Sunday's Biggest Loser and True Champion
By. Arianne Hegeman
July 28, 2008 

The Allstate 400 at the Brickyard was a horrible way to waste four hours on Sunday afternoon. The NASCAR Sprint Cup event that took place at the famed Indianapolis Motor Speedway was a far cry from what it should have been.  What makes the debacle even more embarrassing is that it took place on the race track that hosts two of the top motorsports events in North America; the Indianapolis 500 and the Allstate 400 at the Brickyard. 

We should be ashamed of ourselves.

Race coverage highlighted drivers being forced to pull onto pit road every ten to twelve laps for the entirety of the race.  As soon as their cars would start to come around, the yellow flag would fly, erasing any momentum that was created.  This was termed the best way to keep drivers safe; the only alternative would have been packing up and heading home. Throughout the race, team owners feared the worst and wondered how many destroyed race cars they would have by the end of the day.   NASCAR officials and representatives answered tempered questions up and down pit road while over the wall pit crews, the true champions of Sunday’s race, exhausted themselves trying to keep up with unprecedented pit stops.  The soft-tire situation turned NASCAR into Spin City with everyone trying to make the racing conditions seem less frustrating than it really was.  But the irritation was impossible to hide.

Everyone lost on Sunday afternoon, even the eventual victor, Jimmie Johnson.

Who lost the most on Sunday afternoon?  It was not Carl Edwards who closed in on Johnson during the final lap of the Allstate 400 but needed a few more laps to complete the pass. It was not Tony Stewart, who finished a disappointing 23rd in defense of his win there last year.  It was not Matt Kenseth who cut a tire on lap forty-seven, just before one of NASCAR’s scheduled competition cautions. Nor was it Kevin Harvick who was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time with Kurt Busch. Harvick lost critical points for the Chase and now sits just outside of the coveted twelfth spot.  But Sunday’s biggest loser was not wearing a fire suit, helmet, or heatshield on Sunday afternoon.   The biggest losers did have numbers on their clothing and scanner headsets on their ears but they were not sitting inside race cars or on top of war wagons. 

They were sitting in the grandstands.

Instead of watching the best drivers in the world take on the holy grail of racing, thousands of race fans sat in the grandstands catching an afternoon nap.  Their headset chatter featured eight or nine laps of green flag competition, with one third of the laps scored under caution. Spectators who sat in the infield grandstands saw the most action with pit road right in front of their seats. Over one hundred thousand race fans planned their vacations around this event. They took time off from work, saved their pennies for hotel rooms, and paid over $4.00 per gallon in gas to get to Indianapolis Motor Speedway. 

And this is what they got?

How is it that we can guide our vehicles via satellites in the sky but we cannot bring an appropriate tire to one of racing’s biggest events of the year?  How can we put a man on the moon but we cannot figure out what grading may do to the surface of a racetrack?  Goodyear tested their tires with the Car of Tomorrow in their own session earlier this season.  Did they only run 4 laps at a time?  This time, race teams could not take the blame for the tire mess.  Crew chiefs will always push the envelope but all forty-three of them do not push it in the same way.  Every race team had tire issues this past weekend which left zero room for passing the buck. It is impossible to put all the blame on one entity, but Sunday’s racing conditions were a disaster and it is NASCAR’s responsibility to make sure it does not happen again. The race fans that spent their hard-earned and stretched-beyond-belief dollar deserve more than what they got from NASCAR, IMS and Goodyear. 

NASCAR needs to hold the race track and the tire supplier accountable for the mess that was made at the Brickyard.  Excuses will not fill the grandstands and keep America’s second most popular sport around for years to come.