Things get pretty wild in NASCAR. Wild and confusing. Here’s what happened at the weekend: top NASCAR driver, Jeff Gordon, won a race, and overtook former (and dead) top NASCAR driver, Dale Earnhardt, in the all-time NASCAR winners list. Full report here. (Not that I’d recommend reading it. If you can garner anything more from it than what I’ve just outlined, I’d be impressed).
After the race, in a heady mixture of fury and beer, NASCAR fans threw their empty beer cans at Gordon. Gordon wasn’t best pleased. But clearly he’d cheered up later that night when he was caught on a fan’s camera phone, full-on kissing his NASCAR teammate, Jimmie Johnson. Neither have deigned to make a statement – but Southern NASCAR fans aren’t happy. They’ve never like Johnson – and now this. How is Jeff going to explain it? Was he drunk? Over-excited? Showing off? Is bored already of his new wife, Ingrid Vandebosch, whom he met at a “croquet event”? Was he giving two fingers to his sponsors? Or his faith? Did he know someone else was watching? Was it all played out for the benefit of a third party? Had he taken something a little stronger than beer? Or did he simply find himself stuck in a situation in which he didn’t know what to do? Has he reconfigured it in his own head as something different from what it was? Are Regis and Kelly going to have him back? Are Quaker State going to boot him out? Is it all over for Jeff Gordon?
“Is it over?” he radioed his crew. “Is it over? Is it official?”
Nobody knew after two separate accidents on the first lap of a three-lap shootout to the finish froze the field and had NASCAR scrambling to make sense of the finish.
Gordon, who was 14th on a restart with 10 laps to go, stormed to the lead a second before NASCAR called a caution after David Reutimann’s engine failed and dumped oil all over the track.
It set up a three-lap sprint to the finish, but NASCAR makes only one attempt to complete it. If caution comes out, the race instantly ends. So when Elliott Sadler bumped the back of Greg Biffle to trigger a wreck, the race was effectively over.
But Tony Stewart was knocked into the wall far ahead of that accident and went spinning down the track into the inside wall. He was fuming as the field passed by him under caution, angrily gesturing at Jamie McMurray.
The fans, meanwhile, figured out that Gordon, who tied Earnhardt last week in Phoenix, was the victor and reacted with the shower of beer cans. The debris cut Gordon’s celebration short, he didn’t do the customary celebratory burnout, instead dodging the cans as he headed straight to Victory Lane.
It was fan reaction Dale Earnhardt Jr. had tried to stave off earlier this week when he asked his fans — who dominate the Talladega grandstands — to throw toilet paper instead of beer cans out of safety concerns.
