BLOG: The Sheriff Speaks Truth

Brian Vickers is a smart guy. He's been around racing all his life, and he's done some stuff that you and I will never do...like race at 200 miles per hour and all that stuff Red Bull let him do a few years back (I still don't think jumping out of a perfectly good aircraft is a rational act, but that's me).

Anyway, he's been around long enough and earned enough cred to say pretty much what he wants.

That leads us to a little ditty from the prince of Thomasville, N.C. that is certainly apropos this weekend, when we visit the 1.5-mile oval at Las Vegas.

Talking about aero push and the lack of passing in today's Sprint Cup races, Vickers took off.

"I don’t buy into the whole racing has gone downhill because of aero," he said. "It was always there, I don’t know what people are talking about.  Air has always been there, it’s not like it just got invented in the last five or 10 years."

He wasn't done.

"I think the reason you’re seeing maybe sometimes lots of shuffle on a long green flag run is the tires don’t fall off as much," he explained. "The reality is the competition is closer than it’s ever been.  You put 43 guys out there, put 30 of them on the race track by themselves and they run sometimes within a 10th (of a second) within each other.  How am I going to pass?  I think as a sport we’ve chased parity so much that we’ve accomplished it and the cars are so even and the box is so small.

"You could take the bodies off the things and the reality is I’m going to have a hard time passing someone when I’m only a thousandth of a second faster.”

There you have it, y'all, straight from the Sheriff's mouth.