Just a few words about yesterday's Daytona 500, which was dazzling for about 7/8 of the day and then depressingly cut short by rain. It's a travesty, a sham, a mockery -- dare we resuscitate the old advertising catchphrase and call it a "traveshamockery" --- that NASCAR can't run in the rain. The sport clearly needs retractable domes so this kind of thing doesn't happen? Or whatever the guys in F1 run.The biggest story of the race, for us anyway, was Goodyear, whose secret plan to drive Tony Stewart crazy is working beautifully. . There was also Dale Junior, who missed his pit box four times over the course of the weekend and twice within the race. He pissed off Jeff Burton, which is pretty hard to do, and was in the middle of an incident which wrecked half the field. In his post-race interviews, Junior blamed Vickers for the wreck, implied Burton was wrong, and said the one-lap penalty he got for being outside the pit box was too tough and "we" by which he meant NASCAR, should change it. Dale is likable and has always been a clean driver, but he is also a ten-year veteran who is running out of excuses for not winning.
Finally, we don't care if Gavin DeGraw was replacing Julianne Hough who got sick at the last-minute, blah-blah-blah. DeGraw's was possibly the worst pre-race rendition of the National Anthem of all time and utterly unbefitting an event as big as the Daytona 500. Whether he was trying to imitate Marvin Gaye's famously laid-back rendition at the 1983 NBA All Star game, we don't know. But the way a disheveled McGraw's voice cracked on "land of the free" was not only embarrassing. but depressing. And while we are bitching about music, what would make NASCAR think Keith Urban was a good choice for pre-race entertainment? Yeah, he's country. Kind of. In a greasy, Hollywood kind of way. The guy is an Australian, married to a movie star and has been in rehab for coke. That's not quite the All-American, family-friendly image NASCAR likes to project. Where's Charlie Daniels when we need him?
Oh yeah. Matt Kenseth won the race.
