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Author: Tucker White

  • The White Zone: Shame on NASCAR and Charlotte, if they sign off on Trump’s appearance

    The White Zone: Shame on NASCAR and Charlotte, if they sign off on Trump’s appearance

    Really, NASCAR and Charlotte Motor Speedway? You’re both OK with this? You’re OK with Donald Trump, who previously attacked Bubba Wallace, publicly, to attend, Sunday?

    If so, shame on you both!

    If you missed it, the former president — and presumptive presidential nominee for the Republican Party, this year — plans to attend Sunday’s Coca-Cola 600. Where he’ll turn one of NASCAR’s crown jewels into a glorified campaign event. Just as he did in 2020 at the Daytona 500. Furthermore, that raises the possibility of interfering with Kyle Larson’s attempt at “The Double,” Sunday.

    Those together result in a stupid idea.

    But did you forget he attacked Wallace?!

    Plus, as Jeff Gluck points out.

    You’re gonna let that man have a spotlight at yet another one of your marquee events? Where, if he randomly feels like it, he can incite more vitriol towards Wallace? A good percentage of which is thinly-veiled racism!

    Most charitably, NASCAR and Charlotte acted wildly irresponsibly, if neither stops this before it happens. Less charitably, both entities turn a blind eye to the vitriol that’s sure to come at Wallace, because neither cared enough to nip this in the bud. Yeah, who cares if this inspires more racism at Wallace? The money matters more, right?!

    I hope like hell it’s not the latter!

    NASCAR’s angered me more times than I can count over my 20+ years of following it, but this tops everything! All the work the people at NASCAR did to cleanup the mess left by Brian France, when he endorsed Trump for President. Which, if you recall, happened just months after he pulled the XFINITY and Truck Series banquets from one of Trump’s hotels, for one of the many, many times spewed racist garbage about Hispanic immigrants. All the work to erase virtually any presence of Confederate flags at all NASCAR races in 2020. All the work to make NASCAR more appealing to African Americans. Who saw the sea of stars and bars that plagued the infield of most NASCAR race weekends. Particularly in the Deep South and either refused to give NASCAR a chance, or stoically dealt with the background radiation for years (when they shouldn’t had to in the first place).

    If you and Charlotte let this happen and the national embarrassment known as Trump attacks Wallace again, then all that work and goodwill collapses and disappears into a black hole. What other non-White Southerner would give NASCAR a chance, again? I know none of my leftist friends would, no matter how much I sell them on becoming NASCAR-pilled, like me.

    NASCAR, you dropped the ball on this in 2020. When you waited two days to issue a response on the FBI’s findings of the noose situation. All while racists and right-wing political hacks tarred and feathered Wallace for something that was wildly out of his control on any reasonable level Yes, Wallace didn’t help himself with his comments on CNN the day after the report. But that doesn’t excuse NASCAR’s tardiness on it.

    And let me stop those people who’ll call me a Wallace shill dead in their tracks. I said NASCAR should park Wallace for nakedly dumping Kyle Larson at Las Vegas Motor Speedway in 2022. Argue with the wall.

    Bottom line: NASCAR and Charlotte, stop this before it happens. This possibility shouldn’t exist in the first place, but both entities can save their bacon with the years of work to appeal to a more inclusive audience still intact.

    If not, whatever happens, Sunday, is on you.

    That’s my view, for what it’s worth.

  • McLaughlin saves season with dominant drive in Alabama

    McLaughlin saves season with dominant drive in Alabama

    On Wednesday, Scott McLaughlin learned he lost his second-place finish in the Firestone Grand Prix of St. Petersburg, for push-to-pass violations by Team Penske. As a result, he fell to last in NTT INDYCAR SERIES points.

    “We took the penalty, as we said at the start of the week,” he said. “It was black and white. You move on.”

    Fast-forward to Sunday, McLaughlin dominated the field to win in Alabama.

    He led a race high of 59 laps to win the Children’s of Alabama Indy Grand Prix for the second year in a row, and the fifth time in his career. He built up a large enough gap to pit on Lap 75 and exit pit road ahead of Alex Palou. A caution with five laps to go gave Palou and the field another chance, but nobody had the goods to overtake McLaughlin on the final restart with two laps to go.

