Author: Glen Harness

NASCAR today unveiled some changes to the points system for this coming year’s Nextel Cup Series. The changes are meant to put more emphasis on winning, and make sure that NASCAR favorites like Jeff Gordan and Dale Earnhardt, Jr., consistently make the Chase for the Championship.

As a public service, I’ve decided to publish this guide to the new system.

• Anyone winning a race throughout the year is automatically eligible for the Chase (unless you’re in one of those underfunded single-car teams).
• They’ve done away with the 400 points from the leader after 26 races rule. Instead, the top 12 drivers (if those drivers have led a lap) are eligible for the Chase.
• During the regular season, the winner of a race gets 185 points. Losers get the distinction of having won some money.
• If a driver wins a race, and there’s a full moon, then that driver gets to pick another car from the field and that car’s driver loses all of his points.
• For the first time ever “non-points” races will pay out points. The winners of the Gatorade 150 will each receive a lifetime supply of Gatorade and 25 points. The winner of the All Star race will receive the 25 points plus have everyone in the stands added to his family call list on his Nextel phone.
• If a race winner happens to be a woman, she’ll get 1000 extra points, just because it’s harder for women to drive and put makeup on.

NASCAR is contemplating changes to the points system in the Busch series as well. The most significant of those is that if the winner of a Busch Series race isn’t a full-time Nextel Cup driver, he automatically wins the championship and the rest of the season is cancelled.

I hope this summary of the new points systems has been helpful.

Wow. Another NASCAR death from cancer. NASCAR Champion and broadcaster Benny Parsons died today in North Carolina.

Although I worked as a reporter for Racing Information Systems and attended about a dozen Winston Cup races, I never got to talk to him in person. I did see him from time to time, and he always had a smile on his face.

NASCAR and the world is a little dimmer now.

Rest in peace, Benny.

Wow. I just surfed over to Jayski’s site a few minutes ago and was stunned to see that Bobby Hamilton had passed away.

I think everyone had expected him to get better, but the cancer must have been worse than publicized. I’d guess that that’s what he wanted; he didn’t want the team or the public to be distracted by or fixated on his illness.

I got to see him race at the Fairgrounds a few times. He gave Casey Atwood a lot of help when he was getting started, and Atwood drove the #43 at the Fairgrounds that was owned by Hamilton. One memorable moment was when Dale Earnhardt, Jr. was practicing for a late model race at the track. He and another car wrecked, and both cars burned to the ground. Everyone was ok, but Earnhardt was left without a ride.

Hamilton offered Little Earnhardt the use of one of Atwood’s spare cars. That season, Atwood was driving Fords. Little E had to get permission from his dad before he could drive the Ford.

The racing world lost a truly nice guy today.

Below the fold is the second column I wrote after I created Racindeals.com (sadly, the current version of the site doesn’t go back that far (to 9/3/1999)). The gist of the article (and the whole reason I created Racindeals.com) was to get off my chest things that, as a race fan, I felt NASCAR needed to do to make the sport better.

Continue reading “If I Ruled NASCAR, Seven Years Later”

Not sure why the “big” newspaper in Nashville didn’t have anything on this, but The City Paper reported on the 21st of December that the speedway at the Tennessee State Fairgrounds, currently known as Music City Motorplex, has changed hands to some extent. By March, a new company will own 80% of the company that now runs the track.

Actually, saying “Music City Motorplex has been sold” is somewhat of an incorrect statement. The track is owned by the city of Nashville. The Fair Board, those folks who cost the city a Winston Cup race in 1984, controls who manages (or in some cases in the past, who mismanages) the track.

In 1995, the management of the track was handed over to Bob Harmon, one of the pioneers of the track promotion business. He used his contacts at NASCAR to bring in a Busch Series race and shortly thereafter a Craftsman Truck Series race. Through his leadership, the track’s premier Late Model division easily averaged 35 cars every Saturday night.

Harmon (and the track) was a victim of his own success. In 1998, Harmon sold his ownership interest to Dover Downs Motorsports, the folks who run Dover International Speedway. Their only interest in the track was to get the two major NASCAR races for the 1.33 mile track they planned to (and ultimately did) build in Wilson County, a little east of Nashville.
Once the big track opened in 2001, their lack of interest in running a short track quickly showed, and the quality of racing suffered for it. The track lease changed hands again, this time to a group of folks led by Dennis Grau. Grau came from the sponsorship end of things, and really had no experience running a race track.

And again, that lack of experience showed. The first thing he did was change the name of the track from Nashville Speedway USA to Fairgrounds Speedway at Nashville. He had some big ideas, and some good ideas, but a national scandal involving a female race driver being, in effect, harassed by the male drivers, was the beginning of the end.

After two years under Grau, the Fair Board granted the lease to the current leaseholder, Joe Mattioli (whose family runs Pocono Speedway). Like Grau, the first thing he did was change the name, this time to Music City Motorplex. The name was a reflection on their desire (or hope) to turn the track into a multi-use venue. An artist’s sketch they released showed a drag strip among other things.

Mattioli brought in veteran track operator Jack Deery. Deery rubbed a few people the wrong way, and the track lost a lot of good people because of it. Deery was released in 2006, and Mattioli brought in Norm Partin. Partin’s been around racing forever, and realized that something drastic needed to be done to get the car count back up from an average of 12. The track would abandon the dreadful experiment of running the main races on Friday night’s in 2006, and would go back to the traditional Saturday night races in 2007.

Now, this latest ownership change just adds another questionable chapter to the track’s history. As someone who was affiliated with the track for nearly 10 years (I owned and operated the official web site for the track, under all of its names, from 1996 until early 2004), I sincerely hope things turn around. Moving races back to Saturday night is a good start. That track has arguably generated more top NASCAR drivers than any other track. It’d be great to see it generate a few more.

UPDATE (1/1/07): I’ve just learned that Music City Motorplex is saying that the Nashville City Paper story I linked to above is untrue. This should be interesting.