No posting this week, as two major deadlines loom.

A few quick thoughts, though…

• I’m with everyone who says the Pocono NASCAR races should be shorter. Hasn’t Michigan taught us that races can be 400 miles and still be exciting? I hope NASCAR continues to race the Cup series at Pocono – it’s such a distinctive track with a long history – NASCAR should go there at least once a year.
• I was really happy to see Heikki Kovalainen win the Hungarian Grand Prix (say that 3 times fast!). When it comes to Finnish drivers, I’ve liked Heikki more than Kimi – Kimi never seems to be having any fun. Anyway, hopefully this will be a confidence booster that will allow Heikki to be a good wingman and help Lewis get the World Championship this year.
• NASCAR in the rain at Montreal? Love it! NASCAR not letting the teams decide when to switch from wets to slicks? Hate it. C’mon, NASCAR, all the crews watch F1 and sportscars on TV – you know the crew chiefs are dying to make the wet-to-dry tires call. Let them do it the next time.
• Note to Goodyear: the good performance by your rain tires at Montreal does not take you off the hook for the Brickyard 400 fiasco. Not by a long shot.

Back from hiatus on Tuesday, Aug. 13. Promise.

Maybe the Kevin Cogan-starting line crash was more entertaining that what we saw yesterday at the Brickyard…

More in a little bit.

Major kudos to youtube user AJ1964!!!

Any Indy fan has to check out his posting of the 1982 Indianapolis 500 ABC telecast. I just clicked on “1982 Indy 500 – The Start, crash” start to watch the stupid, stupid Kevin Cogan-induced starting line crash…but the clip begins with the starting line-up. It’s hilarious! I must blog it. Here’s the clip:

Thoughts after the jump…

0:03 – The graphics! The music! This is obviously from the part of the 1970s that bled over into the early 1980s. Awesome. Makes me want to go rent The Last Days of Disco. Mmmm…Chloe Sevigny…wait, I digress…

0:41 – Did anyone ever figure out why Johncock and Mario had different shades of blue on their STP cars? I know about the whole Johncock blue vs. Petty Blue argument…maybe it was just to make the cars easier to tell apart.

0:48 – You think that the Whittingtons were running unsponsored cars and qualifying well might have gotten someone to ask questions about where they were getting the money to do that? Call me crazy…

0:53 – Tom Sneva + pornstache = pure comedy gold.

1:14 – Pancho Carter’s afro – even more comedy!

1:19 – I can’t even think of a good comment for the look Chip Ganassi’s sporting. I’m laughing too hard.

2:13 – You’d think Geoff Brabham could’ve gotten a hat that fit…

2:15 – Dennis Firestone also went on to a great career in the porn industry after his racing career ended.

3:18 – Wow. That was intense. I might have to take a break before the crash.

OK. Ready.

7:30-ish. Wow. I loved Mario’s and A.J.’s reactions. Classic. They were cut from different cloth back then.

Anyway – let’s hope this weekend’s start at the Brickyard is incident free. Although I wouldn’t mind a few real, uncensored comments from the drivers.

This is second in a series of promised posts about drivers I have rooted for in my attempt to understand why fans root for certain drivers and against others.

By the end of 1984, I was totally into auto racing, the way most 12-year-olds are into baseball or football. I watched like every race on ESPN (and there were a lot back then!) and I clipped articles from our local newspapers and USA Today and kept a scrapbook of every major racing series’ results.

I was still a Richard Petty fan, but I think, like a lot folks, I began to sense that a decline had begun with the King after the big 200th win. Plus, with dozens upon dozens of drivers in several major racing series (I’ll get into my Mario Andretti fandom later, promise), you could root for more than one driver. Couldn’t you? Well, in the winter of 1984-85, I totally bought into the hype that magazines like Stock Car Racing were selling that winter, and adopted, yes, Geoff Bodine. Why?

Well, one of the things Bodine had going for him in my mind was that he was from the northeast. Growing up in New England – and being very aware of that – I had adopted the Boston Red Sox and the New England Patriots as my teams. But, of course, one of the things that separates auto racing from other sports is that drivers and teams are not tied to a particular geographic location, at least in the same way that sports teams in the major sports – baseball, football, hockey, basketball – are. Sports fans generally pick allegiances based on the teams that are close to where they live or the college that they or a family member attended. There are important exceptions, but that’s the general rule. Racing is different.