    “We did what we thought we could do,” he said. “It was execution. Like, probably one of the most I guess you could say so proud of the execution, the way that the team, particularly on the three cars, stuck together. We just kind of kept executing. That’s our word for the rest of the year. Keep knocking ’em out. Points are points. Points are imaginary things. You just, like, get them. It’s a reward at the end of the race.

    “It’s about executing. The higher you finish, the more points you get. Ultimately it’s a bonus at the end of the season. We’re here to just take it race by race and see what happens towards the end.”

    Teammate, Will Power, who lost 10 points in Wednesday’s penalty announcement, brought his No. 12 Team Penske Chevrolet home to a runner-up finish. INDYCAR rookie, Linus Lundqvist, passed Palou for third on Lap 79. For a moment, he thought he could pass Power in Turn 5. To no avail.

    “I think these guys were obviously the pace of the field today,” he said. “I was able to hold off fairly easily from Palou. I think he still had some fuel saving or old tires.”

    Felix Rosenqvist and Palou rounded out the top-five.

    Christian Lundgaard, Santino Ferrucci, Colton Herta, Marcus Armstrong and Kyle Kirkwood rounded out the top-10.

    Race summary

    McLaughlin led the field to green at 1:40 p.m. ET. A three-car incident in Turn 1 set the tone for the day. For which Rinus VeeKay served a pass-through penalty, for avoidable contact. I counted at least six times one car touched another, over the course of 90 laps.

    McLaughlin pitted from the lead on Lap 28. Palou followed suite, two laps later. Followed by Rosenqvist on Lap 31 and Ferrucci on Lap 36. McLaughlin cycled back to the lead on Lap 37.

    Alexander Rossi lost a wheel exiting pit road on Lap 44. Which brought out a caution. Running on a three-stop strategy, Palou stayed out during the caution to retake the lead. When Sting Ray Robb plowed into the Turn 1 tire barrier on Lap 55, Ferrucci stayed out to inherit the lead. It was a lucky break for McLaughlin, who was “probably on the backfoot” when the caution flew.

    “That was a way of us getting back to the point where these other guys had to take the fuel and hope they made the fuel,” he said.

    After Ferrucci pitted on Lap 66 and Lundqvist on Lap 70, McLaughlin built a roughly 30-second gap to Palou. When he pitted on Lap 75, he exited ahead of Palou.

    Aside from Christian Rasmussen’s stall in Turn 14 with five laps to go, it was McLaughlin’s race to lose.

    What else happened

    File under “Well that happened.”

    On Lap 53, a mannequin named Georgina fell off the bridge before the entry to Turn 7 and partially onto the track. Which Luca Ghiotto clipped. In a sports league where fans tape up beer cans to make a beer tower on Carb Day at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, nothing compares to this. Hell, I once saw a bat fly around the media center at Bristol Motor Speedway, and that was less bizarre than any of this.

    Nuts and bolts

    The race lasted one hour, 56 minutes and 45 seconds, at an average speed of 106.369 mph. There were 10 lead changes among six different drivers and four cautions for 15 laps.

    Herta leaves Barber Motorsports Park as the points leader.

  • The White Zone: Yeah, this race wasn’t good

    The White Zone: Yeah, this race wasn’t good

    EDITOR’S NOTE: A previous version of this story used the headline “The White Zone: Yeah, this race sucked.” After discussing it with Tucker, he understood this was too mean-spirited of a title. Furthermore, he rewrote several paragraphs for the same reason.

    ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. — Even IndyCar puts on lackluster races.

    I’ve worked enough NTT INDYCAR SERIES races to know what makes a good race. You won’t see bumping and banging, and multiple on-track lead changes like NASCAR. And if you understand and accept that, there’s a lot of fun to have with IndyCar. Which, in my opinion, is more strategy-heavy than NASCAR.

    But just like NASCAR, INDYCAR has doldrum days.

    All weekend, I heard beat writers and even NBC take potshots at Formula 1 for how stale and boring its product is (and rightfully so). Now by no means was Sunday’s Firestone Grand Prix of St. Pete near the level of the Max Verstappen Invitational.

    But it had some elements of it.

    Josef Newgarden led 92 of 100 laps and won by a margin of roughly eight seconds. All the lead changes happened during pit stops. Three times, a driver braked wrong, overran a corner and a caution flew. In one case, Romain Grosjean clipped Linus Lundqvist in Turn 10 and put him in the tire barrier (for which, he served a pass-through penalty).

    Outside of that, Sunday’s race didn’t give me much to discuss.

