Professor Of Speed

Three points. Three positions on the race track.

Failing to earn three additional points kept Kyle Busch from making this year’s edition of The Chase for the Sprint Cup. Someone, working somewhere in the NASCAR main office (and at M&M/Mars) is probably lamenting the fact that one of sports’ most volatile and controversial figures will spend the next ten weekends watching the season championship go (yet again) to another driver.

This is a rough time of year for athletes. If you’re a football player, your talents are being assessed under the media’s microscope – and every idiot with a pizza stained t-shirt managing a fantasy team. For every player who looks good, there’s another who looks great; for every possible playoff contender, there’s an already-forming line of teams buying tickets for the S.S. Better Luck Next Year.

Labor Day is always a melancholy holiday for me. It’s not because the weekend marks a symbolic end to summer, nor is it because it marks the beginning of a new school year (the moans of children are often difficult to hear over the cheers of their parents). What makes Labor Day so depressing to me is the fact that this was the time of year when Virginia Howell – my mother and one of the most dedicated NASCAR fans I ever knew – died from lung cancer at the age of 69.

I’ve written at length over the years about the role both of my parents played in my life-long relationship with NASCAR, but it was my mother who taught me about the meaningful (and sometimes quite complicated) nature of the driver/sponsor/fan triumvirate. Her loyalties were legendary within my family, and the example she set went on to inspire others once they discovered this thing called stock car racing.

The on-track accomplishments of Marcos Ambrose over the past month have been nothing short of inspiring. While always considered a threat to win on road courses (which he did in a wild, dirt-throwing, metal-bending show of last-lap fireworks at Watkins Glen a few weeks ago), Ambrose is also proving to be a worthy contender on other kinds of racetracks, as well. His recent back-to-back, fifth-place finishes at Michigan and Bristol demonstrated his talents on both superspeedways and short tracks – finishes that had him in-the-mix with Sprint Cup notables such as Jimmie Johnson, Jeff Gordon, and Dale Earnhardt, Jr.

It’s back-to-school time, which means it’s also make-the-Chase time, too. The postseason format for stock car racing has now become synonymous with the start of autumn. Once the checkered flag flies at Richmond, the final ten Sprint Cup races take their place in the media spotlight alongside college football, early season games in the NFL, and late season games in major league baseball. That’s precisely what Brian France intended when he explained what the “Chase for the Championship” was hopefully going to accomplish back in January of 2004. Here we are, eight years later, and France’s vision seems to have come true. The Chase, roller coaster TV ratings aside seems to have earned its recognition among the other “mainstream” sports of fall.

So there I was … pretty much finished with NASCAR, when …. Wham! There’s Kyle Busch slipping and sliding, and there’s Brad Keselowski running through the grass, and there’s Marcos Ambrose beating and banging his way to a .571 second margin of victory in the Finger Lakes 355 at Watkins Glen. It took just a moment for the final lap of that race to become etched in NASCAR folklore; all the radio announcers said so, as did the television commentators. The newspaper/internet writers who covered the event echoed the same fact when their stories were posted.

What a difference an exciting finish makes.