What Now?

We go through this every year. The NASCAR season comes to an end and we all sit around looking at each other and wondering what we’ll do for the next 11 weeks.

Oh sure, there’s news, like Mike Ford being shown the door at Joe Gibbs Racing and Darian Grubb arranging for a van to take his stuff up to Huntersville and replace him. Steve Addington is still doing daily cartwheels in the parking lot over at SHR, and Kurt Busch is still checking messages on a minute-by-minute basis.

The relationship between the hard-headed Hamlin and the equally stern Ford had been running on fumes since before last year’s Chase. When they failed to derail Five-Time at Homestead after taking a 15-point lead into the finale, it was all but out of gas. Hamlin did win a race this year, at Michigan, and he made the Chase, but he was never a factor and finished well down the order.

Goodbye, Mike. It was a foregone conclusion that Ford was going to get the heave-ho, it was just a matter of when. Hamlin talked openly toward the end of the season of changes that had to be made, and it was never in doubt that replacing Ford was Job No. 1 on that list.

Wondering where Busch will wind us is becoming a popular game, and now you can add Ford to that mix. Ford, while fairly strict, is a solid crew chief, and any team wanting an immediate refocus would do well to let their fingers do the walking in search of the big guy.

There’s not much on the driver swapping that is sure to happen later in the season, other than wondering where Busch will wind up. Some team that wants a little bit of fire in the cockpit could use a guy like Busch, but if I were the crew chief, I’d disable the talk button on the steering wheel and communicate via smoke signals. Hand gestures, you understand, would be quite problematic.

Here’s a thought: Busch winds up at one team or another and they hire Ford as the crew chief. That would last about 10 minutes, just long enough for Kurt to open his mouth. Ford would be on the last train to Clarksville 10 minutes after that.

While we’re pondering the future as yet untold, take a minute to reflect on the Chase. For those 10 races, there was a kind of magic in the sport that I haven’t felt in a long time. Could Tony Stewart really not win all year and then just blow up the Chase? Could Carl Edwards average a finish of 4.9 in those 10 races and still lose? Could Kyle Busch really be that stupid? Could Jimmie Johnson not muster a stellar run in the 10 races his team has been built to dominate?

The answer to all those questions, remarkably, is yes. It’s an amazing thing, what happened over the final 10 races, and even more amazing is the fact that NASCAR needed this to happen in the worst way.

Just like it needed Dale Earnhardt to win the Daytona 500 to kick off NASCAR’s 50th season, just like it needed a kid from Indiana to win the inaugural Brickyard 400, just like it needed a replacement for that kid to come in and dominate the sport the last five years.

I guess we have more to think about in the offseason than just when the cars start to run again, don’t we?

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