    Look, there was a lot of good from this weekend. This race drew an insanely huge crowd, which crowded pit road, pre-race. I found it more difficult than normal to move my way through the sea of people. Furthermore, St. Pete is an amazingly intimate venue. Everything’s centralized to an excellent walking distance radius of the deadline room and once you figure out the basic layout, it’s insanely easy to navigate.

    Would I come here to cover a race, again? ABSOLUTELY!

    Moreover, this race was probably an outlier.

    For now, however, the kickoff to the 2024 season could’ve been better.

    That’s my view, for what it’s worth.

  • Newgarden takes pole at St. Pete

    Newgarden takes pole at St. Pete

    ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. — Josef Newgarden told NBC’s Marty Snider, Friday, in the Mahaffey Theater that despite his Indianapolis 500 victory and wins on all but one oval, he was bummed to not win a pole in 2023.

    He rectified that in Race No. 1 of 2024.

    “Crazy proud,” he said. “I’m always proud of my team and even more so today. They deserve it. They’ve done a great job all off-season. They’ve done a great job in 2023 (sic), and I feel like we fell short in a lot of areas that we didn’t need to.”

    The two-time NTT INDYCAR Series champion scored his 17th career pole with a Firestone Fast Six time of 59.5714 (108.777 mph). He jumped to the top of the charts with just 15 seconds left in the final round. Besting Felix Rosenqvist, who broke Will Power’s track record in the second round.

    All of which came after a less than stellar performance in first practice, Friday. Newgarden’s team didn’t change much on the car after first practice.

    “We were sort of same car,” he said. “Just really putting it together better, and I think (second practice) was representative more so for where we were as a team.”

    Rounding out the top-six are Pato O’Ward, Colton Herta (who ran his fastest time in the final round on Firestone black tires, while the rest used greens*), Romain Grosjean and defending race winner Marcus Ericsson.

    Aside from Rinus VeeKay kissing the wall off Turn 10, nothing out of the ordinary happened during qualifying. Gusts of wind dragged debris onto the track, but that wound up a non-factor.

    * The green-banded Firestone tires are the same compound as the reds of years past, but with a different construction. How differently it performed was “hard to say.”

    “I felt like it was probably more of a lap two, lap three tire than the past,” Rosenqvist said. “I think here last time we were here it was like a lap one tire. It changes all the time kind of depending on the weather and the wind and what not.”

  • Dixon vs. father time

    Dixon vs. father time

    ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. — Scott Dixon took his seat at the podium inside the deadline room of the Mahaffey Theater. The six-time NTT INDYCAR SERIES champion starts his 22nd season, Sunday.

    In most sports, an athlete’s performance peaks in their mid to late 20s. Whereas in auto racing, many drivers race well into their 40s. Mario Andretti raced full-time in IndyCar until 1994, at the age of 54. AJ Foyt ran his final race in 1996, at 61, in a 28th-place finish in the NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series at Las Vegas Motor Speedway.

    Furthermore, winning races isn’t just for the youth. Dixon, 43, capped off the 2023 season with three wins in the last four races.

    With that said, however, father time waits for nobody.

    “I think it’s different for everybody, depending on when they feel like they should be done with a sport,” Dixon said.

    Sometimes, a driver leaves a sport on top. While he didn’t win a fifth NASCAR Cup Series championship, Jeff Gordon, at 44, raced his way into the Championship 4 in his final full-time season in 2015.

    More often than not, however, a driver exits with a whimper.

    While Jimmie Johnson won his seventh championship in 2016, at 41, his performance declined as well. He finished less than half the races in the top-10 for the first time in his career and didn’t lead the most laps in a single race. Moreover, his results fell sharply in his final four full-time seasons. He went winless in his final three and missed the playoffs in his final two.

    Dale Earnhardt Jr., at 43, finished his Cup Series career in 2017 with no wins in his last two seasons. That, and a concussion cost him half of his penultimate season.

    Sometimes, a driver gets no say on how they go out. A wreck in the penultimate round of the 2013 IndyCar season forced Dario Franchitti, at 40, into an early retirement.

    So how much longer Dixon has is “hard to answer.”

    “I think you go until you feel like you don’t want to or maybe you’re not winning as much,” he said.

    In 21 years in INDYCAR, Dixon won at least one race in all but one. Last season, in addition to his three wins, he finished top-10 in all but one race and top-five in 11 of 17.

