Silly Season Ramps Up

Baseball has the Hot Stove League, where fans sit around and speculate on whether the local team will be any good the coming year, who to add to make them better and engage in pie-in-the-sky dreaming about the future.

For NASCAR fans, it ought to be called the Hot Engine League, because fans do the same thing until the cars begin to roll for Speedweeks at Daytona.

The biggest burner going these days is where Kurt Busch will wind up. If you read the story above, you’ll see what the commotion is, and why Richard Petty Motorsports wants to have Kurt Busch in the cockpit come Daytona. Crew chief Greg Erwin has re-signed with the team, after leading driver AJ Allmendinger to a 15th-place finish in 2011, and he’s an ex-Roush Fenway Racing guy just like Busch…although he left on better circumstances. Shoot, everyone left Roush on better terms than Busch did, so that’s irrelevant.

Roush is the key to whether this happens or not. Back in 2005, Busch missed the final two races of the season after an altercation in Phoenix led Roush to declare that his organization was no longer going to defend or tolerate Busch’s actions.

In six seasons with Penske Racing, Busch won 16 races and made the Chase all but two seasons, but was released after letting his alligator mouth overload his lightweight behind in a profanity-laced tirade against Dr. Jerry Punch at Homestead. An enterprising fan caught the whole thing on video and posted it to YouTube, and that was his undoing.

Once Shell Pennzoil officials saw their driver, standing there with the company name scattered all over his firesuit and wearing a company cap, the skids were greased for his ignominious exit.

Busch knows he has the right to remain silent; what he lacks is the ability to do so.

One big question remains: how is living legend and certified NASCAR monarch Richard Petty going to react to having a driver with a known habit of making a horse’s hind end of himself on national TV sitting in his family’s legacy ride? How about the first time Busch toggles the in-car radio and starts running down everyone involved? He did it to Penske, one of the world’s

most famous and successful team owners, on several occasions. It wasn’t on a five-second delay, either.

Somebody needs to teach this driver that tugging on Superman’s cape is a bad idea, one that will leave you sorry, sore and unemployed at the end of the day.

I understand why RPM would want Busch to drive one of its cars. He’s a series champion, can drive a race car like few others on the planet and has that thing the sponsors are looking for: credibility behind the wheel and the opportunity to win races.

What he doesn’t have is a governor, a rev limiter on his mouth, and Emily Post is a stranger to him. He’s ticked off and everyone within sight or sound is a target. Trust me, I’ve been there, and it’s something that requires a trip to the woodshed to fix. Jimmy Spencer delivered the right cross of absolution one summer day at Michigan, but apparently it has worn off.

We’ll keep you up on this development as it plays out.

In other news, NASCAR is moving ahead with instant replay options. Telestream, the leading provider of video transcoding and workflow automation systems, announced that it has created a new High Definition (HD) instant replay system for NASCAR race control officials.

Developed for the start of the 2012 racing season, Telestream's new Replay multichannel video player combines with its Pipeline HD video capture system to provide instant capture and display of 18 high definition 720p camera feeds. This allows race officials to instantly see detailed information to make rapid decisions about on-track aspects of the race. Telestream's Replay multichannel video player provides instant, synchronous multichannel playback of multiple HD camera feeds for simultaneous review and analysis of incidents from different camera angles. The player also allows officials to easily locate any camera and scrub forward or backward through any portion of the event video.

That’s sort of a warning, don’t you think? “We’ll be watching you, in HD, so be good! Have at it and all, but not too much!” Is it too early to state that NASCAR has become Santa Claus, and this new system is a high-tech naughty-nice list?

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