Now, sure in Formula One, a lot of folks will root for the driver from their home country. Brits are cheering for Lewis Hamilton and Jenson Button (and Nigel Mansell before them), Spaniards for Fernando Alonso, Brazilians for Felipe Massa, etc. In the old CART days, Paul Tracy and Scott Goodyear attracted Canadian fans (although plenty of U.S. fans cheered them on, too), and for the various Villenueves, it was not only Canadians, but Quebecois, who saw Jacques and Gilles as the vessels of their hopes and dreams. But NASCAR in the 1980s was still very much a southern sport, and there were few drivers not from the American southeast – you had Bodine, Ron and Ken Bouchard, Tim Richmond, Dave Marcis, probably one or two I’m forgetting, but that was pretty much it. Things were a decade away from the big influx that would bring a steady stream of west coast drivers (Jeff Gordon, Kevin Harvick, Jimmie Johnson, Kurt Busch, Kyle Busch, Carl Edwards, et al.) and more midwesterners (first the Wallaces, the Mark Martin, then Alan Kulwicki, then Kenseth and Bowyer, et al.) to NASCAR. So, anyway, jumping onto the Bodine bandwagon had a whiff of supporting the “home team” to it.

Of course, then Bodine posted a big 0-fer in 1985. Finally, in 1986 he won the Daytona 500. He almost won it again in 1987 (but for a gallon or so of gas). But that was kind of the height of his career. He won races for Bud Moore and Junior Johnson after leaving Rick Hendrick, and then bought the Kulwicki team. It’s weird, his last Cup win (the 1996 Watkins Glen race) really sticks out in my mind.

Maybe it’s because in the mid-80s I had also adopted Billy Joel as my favorite singer, but I’ve always sort of equated Billy Joel and Geoff Bodine. Think about it – both grew up in New York State (one upstate and one on Long Island); both have similar shaped faces, with kinda sad eyes; both worked their tales off in the late 70s and early 80s to make it big (Bodine won Cup Rookie of the Year in 1982, Joel’s awesome album The Nylon Curtain was released in 1982), both were at the top of their game in the mid-1980s, and then each began a long, downward slide punctuated by car crashes and failed marriages.

When Bodine won Watkin’s Glen in 1996, it was a really jarring moment. He had won the race by good fuel strategy – pitting before a late yellow and remaining on the track when everyone else refueled – so it was a big surprise. And then, when he was in victory lane – his ex-wife Kathy wasn’t there and his current girlfriend was. Geoff looked older and wore an expression of surprise and gratitude. As he (and we all) might have guessed at the time, it was to be his last Cup race win.

For this race fan, seeing Geoff’s win, and seeing how he had changed, it was a small marker of the changes that transpired in my own life. Now in my mid-20s, I just finished my first year of graduate school. My parents’ divorce had finally become final earlier that year. I’d long since put away my Billy Joel in favor of R.E.M., Pearljam, and Dave Matthews. And now one of my first favorite driver was beginning the a long ride into the sunset.

At the time I imagined, subconsciously, that this must be what it feels like to grow up.

This is first in a series of promised posts about drivers I have rooted for in my attempt to understand why fans root for certain drivers and against others.

The first driver I was ever a fan of was…wait for it…Richard Petty. It feels awful to admit it now. I mean there is nothing edgy or hip about rooting for Richard Petty. Why did I like Petty?

Well, the first race young racefanphd ever watched was the 1981 Daytona 500 (I would have been like 8 or 9 then). Anyway, my dad was both a gearhead and a race fan and had the day off from work that Sunday in winter 1981. He was committed to watching the entire flag to flag telecast without interruption, and my sister and I were given explicit orders to not walk in front of the tv (except during commercials). This was sort of comical in retrospect, as we’d time our trips between the kitchen and living room on one side, and the stairs to go up to our rooms and play on the other, for the commercial breaks in the CBS telecast. Anyway, being a fairly normal 8-year-old boy (we’re using a liberal definition of normal, here), who liked to play with Matchbox cars and Tonka trucks, I found myself watching parts of the race. I still remember the Mike Joy call from the pits on Petty’s last stop — “They’re NOT changing tires” — that allowed him to go on to the win. So, easy answer there – Petty won the first race I ever saw.