    For now, the New Zealand native shows no sign of decline. Aside from clocking in 12th in first practice.

  • Reddick bested by Larson’s blocks in Las Vegas

    Reddick bested by Larson’s blocks in Las Vegas

    Kyle Larson dominated, Sunday, at Las Vegas Motor Speedway. He led 181 of the 267 laps and swept the stages. The Pennzoil 400 was his race to lose. Even with Corey LaJoie’s spin with 34 laps to go, Larson fended off Ross Chastain to pull away from the field.

    With 12 laps to go, however, Tyler Reddick ran faster laps and turned the race to the finish into a game of cat and mouse.

    “I knew I was going to have to kind of catch him off guard with a late kind of block,” Larson said.

    And he blocked multiple times.

    Reddick, who ran the bottom line to reel Larson in, ran higher and higher to close the gap. Larson responded by hogging the middle line and blocking in a way that would get him black-flagged in the NTT IndyCar Series.

    “Every time I sort of got close, I mean, we’re running just wide open enough in Turn 1 and 2, you can kind of defend pretty well,” Reddick said.

    The closing laps showcased two generational talents trying to make the other flinch. With two to go, Reddick closed the gap into Turn 1. He expected Larson to hold the middle, while he slipped by underneath.

    Larson didn’t fall for it, and Reddick’s car tightened up.

    Even with a lap and a half left, he ran out of time. Just as he did in both stages, Reddick finished runner-up to Larson.

    Both were evenly matched in the closing laps. So what more could he have done?

    “I don’t know if there was anything that I really could’ve done to get around him,” he said. “He would have had to make a big mistake or had some traffic kind of knock his wind around.”

    Nevertheless, compared to lackluster runs at both Daytona and Atlanta, his run at Las Vegas was a change of fortune that pole-vaulted him from 24th to 12th in points. Furthermore, if this was any indication, he’s a threat to win at any of the 1.5 mile tracks, this season.

    “We had a really good Nasty Beast Toyota Camry,” he said. “Just stupid mistakes on pit road. Same shit, different year, right? Kind of frustrating. We’ll continue to work on it, but a good rebound for our team today.”

  • NASCAR explains Logano’s glove violation

    NASCAR explains Logano’s glove violation

    NASCAR gathered the media to the Cup Series hauler to show the gloves it confiscated from Joey Logano last weekend at Atlanta Motor Speedway.

    During post-qualifying inspection, NASCAR viewed the in-car footage of his qualifying lap and noticed an “obviously concerning” detail.

    “We have our safety cameras inside all the Cup cars, and we review them quite often during practice and qualifying, and we look for oddities,” Brad Moran, series director for the Cup Series, said.

    The problem? SFI Foundation Inc., which sets the quality and safety standards for NASCAR equipment, doesn’t make gloves with webbing. The webbing of the left-hand glove was so obviously modified, it looked like a frog hand. In fact, it wouldn’t look out of place on the hands of Tsuyu Asui from “My Hero Academia.”

    Webbing gives a driver more room to block the air, but it also hinders their ability to unbuckle their belts and window net. Which is a serious problem, if your car is on fire.

    As a result, NASCAR dropped Logano to the back of the field for the start of the Atlanta race, along with a pass-through penalty after the green flag dropped. On Tuesday, NASCAR fined Logano $10,000 for violating the league’s safety code under “Driver Responsibilities & Driver Protective Clothing/Equipment.”

    Team owner Roger Penske told Jenna Fryer of the Associated Press that he “didn’t like that at all,” and expressed his disappointment with the two-time Cup Series champion.

    “It’s not good. Period. I told him,” Penske said. “He’s the leader of the team. Look, we are under so much scrutiny and the last thing we need to do is have any noise like that. It’s not good for us. It’s not good for him. We’ll take our punches.”

    Well, it didn’t affect Logano’s qualifying run, Saturday, at Las Vegas Motor Speedway. Wearing approved gloves, Logano clocked in a lap of 29.291 (184.357 mph) to win his second pole of the 2024 season.

  • The White Zone: Lighten up about saving fuel

    The White Zone: Lighten up about saving fuel

    Kyle Busch took his seat in the deadline room, Saturday, at Atlanta Motor Speedway. Never one to mince words, gave his thoughts on the stretch of fuel-saving during the first stage of the Daytona 500.

