 pm EST - “Gentlemen, start your UAW engines?” Are you kidding me? It’s going to be tough to for anyone to get worse than that, but I imagine before this year is out someone will do it. Although they won’t come close to the all time worst by that one football guy at that one NBS race in ‘05…”Drivers, crank it up!”

Right, so I never got through all of them. I spent too much time writing about illegal immigration over break, so that’s the way it goes.

Stay tuned next week as the race summaries make a return.

Unless Congress starts passing more shamnesty bills, then I’ll be back on my Conservative Rumblings blog.

Congratulations, NASCAR. In another attempt to “level the playing field,” you’ve only succeeded in making it worse.

No, I’m not talking about the insane Car of Tomorrow debacle. We all know how well THAT worked last year, you know, NASCAR’s whole idea of helping the little guy was obviously embodied by one team winning half the races and once proud organizations (Morgan-McClure, not Ginn, mind you) closing their doors.

No, I’m talking about the New Top-35 qualifying rule. This is the one that now dumps all the “go or go home” cars together at the end of a session. Ostensibly, this rule will bring parity to the cars that are on the outside looking in (for brevity’s sake, I’m calling all these non-top-35 cars the ‘Outsiders’ from now on).

In 2007, the war of the Outsiders raged every week; with a dozen fully funded teams fighting for seven or eight spots, hundredths of a second could mean the difference between making the race and packing up and going home. What ended up happening, however, was that when some Outsider teams went early in the session, those that went at the end easily beat the first group’s times and made the races. This sometimes led to what were referred to as “inferior teams” (read: non-Toyotas) beating “well-funded teams” (read: Toyotas).

Of course, the cry of foul came from many directions; some of the Outsider teams themselves (again, read: Toyotas), fans, the insanely drama-addicted ESPN commentators and of course, NASCAR itself began to get a bit worried when their buddies in TRD began to complain that their uber-teams weren’t making the races. That’s speculation on my part…of course.

So, NASCAR, true to form, has had another knee-jerk reaction, and presto, we have a new rule. Now, all the Outsiders will take their qualifying times at the end of every session, which is, for most tracks, when the faster times will be gotten. By grouping all the Outsiders together, they think it’s more “fair.”

What they failed to consider is that now there will be a disproportionate amount of “go or go home” cars qualifying too high in the field. On top of taking away higher starting spots from the cars that actually earned them, it’s dangerous for everyone involved, because you have these slow cars getting artificial boosts in time by virtue of this “bye” to qualify at the end of the session.

We saw at a couple races last year what happens when a really bad car turns a good lap at the end of a session and starts up front, and it’s not pretty.

What NASCAR needed to do was change the top-35 rule to a top-20 rule. Open the field up, take away more protected spots, and then there wouldn’t be so much of a problem. This whole meddling with the random order of qualifying is going to have some serious implications down the road, mark my words on that. Does an Outsider car that wins the pole by virtue of going out late ACTUALLY win that pole? Or is the pole given to the fastest car that was not handed a late draw on a silver platter? As I said, it’s going to be a mess.

Of course, NASCAR will never reduce the top-35 to a top-20, even if it would create more drama and better racing on Fridays. Because as much as NASCAR loves to manufacture drama, there’s only one thing they like more: sponsorship dollars.

Sterling Marlin #14 Waste Management Chevy
Ginn Racing
40th in driver points (1752)
S: 21 ||| W: 0 ||| T5: 0 ||| T10: 0 ||| DNF: 4 ||| LL: 18

Marlin hasn’t had a competitive year since 2002, and his 2007 was, simply put, painful. He scored a couple of modest 16th place runs in the 14 car before being replaced in July by the erratic Ginn, who later sold his operation to DEI.

He then went on to attempt a few races in the 78 car, and then settled for two field filler runs in the Miccosukee 09 car. He will pilot that car in 7-9 races in 2008, but aside from plate tracks, that 09 is usually quite uncompetitive, so we shouldn’t expect much.

This sort of falls into the Bill Elliott category; nice guy, but he hasn’t run well in almost six years.

2008 prediction: Maybe a couple top-20s, but he’s only running 9 races so points don’t matter

Dale Jarrett #44 UPS Toyota
Michael Waltrip Racing
41st in driver points (1584)
S: 24 ||| W: 0 ||| T5: 0 ||| T10: 0 ||| DNF: 8 ||| LL: 0

When Jarrett announced he was leaving the team that helped him win a champsionship for an upstart team and upstart manufacturer, I jokingly said that with his new number (44) he was only going to be half as good as he was in the 88. Hardy harr harr.

As it turned out, he was a whole lot worse than half bad. Every time he got lapped by the 88, which was running awful in its own right, Jarrett had to be mentally kicking himself. Once he ran out of champion’s provisionals, he missed a race for the first time in years, and only managed two top-20s all year (which came in two of the last three races, mind you). MWR was not prepared for 2007, and Jarrett’s farewell tour suffered because of it.

In 2008, he’ll race just the first five races of the season and then retire…where he has a broadcasting job with ESPN waiting for him. He’ll replace Rusty Wallace, which is a step in the right direction for the deplorable ESPN coverage. With Wallace out of the booth, perhaps we’ll be able to hear about something other than his son and “draft boost.”

2008 prediction: He’ll be a heck of a lot more enjoyable to listen to in the booth than Rusty Wallace