One advantage of being a relatively-unread blogger, and not a journalist, is that I can be a little opinionated. Those friends I have who also like NASCAR (all three of them) know I'm not a Jimmie Johnson fan. When he and Herzog Motorsports were winning in ASA, I wanted to like Jimmie. When he announced he would be racing for Hendrick Motorsports in Cup after a lackluster Busch career, I lost interest. Since then, Jimmie's had his share of success, no doubt. But what I dislike more than his streak of unbeaten championships is his seeming lack of personality and emotion.
I realize that this is an interesting opinion from someone whose favorite active Cup driver was lampooned in post-championship commercials for having the demeanor of a robot.
But there's a difference between a shy, aloof camera presence and a seeming lack of emotion. The latter is the feeling I get from Jimmie Johnson. There's no question that he loves winning. But his approach is too controlled, too muted, too censored. I want to see a driver who treats every win like it's his first. I want to see a driver who can't stand finishing second. I want to see the guy who got wrecked under caution throw his helmet at the other car and ask him what he was thinking. No one remembers Richard Petty's victory-lane speech in the 1979 Daytona 500; they remember what was going on on the backstretch with the guys who almost won.
And for a fleeting instant this weekend, we were treated to that kind of passion from Jimmie, the kind that's so rare you can't help but wonder if he was a political-science major. Late in the going at Martinsville, with a car in the top five and ready for a win, Jimmie was tagged for speeding on pit road. Jimmie and his crew insisted they were in the right; NASCAR disagreed, and the penalty dropped Jimmie out of the top ten. By race's end, he was only able to fight back to eleventh. After the race, Jimmie argued to the press that he had not sped down pit road, that he had kept below the 5-mile-per-hour margin on the 30mph speed limit. He felt NASCAR had timed him wrong in a pit road segment, that with the team's calculations, there was no way he could have been speeding. He tweeted that NASCAR should post pit-road speeds for the fans as a measure of transparency.
And then today, he took it all back. Sorry for being wrong. Sorry for the complaining. Sorry for questioning NASCAR's judgment. Sorry for the tweet.
Translated, it sounds more like: "Sorry for speaking up. Sorry for being controversial. Sorry for getting caught. Sorry for showing passion."
Pit road speed limit in NASCAR is a tricky thing. For a number of reasons, NASCAR stock cars are not equipped with a speedometer. Pre-race pace laps are set at the pit road speed limit for the track, and the teams take a tachometer reading during pace laps (for instance, 3000rpm in second gear). Years ago, officials would time a car between segments on pit road to determine pit road speed. Now, digital telemetry can determine a car's precise speed. To account for not having an accurate speedometer in the cars, there is a five-mile-per-hour buffer on the speed limit. But if you're not cheating, you're not trying...so most teams will use every bit of that buffer they can.
Moreover, the teams know where the timed segments of pit road are. As such, a driver will accelerate into his pit and out of it, as long as he can keep pit road speed when timing begins. Johnson's team had calculated this to a science. On Sunday, in the segment in question, Johnson was clocked at 35.53mph. Pit road speed limit at Martinsville is set at 30mph, plus the 5mph margin of error. NASCAR released those numbers to the public, much as they did when Juan Montoya argued a speeding penalty at Indianapolis when he was dominating the race in 2009. Jimmie and his team pushed the envelope, and they went over the line a little. NASCAR was watching, and they called them on it. Jimmie disagreed with the call, and he said so.
But that doesn't call for an apology. An apology for that is basically an apology for caring, for showing passion, for wanting another one of those grandfather-clock trophies for his living room. I don't want to see the eleventh-place finisher shrug off the finish and say he did okay in the points and he'll have a better week next week. I want him to say he didn't agree with the penalty and he didn't come to finish eleventh. I'm not saying that Tony Stewart's early-career "swat the journalist's tape recorder and walk away" approach is the right answer, either, but all I'm asking for is sincerity. I'd rather see true happiness in a winner's eyes, and true determination in everyone else's eyes. I don't want some watered-down "it's okay" politically-correct response. It's not genuine.
There's the other aspect that Jimmie hinted at in ESPN's article today—that NASCAR could fine him for his comments on Twitter, as it was revealed they had privately done last year to two drivers who questioned NASCAR's officiating in post-race tweets. Come on, Jimmie...you're the five-time defending champion with a squeaky-clean public persona and a history of parroting the company line. Saying "NASCAR called that one wrong" is a little different from suggesting the finish was manipulated for ratings.
After the 1996 World 600, in which Kyle Petty was penalized several laps for aggressive driving that resulted in a major wreck, car owner Felix Sabates argued that Dale Earnhardt would not have been penalized in the same circumstances. The next week at Dover, Petty's Pontiac arrived at the track painted black with a silver body stripe down the rocker panels and white lettering outlined in red, mimicking Earnhardt's Goodwrench #3. In tiny letters on the door, a block of text read "Todo es justo en amor y carreras," roughly translated, "All is fair in love and racing." Sabates argued that, since his car looked like Earnhardt's, NASCAR would turn a blind eye. It caught attention, though not a lot as Petty ran poorly most of the day and Earnhardt won. But the statement was made, replica die-cast cars were sold (of which I own one), and as far as I know, no fines were ever levied.
Suddenly, in an era when a driver feels the need to apologize for showing sincerity, the Kyle Petty protest car seems so long ago.
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