Abreu won the 2014 USAC Midget car championship,

Darrell Waltrip has announced that he will retire from the booth this summer.

Just like his driving career, he hung on about 5 years too long.

I would say he hung on 18 years too long. Supposedly this followed by a day or so a pretty scathing editorial from a NASCAR writer about the shit quality of the Fox broadcast. One of her suggestions was his retirement.

After my post, I read her article. I laughed. And agreed.

An interesting point I've been seeing out there is how old Mike Joy sounds these days. He's nearly 70 himself.

Dover was supposed to be today and it was rained out. Fox showed last year's race instead. That got this Tweet from good old Clint Boyer:

For the love of god. Can we please stop playing replays of last years races on rain outs. My phone is blowing up! FOR THE RECORD!!!! The race is TOMORROW!!!! Tune in while you’re at work. Chances are your boss is at the race anyways. He’ll never know!

I would love to say that NASCAR fans aren't the brightest fans in the world, but I know they don't have a monopoly on ignorance.

The dumb all-star race was last night. It had an interesting post-race battle between Clint Boyer and Ryan Newman.

This is a tough one for me. I don't like Newman at all, but Boyer is being a tee-total chickenshit here. He threw several punches at Newman while Newman was sitting in his car, helmet off. You just have to watch the first 10 seconds of the clip to see what happened:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dm8Zsgb5e2Q

The 600 was tonight, and at the start of the race, the track had a tribute screen to stupid Waltrip that read, "Thanks DW."

I wasn't sure if they were thanking him for his contributions, or thanking him for finally leaving.

I was ok with Truex winning. Boogity.

That was hilarious. Looked like a good ol' fashioned slap fight.

Caught the end of the Sonoma road race today, DW's last. He did have one funny line, saying something like, "He's sitting on the hot seat, but he's peeing ice water."

Goodbye, DW. And good riddance.

And fuck the guy with the Boogity sign.

The Daytona summer race finish was marred by weather. Because of rain and more importantly, lightning, they ended the race early and some guy that had no chance of winning, won the race. People are STILL bitching about it days later.

Nobody bitches and moans more than NASCAR fans. I'm not crazy about some spare winning, but that stuff happens sometimes in racing.

This was about as spare of a winner as you could get. One of my favorite parts of the ordeal was one of the NBC announcers talking about Kurt Busch being screwed over by the red flag (shit happens) and emphatically declaring, "Nascar officials would never manipulate the flags to get the outcome they want!" I don't think that's what they did in Daytona, but that was a pretty funny declaration.

Don't they normally postpone the race and finish on Monday?

It was already postponed from Saturday night to Sunday afternoon and I'm sure they didn't want to shorten the travel week with another Saturday race coming up.

Last July 4th weekend race at Daytona since they're swapping dates with Indianapolis going forward.

Not a fan of this development.

Oh my my my. Toni Stewart got mad at a heckler in Jackson, Minnesota and socked him with a left hand. Afterward, fat Toni reportedly said, "Fuck, I broke my hand."

No cops were called, making old Hoob laugh.

I don't like this guy and it proves again that he has severe anger issues. But the heckler deserved it.

Audio is NSFW.

https://www.tmz.com/2019/07/30/tony-ste ... ck-nascar/

Surely that guy's gonna get paid.

Here's a sign that I work at a country school. I passed by the cafeteria workers and they were discussing the plane crash involving June Bug and his family.

Included in the discussion was one worker saying he was probably flying the plane too fast and couldn't land. Another pointed out the fact that there were two pilots.

Hoob's take: thank goodness he didn't die. Otherwise we'd be seeing 88 with wings stickers all over the place.

And no, I didn't tell them this.

From the pics of the aftermath, he and his family were damn lucky. The video of him lying on the ground getting treated was pretty scary looking.

It sure sounds like it. Dang, June. Be careful out there.

I flipped by the Brickyard race on Sunday a few times during commercial breaks in the Ranger game and the 2 early football games, but I missed the really wild crash involving Erik Jones and Brad Keselowski. Keselowski caught a tire barrier at an odd angle and ended up on top of what was left of the barrier. (Go watch the video. Not for the crash but to hear whoever was calling the race for NBC screaming at the top of his lungs about the crash.) Keselowski is raising hell over the odd barrier being there. This seems to be a race that is universally hated, so much so that the track is considering the road/oval option like Charlotte. I'm glad I stayed away from this race for the most part and I bet Hoob is too.

I just now watched the crash. Good grief somebody had that announcer by the nuts.

Odd that I don't remember that many Indy cars going flying into that wall coming out of turn two. I've seen a couple of people die from hitting the same one in turn 4, though.

You, me, and most of America stayed away from that race. It suuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuucks.

The Texas fall race is this weekend. Stay away from this race, and stay away from 114 at I-35 W.

Today's race was good. The season ends next week, and the final four is set:

Denny Hamlin
Kyle Busch
Martin Truex Jr.
Kevin Harvick

Three of those are Joe Gibbs cars. I guess I want Truex to win followed by Harvick. Anybody but Busch.

There will only be 4 cars racing? I might watch that.

Jimmie Johnson announced that the 2020 season will be his last as a full-time driver. He and his team have been kind of also-rans the past couple of years. I never thought I'd see the day when that would happen.

