The state of the art is messy

 



Jeff Burton wrecked at ‘Dega, and he wrecked again at Texas … (photo: Getty Images)

 

AVONDALE, Ariz. – Have at it, boys. Those words, spoken back in January by NASCAR’s Robin Pemberton, might as well have been the slogan of the season.

Oh, by the way, remember the Maine, the Alamo and Joe Hill, too.

Once, when I was in high school, our team paid a visit to a conference rival we’d beaten 62-0 the year before. That school normally wore orange, but when we trotted out on the field for warm-up, we immediately noticed the other team was wearing red and white T-shirts, matching our school colors. The T-shirts read:

WE REMEMBER! 62-0!

We remembered, too. We won, 34-6, and there weren’t any T-shirts the next year.

While pro football implements rules that limit the capacity of overgrown physical specimens to, uh, play football, NASCAR tumbles into old-fashioned laissez-faire.

If a driver doesn’t like the way another driver is racing him, he can just duke it out, by gosh. Unlike a beanball in baseball, NASCAR doesn’t eject or issue warnings, anything like that.

Have at it, boys. The three R’s are rubbin’, retaliatin’, and wreckin’.

The august ruling body must, of course, prevent an outbreak of anarchy. It can’t have these cocky, rich whippersnappers just rioting in the streets (uh, tracks). They can be scrapping among themselves all they want, but don’t be “sassing” a NASCAR official. Kyle Busch didn’t need words to “sass,” but he would have been no better off had he launched into a profanity-laced diatribe.

One reason modern racers can “have at it” is that they have few limitations.

In the old days, when a driver wrecked a car, he had to fix it, and if he didn’t fix it, he paid to have it fixed. Nowadays that’s the domain of millionaire owners with accompanying millions from sponsors. Now a dozen cars, just like the wrecked one used to be, sit back at the shop. They’ll send a transporter to pick another one up, if need be.

More than 20 years ago, Darrell Waltrip was kidding when he suggested that a car owner’s advice to a driver was, “If you can’t win the race, at least tear up the car.”

That’s no longer a joke. That’s the state of the art now.

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