Rivalries, Payback & Track Games
Somewhere Along the Way, This Got Personal
Racing would be considerably simpler if everybody worried only about the stopwatch.
Fortunately, racers are people.
They remember who leaned on them last week. They remember who blocked them, bumped them, embarrassed them, protested them or said something particularly irritating after the race.
Then they put on helmets and line up beside each other again.
Pick Your Argument: Hail Melon | Jungle Jim’s Red Light | Daytona 1979 | Earnhardt vs. Labonte | Pass in the Grass | Kenseth vs. Logano | Talladega Boycott | Arfons vs. Breedlove | USA-1 vs. Bigfoot
Sometimes the argument is serious. Sometimes it is gamesmanship. Sometimes it is a rivalry that lasts for years because two people keep chasing the same record, championship or piece of racetrack.
And occasionally somebody decides the fastest route around the problem is directly through it.
This is where racing quits being entirely mechanical.
The cars still matter. The speed still matters. But the stories survive because there were people inside those cars who had opinions about the fellow in the other lane.
Ross Chastain needed positions. The conventional racing line was no longer solving the problem.
Most racers tried not to red-light. Jungle Jim reportedly found a more direct solution.
Cale Yarborough and Donnie Allison managed to lose the Daytona 500 and become the part everybody remembered.
Dale Earnhardt said he only meant to rattle Terry Labonte’s cage. Bristol provided a rather narrow place to test that explanation.
Bill Elliott and Dale Earnhardt were already racing hard when Earnhardt suddenly found himself somewhere the racing line definitely wasn’t.
Matt Kenseth was nine laps down. Joey Logano was leading. That did not mean they were racing for different things.
There was plenty of salt at Bonneville. Art Arfons and Craig Breedlove kept finding reasons to use more of it.
Once there were two famous giant trucks, somebody was inevitably going to ask which one was better.
Bottom Line
Racers do not forget much.
They remember the bump at Bristol, the wreck at Kansas, the fellow chasing the same land-speed record and the team parked in the other lane.
Sometimes that produces great racing.
Sometimes it produces a fight in the Daytona infield.
Sometimes it produces a race car scraping the wall wide open because the normal route wasn’t fast enough.
The machinery makes racing possible. The people make it personal.
That is usually where the better stories start.
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