Rough Weekend for NASCAR

NASCAR has had an interesting couple of weekends, and for those of you who aren't following the sport (shame on you) I'll fill you in. First we had the final lap fracas at Talladega in which the third place car (Brian Vickers) wrecked the second and first place cars and went on to win the race. The first place car was Dale Earnhardt Jr., and wrecking Jr. in Alabama is pretty much like spitting on a Koran in downtown Baghdad. The doer of the evil deed suddenly becomes the most hated guy on the planet and is lucky to get out of their alive. Brian Vickers has been feeling the wrath of the Bud Gang all week.

Bruton Smith, who owns Lowe's Motor Speedway in Charlotte, NC, even tried a little publicity stunt to stir the pot. He issued a press release stating that he had hired additional security for Vickers because of unnamed threats. That was silly.

Then we come to this past weekend's races at Lowe's, and here we'll pick up the story from NASCAR.com:

Three safety vehicles were cleaning debris along the backstretch of Turn 2 at Lowe's Motor Speedway during Saturday night's Nextel Cup race when an official began waving the green flag for a restart.

What was said next in the control tower can't be repeated -- at least not in front of children and those with weak hearts.

That came 24 hours after the Busch Series race was red-flagged several times to sort out scoring errors involving the leaders.

That came after a week in which 1988 Cup champion Bill Elliott blasted NASCAR in his autobiography for not having a traveling medical team to treat drivers after a crash.

That came after an Internet story reminded that despite all of its progress, NASCAR still hasn't escaped the shadow of the Confederate flag and the negativity it represents to many.

No, it was not a good week for NASCAR in terms of positive press.

Or maybe it was.

I've watched nearly ever Busch or Cup race since 1997 and I've never seen either of these things occur before. Having the race red flagged with 10 laps to go in order to sort out the scoring was weird enough, but watching the flagman give the green flag while safety trucks were still working in the backstretch was not only strange, but could have been disastrous.

They caught the problem pretty quickly and were already signalling a caution even before the entire field had passed the flagstand, but they could have had a big mess. It's a minor miracle that they didn't wad up a bunch of cars in the effort to slow the field down (they don't have brake lights on those cars), and if they'd headed into the back stretch at speed the safety workers would have found themselves sitting still with 40 cars going by a few feet away at 180 mph. Not a good thing. They prefer to have concrete barriers between themselves and the race.

I think the pressure of the Chase has got everybody a little spooked right now, and it's probably a good thing they'll be on the short track at Martinsville this week. It's probably my least favorite track, but it will be a test for the Chasers to try and stay out of trouble and control their tempers.