He has won 83 times, which is 6th on the all-time list:

1. Richard Petty, 200 wins
2. David Pearson, 105
3. Jeff Gordon, 93
4. Darrell Waltrip, 84
4. Bobby Allison, 84
6. Jimmie Johnson, 83
6. Cale Yarborough, 83
8. Dale Earnhardt, 76
9. Kyle Busch, 56
10. Rusty Wallace, 55

In Pensacola they have a track called 5 Flags Speedway. The place holds something called the Snowball Derby.

Yesterday they had a race there and 58 year old spare Rich Bickle was racing 19 year-old Harrison Burton. Harrison is former racer Jeff Burton's son.

Somebody behind Bickle tagged him, and it wrecked both him and young Burton. Bickle, thinking Burton caused it, got out and started cussing Burton, who was still in his car. On camera he is heard calling Burton a "fucking pussy," among other things.

The youngster got out of his car and calmed down the old dumbass, who later apologized to the entire family. Young Burton is being widely praised for how he handled this moron and calmed him down.

He probably should apologize to Harrison's mom Kim. When this all happened, she fell off her perch in the pits and broke her arm. The only video I could find of this dust-up was on Twitter, so I didn't link it.

A kickass time was had.

Junior Johnson died this week. He had retired from driving by the time I started watching NASCAR so I knew him only as an owner.

His family was moonshiners, and he was convicted of moonshining in 1956. He was well-known for outrunning the law while carrying 'shine to a customer.

He won 50 races and was the first driver to figure out drafting. This happened in the 1960 Daytona 500, which he won with a car that was slower than the others.

He never won the championship as a driver, but as a car owner he won six of them: Darrell Waltrip won three, and Cale Yarborough won three.

He was 88.

Fox is going to a two man booth this year. It'll be Mike Joy and Jeff Gordon.

I'm okay with this.

The new president of NASCAR agrees that they have "lost their way" in trying to cater to the casual fan. The article talks a lot about short tracks. It also mentions a streaming service.

https://athlonsports.com/nascar/nascar- ... ack-racing

Hoob's take on this:

1. It's too late. You ran those fans off and they are gone.
1a. But it's nice that you admitted it.

2. By getting involved in some of the lower-level racing, they'll screw that up too. Or the networks will.

3. If they are getting involved in some sort of streaming service, races will end up on it that nobody will get to see. It's just like putting races on Fx1 or one of the oddball NBC channels, which is part of the reason for them losing fans.

Count me amongst fans almost completely runofft by that goofy ass playoff system and the boring intermediate tracks If they insist on running half or 2/3 of the races on those tracks, at least find a way to trick up the cars and keeping them from turning into single file parades with 10 cars on the lead lap. I have no problem with more short tracks (although they seem to think that adding 1 short track to the series is the magic number) and trick up attempts like the roval or even adding a cup series race at a dirt track like Eldora. A streaming service is a stupid idea unless it involves a shit load of archived races. If they try to take live races off of the networks, that could be fatal. That ain't gonna draw back Joe Bob from his trailer outside of Tallahassee.

Most people saw or heard about the Ryan Newman wreck on Monday at Daytona. He walked out of the hospital today, holding hands with his daughters.

Not a fan of the guy but I am very glad he survived that. The closeup of the gas pouring out of the gas tank while fire was burning nearby was pretty scary. The car was upside down at the time.

I thought he was moving to block Ryan Blaney and nearly caused him to get Earnhardted. I must be the only one who saw it that way. I saw a ton of people who said that Blaney was just trying to push Newman to the win and he didn't catch his bumper correctly and spun him out.

And good Lord did this event bring out the Twitter trolls. Many announced that he had been declared dead and it was official. WTF.

That was a cool wreck.

The former CEO of NASCAR, Brian France, is suing a guy for having a parody Twitter account that makes fun of him. The name of the account? Drunken Brian France. It's usually pretty funny stuff. It's obviously a parody account.

Ol' Brian is the grandson of NASCAR's founder, Bill France. He sucks. None of the presidents of the big four sports league were ever hated like this guy has been.

For what it's worth, he did get a DUI and some Oxy pills were found on him when he was arrested.

In his suit he says that the parody account is intended to deceive other Twitter users into thinking that this is actually the real Brian France.

What a dumbass.

Ken Schraeder was the driver that walked up to Dale Earnhardt's car after his fatal wreck.

June talks about it with Ken, that he had to be the one to carry the burden of what he walked up on and saw. It's a pretty cool three minute clip.

https://twitter.com/i/status/1237881914414870529

I'm not an Earnhardt lover at all, but I enjoyed this.

I guess I missed an eSports race last weekend. Saw a ton of tweets about it, and Denny Hamlin won. I see that 903,000 people watched this.

Manny Anekal
@mannyanekal
·
1h
NASCAR Esports Sunday on FS1 hit 903,000 total viewers (297,000 18-59). 9K Avg. viewers online (via @StreamHatchet
)

This would make it the highest rated esports TV program ever (2nd was Mortal Kombat on The CW in 2016 at 770,000).

Last weekend's fake race at Tejas got over a million viewers. Some spare named Timmy Hill won. I forgot it was on, then watched the last three laps.

The racing looks real on TV until they wreck. They haven't got that part down yet. Cars bounce around like they only have half gravity.

This weekend they are e-racing at Bristol. Should be some beatin' and bangin.

Dude, those graphics are pretty damn good. I saw a clip of it and thought those were real cars.

Actual footage from the race:

I watched about 30 minutes of the fake race last Sunday. It's kind of cool. The in race commentary, especially from the real drivers, was pretty amusing. There was a shit ton of it in that 30 minutes since it was packed with cautions.