Burning Questions: Richmond

By Stephen Thomas, CNNSI.com
September 4, 2001
5:37 PM EDT (2137 GMT)

CNNSI.com's Stephen Thomas tackles three questions that matter to fans:

1 What gives with red-flagging the Southern 500?

Dale Earnhardt Jr.

With seven laps remaining in the Southern 500 on Sunday, NASCAR officials stopped the field while work crews cleaned up separate incidents with Joe Nemechek and Ron Hornaday and Jimmy Spencer. The last time NASCAR waved the red flag, near the end of the race at Richmond in May, Dale Jarrett, who had been running near the front, ran out of gas and eventually finished 15th.

NASCAR's motives are obvious and understandable -- they want to deliver exciting product, which means if at all possible, a race should end under green. However, on Sunday, not only did it appear that crews had plenty of time to clean up the track while still allowing for, say, a three-lap run to the finish, but as often happens in late-race restarts where everyone is racing madly to the flag, Sunday's race was marred by still another crash, one that conspicuously took away a top-5 finish from Dale Earnhardt Jr. (he finished 17th).

"It's the dumbest [stuff] I've ever seen," Earnhardt said of the decision to red flag. "That's staged. That's rigged. It's ridiculous. That's what you get when you get red flags, you get wrecks."

Earnhardt is neither alone in his anger (Ricky Rudd also was exceptionally vocal after the race) nor is that anger misplaced. After all, there is nothing in the NASCAR rulebook, as there is, for example, in the truck series rulebook, that codifies when, why and under what circumstances NASCAR will stop a race to ensure that it ends under green; the irony Sunday, of course, was that the final wreck that Jr. was caught up in caused the race to end under yellow. Be that as it may, on the assumption that at some point in the future NASCAR will once again arbitrarily stop a race to manufacture more excitement, then the organization would be well advised to consider writing a rule stating as much.

2 Has Dale Jarrett made his recent luck?

Dale Jarrett

Though Jarrett wasn't undone by this most recent red flag, his season was further undone by Sunday's events -- for the fourth time in the last six races, Jarrett finished 31st or worse. Since winning the New England 300 at New Hampshire in July and taking first place in the point's race from Jeff Gordon, Jarrett has been in a virtual free-fall (though of the drivers tied after New Hampshire with 2,695 points, Jarrett became the leader based on total wins at the time).

Despite his four wins (second now to Gordon's five) and nine top-5s, Jarrett's 34th-place finish in the Southern 500 dropped him to fourth, his lowest position since the third race of the year at Las Vegas. Over this recent, desultory six-race span, Gordon has earned almost twice as many points as DJ has, 1,013 to 520.

"I think you make whatever [luck] it is," Jarrett said Saturday about good versus bad luck. "That's where hard work and preparation come together. Bad luck is just a matter of having yourself in the wrong spot at the wrong time or doing the wrong thing. Sometimes that translates into doing it well and sometimes not so well."

Whether one subscribes to the "you make your luck" theory of racing -- and we'll give both Jarrett and his crew the benefit of the doubt here -- if he and his team are to right their badly listing ship, they need to get a move on.

3 Will Kenny Wallace's stint in place of Steve Park re-fire his Cup career?

Kenny Wallace

"Just because you don't win doesn't mean you don't have the right to go out there every week and race."

That statement seems almost reasonable, even coming from a professional race car driver, when you consider its source: Kenny Wallace. After all, in his more than 230 Winston Cup starts, Wallace has never won a race. Still, what owner wants to hire a driver who is satisfied with losing? But after what Wallace did Sunday, the statement he made to a reporter from The St. Louis Dispatch soon after he left Eel River Racing begins to sound downright logical.

Wallace has long voiced a desire to match his driving talent with the right opportunity and equipment. He got it Sunday, when he replaced Steve Park in the No. 1. (Among other injuries, Park suffered a concussion in a brutal crash in Saturday's Busch race at Darlington). And in so doing, he might well have proved the validity of that seemingly ill-advised statement. There's no other way to put it: Wallace flat drove his tail off. After starting 34th, he rose to as high as 12th before his day was ended prematurely by engine problems (he finished 41st).

Park may or may not be able to reclaim his seat this week, but, according to a person at Dale Earnhardt Inc. on Tuesday, the assumption is that Wallace will again be behind the wheel if Park is still incapacitated (that decision won't be officially made until the last minute). "I'm a racer," Wallace told the Post-Dispatch, "and that's the bottom line. I'm a damned racer. I race. That's what I do."

And what he will continue to do into the future if he can run like he did Sunday.