After 1,272 lefts, why Dale Jarrett turned right
The short answer to why there are so many crashes in NASCAR:
Strip away the 800-horsepower engines, the flame-retardant suits, the 3,400 pounds of steel and the drivers go about their business pretty much like everybody else.
They laugh, they cry, they win a few and lose all the rest. They show up at work, get their feelings hurt, get mad, and sometimes, they get even.
Except in their case, that means just about every time.
Maybe that explains why none of the higher-ups got the least bit overheated about the right turn Dale Jarrett made into Ryan Newman on lap 318 of the Sharpie 500 late Saturday night. Never mind that it happened at 100 mph, and knocked both of them and Kevin Harvick — his only sin: wrong place, wrong time — out of the race.
In NASCAR, those little love taps aren’t just tolerated; they ARE the rules of the road.
And so maybe the only thing that distinguished this one from the dozen other dustups and spinouts that took place at the Bristol Motor Speedway — including the handful of purposeful ones — was how absolutely dumb and obvious it was.
“Mine was unintentional,” Newman said about running Jarrett into a fence 17 laps earlier, “and his was intentional and that’s all I’m saying.”
Jarrett was slapped with a two-lap penalty during the race, but that’s all. And in the unlikely event officials call him in to pursue the matter further, he’ll point out he forgot to turn left only once in 1,272 tries, that it could happen to anybody, and walk out of the hearing room with pride intact and nothing worse than another slap on the wrist.
Besides, the higher-ups at NASCAR probably figured out by now that Jarrett did such a good job of punishing himself, any further discipline would be piling on.
That little road-rage episode, coupled with the two-lap penalty, resulted in a 31st-place finish. More important, it probably killed off any chance Jarrett had of qualifying for “The Chase for the championship,” the lucrative little postseason scheme NASCAR hatched last year to keep fans from changing channels once the NFL begins playing for keeps in the same weekend time slots.
Jarrett left Bristol without comment, which was probably a smart decision. The result dropped him from 11th place to 14th in the Nextel Cup “Chase” standings, but the real shame is that he took Newman down a notch, from eighth to ninth, and Harvick from 14th to 16th. With only two races left to accumulate points before the top 10 are awarded playoff spots, Jarrett needed more enemies and frustration like he needed an allen wrench upside the head.
He’s 0-for-his-last-94 races, and on his eighth crew chief since Todd Parrott departed at the end of 2002. He’s already 48 and staring out a fast-closing window. Rusty Wallace and Mark Martin, two guys who broke in around the same time and planned to retire at the end of the season, have just about locked up spots in the “Chase.” Martin is having second thoughts, but if he does return, like Terry Labonte, Bill Elliott and a few other of Jarrett’s contemporaries, he’ll probably run a much lighter schedule. Jarrett is one of the few older drivers who hasn’t talked about slowing down, but maybe he should.
Whether any of that factored into his thinking Saturday night, only Jarrett knows. He and Newman, who’s 20 years younger, are both clean racers with no history between them. On the other hand, once Newman loosened up Jarrett’s car on lap 318, everybody seemed to know a payback was in the cards.
One racer said afterward the spotters were warning their drivers over the radio “to steer clear when the 88 (Jarrett) gets near the 12 (Newman).” And sure enough, it was worth heeding.
Of course, Bristol’s officiating crew knew what was on the way, too. The half-mile, high-banked track guarantees racing at close quarters for 500 laps, which in turn, guarantees lots of frayed nerves. NASCAR treats bumping incidents the same way major league baseball does knockdown pitches and the NHL does fights — as necessary evils — and hands out penalties after determining intent.
It’s not always fair, which is why you see drivers occasionally taking justice into their own hands. After totaling up the damage at Bristol, Matt Borland, Newman’s crew chief, suggested that didn’t seem like such a bad option.
“If they have problems, Ryan and he need to talk about it after the race, beat each other up, I don’t care. But to destroy two race cars that cost a whole bunch of guys at two shops a lot of work,” he added, “that’s just stupid.”
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Jim Litke is a national sports columnist for The Associated Press. Write to him at jlitke@ap.org