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Double Clutchin’-The Good, Bad, And Ugly From Bristol

I bump you, you bump me, we’re a NASCAR family…

No Christmas cards will be exchanged between Kyle Busch and Carl Edwards this year, and there probably wouldn’t have been before Carl took Kyle’s bump during the cool-down lap and gave him his best heavy metal left hook.

I love Bristol.

Anyways, since I already talked about the after race issues and the importance of bad guys in NASCAR in a previous post, this is going to be a shortened version of the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, so let’s get this puppy howling:

The Good:

Great finish.  Carl Edwards may have come into his own as a big fan favorite, and that’s great for the fans and the sport.  Richard had Cale and Pearson and Allison; Dale had Darrell; Darrell had Rusty; Jimmy Spencer had everybody; and now Kyle has Carl.  Calm down, folks, I’m not saying those two are in the same league as those other guys, but rivalries are entertaining and they make racing better.

Jeff Gordon can rest easy at night knowing that there is finally someone that Bristol fans hate more than him, barely.  I expected a big pop of boos for Kyle, and I wondered if it would pass Gordon’s normal wave of boos, and it did.  But, the hate for Gordon was still loud, so don’t worry Jeff they still despise you, they just hate Kyle more.  This year, anyways.

Also, Gordon should be pleased with his race on Saturday.  He didn’t win, but he had one of the best three cars on the track all night, and a top five finish should help his team’s confidence, which the last few weeks had been lower than my opinion of politicians.

Weird to put this under the Good, but Yay! for yellow flags.  Having enough cautions at Bristol to eliminate green flag pit stops actually makes for better (and safer) racing at Bristol, and I get the feeling that NASCAR took that into consideration with a couple of cautions for debris that were rather, shall we say, mysterious?

The Bad:

I think that Junior needs to take advantage of the fact that his team is sponsored by AMP, because he seriously needs something to jolt him into paying a little bit more attention to what he’s doing.  Seriously, passing before the green flag?  WTHeck, June-Bug?  How in the world can you get yourself down a lap, at Bristol by lap five?  And more than that, how in the world did you manage to move up in the standings with an 18th place finish?  The Sprint Cup formula is harder to decipher than drinking three jars of moonshine and trying to understand intricacies of early Toni Morrison novels.  That’s right, I just referenced Toni Morrison on a motor sports site.  Get you some of that.

Also, three leaders and that’s it.  The ending of the race was good, and the aftermath was excellent, but there were a lot of people who didn’t make it to the ending, either because they were bored, or because they thought the ending was a foregone conclusion.  Forget them, they deserved what they missed.  But, there were times that it just looked like Kyle Busch was going to lap the field about twice and that got more than a little frustrating.  How can he go around that many drivers and all of them just humbly let him go?  I understand not wanting to interfere with a leader, but it seemed to me like there were drivers who weren’t that concerned about going a lap down on a track where it is dang near impossible to make up the lost time.

The Ugly:

KK my boy, you just keep making this too easy for me.  For starters this goes in the Ugly, because my rear end was at the hot dog stand when it happened and I missed the full glory of Kasey Kahne’s Cup season coming to a crashing halt.  Kahne got into the big one created when Casey Mears got into Michael Waltrip and it was just a big jumble of drivers that I don’t like running into each other.  Second of all, I’m not going with any kind of jokes about Casey Mears’ spotter being blind or anything, but it was nice of him to let me pet his dog.  Kahne took the worst of the incident, as he dropped from 11th to 14th in the points, and is now not on the bubble, but just outside the bubble of contention.  He has time to recover, but he’s going to have to wipe his tears and spend less time dancing in that silly costume.

Oh yeah, add this to the Good:  Live races free you from having to watch KK commercials.

Also, best quote this season. 

 ”Michael Waltrip is the worst driver ever…I can’t believe NAPA signed back up…”

That was Clint Bowyer on his radio after the aforementioned accident.  Couldn’t have said it any better than that, myself, Clint, so I’ll just quit while I’m ahead.

That’s it folks, I hope that you enjoyed the race as much as I did.  The only bad thing about Bristol is that it just comes twice a year.

Rocky Kitts is a fine, upstanding young man, who can be reached at wwwthreestrikesandout@yahoo.com.  If he thinks that you are not a member of a terrorist faction (aka the Kasey Kahne fan club) he will probably respond.

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