As I watched more races in the 1983 and 1984 seasons, I liked the bright colors of the #43 car — that Petty was something of an underdog at this point of his career, as few could compete with Darrell Waltrip in Junior Johnson’s car and Bobby Allison at DiGard during these years — that he had won a lot in the past. And I actually watched the ESPN Rockingham telecast in 1983, where Petty beat the young Bill Elliott (driving the Melling-sponsored “crackerbox” Ford Thunderbird) by a nose. One of the first races I watched on my own…very exciting.

So, nothing earth-shaking there. Those are things that appealed to an impressionable kid, 10-12 years old – a bright colored car, a driver who won, and who was soft-spoken and approachable. Thinking on that, I can see why that so many kids like Jeff Gordon – he’s got a lot of the same attributes.

I was still in graduate school in 2001 (still? – I had like 2 more years to go before I got the ol’ Ph.D.) when Dale Earnhardt Sr. died at Daytona. Like many readers, I found myself answering questions about NASCAR and motorsports to friends who knew little or nothing about NASCAR before Earnhardt’s death put NASCAR on the national scene. One silver lining to emerge from the Earnhardt episode was that a couple of friends wanted to see NASCAR in person. Months later we went to the spring Cup race at Richmond International Raceway. Anyway, one of my friends asked an interesting question – how do you decide which driver you are going to root for?

It is an interesting question. I don’t know if anyone’s ever done any kind of formal or scientific study of why fans root for certain drivers. It is something I’ve thought about quite a bit this year for a number of reasons: the harsh reaction NASCAR fans have had to Kyle Busch; the continuing obsession fans have with Dale Earnhardt Jr.; the fact that Scott Dixon seems to have no fans at all.

It’s easier to understand why fans don’t like certain drivers. If a driver wins a lot, and if he/she is not your favorite driver, one is inclined to root against that driver. I think that is a lot (but not all) of what is behind the antipathy so many NASCAR fans feel towards Kyle Busch. Personally, I’ve rooted against Darrell Waltrip, Bobby Allison, Bill Elliott, Dale Earnhardt, Ayrton Senna, the entire Penske Indycar team, Michael Schumacher, and Jimmie Johnson at various points in my career of motorsports fandom. I mean what’s more boring than seeing the same guy win week after week?

Again, I think there are other factors involved than simply winning a lot. Jeff Gordon and Kyle Busch have both attracted a great deal of antipathy among NASCAR fans during their seasons of dominance. Yet, between his “Million Dollar Bill” season of 1985 and his 1988 Cup championship, Bill Elliott never received the boos that Gordon received in the late 90s and early 00s and that Busch receives today. Elliott won the Most Popular Driver award so many years, even when he stunk up the show.

So, why do some drivers resonate with fan bases, when others do not?

This is a question that I’d like to explore in a series of posts, discussing my theories as to why fans prefer some drivers over others. I’ll also by doing a series of posts describing the drivers I’ve adopted as my favorites over the years…sort of a fanboy psychoanalysis. I know, you can’t wait.

Well, here we go. This is my third or fourth attempt to start a motorsports blog. In the past, I’ve had pretty bold intentions, as far as all the things I wanted to do and say with a blog. But, when I’ve done this before, I’ve always put it to one side after starting it, or never felt I could justify the time. With this blog, my intention is to post twice a week. I’ve also been confronting something of a writer’s block with my professional writing, so I’m looking to use the blog to clear my head, knock out the writing cobwebs, and re-energize my historical writing. Let’s hope it works.

Once I make this blog public, we’ll see if anyone’s paying attention. Right now I see this as a hobby. So, if you are reading thanks a lot for stopping by.

Anyway, what kind of things am I going to do here? Well, I’d like to do some commentary about the world of motorsports and the intersections I see between motorsports, everyday life, and some of the issues, approaches, and ideas I’ve been exposed to and thought about in my career as a humanities academic. I don’t want to do individual race reports and that sort of thing – there are plenty of blogs and other places that do that sort of thing. So, we’ll see where this goes.

Again, thanks for stopping by!