    “I believe it’s a problem,” he said.

    After a multi-car wreck in the opening laps, while some drivers followed the typical green flag pit cycle pattern of restrictor plate racing, most of the field dropped their speed to save roughly 20+ laps of fuel. At one point, AJ Allmendinger (a lap down) ran faster laps by himself than the field ran, together.

    “I felt disgraceful, myself, being a race car driver – wanting to go fast, lead laps and win the Daytona 500, and that was our strategy that we had to employ at the start of the race because everybody was doing it,” he said.

    Now I say this with the utmost respect to Busch and the many fans who called into SiriusXM NASCAR Radio, this week, to share that sentiment.

    Y’all overblew it.

    Who would make it to the end of the stage on fuel? Could they make it to the end? That fuel-saving added a layer of strategy and intrigue to plate racing and demonstrated how skilled these drivers are. Rather than a wreck-fest embarrassment, like the NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series displayed at Daytona, Phoenix and…well, really, most weekends now.

    As a sports league, NASCAR sacrificed so much strategy and sport for entertainment value since in the last 10 years (after a decade of maintaining some semblance of both). It made the already controversial playoffs into a total game of chance and instituted arbitrary cautions that slow the pace of races and incentivize overly-chaotic restarts. What’s more, NASCAR all but made fuel-mileage races extinct.

    NASCAR gave us a reprieve, last season, with no stage cautions for road courses. At Circuit of the Americas, William Byron and Tyler Reddick gave us some actual “quintessential NASCAR,” thanks to teams running varying pit strategies. In fact, the pit strategy was the only interesting thing to watch for most of the road course races.

    Don’t point the finger at the artificial cautions that are nakedly meant to spice up the race (FOX and NBC don’t even hide it). Blame the terrible aero package NASCAR ran on road courses.

    But enough of you complained, that NASCAR reversed course on it.

    Say what you will about Formula 1 (and it gets bad), there’s still strategy at hand. With when you pit and what Pirelli tires you run. Yeah, most weeks, the same driver nails it better than the rest (welcome to Formula 1), but when it hits, IT HITS!

    If you think you can’t do both strategy and entertainment, look at the NTT IndyCar Series. Tire strategy makes or breaks a driver’s day, most weeks. Scott Dixon ran a longer stint on tires to win at Gateway, last August.

    Notice how neither F1 nor IndyCar (overly) sacrificed strategy and integrity for entertainment value.

    That’s my view, for what it’s worth.

  • Multi-car pileup in closing laps of Daytona 500

    Multi-car pileup in closing laps of Daytona 500

    With the laps winding down in the Daytona 500, the pushing, shoving and tight-quarter action that defines restrictor plate racing led to the inevitable big one.

    “Speedway racing again,” Joey Logano said. “It’s a lot of fun until this happens.”

    As the field zoomed down the backstretch at Daytona International Speedway, Brad Keselowski moved from the outside line to the bottom to overtake race leader Ross Chastain. Meanwhile, Alex Bowman and William Byron, who spent the previous laps on the bottom line, got shuffled up to the middle line and worked their way up to the front. The last bump wasn’t squared up and Byron’s car wiggled, hooked Keselowski and triggered a 23-car pileup at the entrance of Turn 3.

    It capped off a miserable Speedweeks for the reigning NASCAR Cup Series champion who wrecked his primary car, Thursday, in the Bluegreen Vacations Duels.

    “You’re kind of always watching when you’re in there and especially if you’re on top you can kind of watch and see how well their pushes are and it just looked like the 48 kind of got the 24 out of shape and just happened to get the 6 in the right-rear and unfortunately we were in the top lane,” Blaney said.

    After the initial hit, he grabbed his wrist.

    “I had my initial wreck and then my wheel grabbed something,” he said. “I usually let go of the wheel, but I didn’t think I needed to and it just tweaked it a little bit. It’s all good.”

    He and Logano led a combined 57 of 200 laps and were in position to deliver Team Penske its second Daytona 500 victory. On the back of a ninth-month stretch of marquee victories for Roger Penske.

    “It’s part of it,” Logano said. “You’re pushing and shoving there at the end. We had the cars that could take it and were doing really well. I had Blaney behind me. I thought, ‘Man, if I could pick one, that’s the one I want. I’m in a great position here’ and just had to find the right opportunity to slip the 1 again because the 6 wasn’t working with us, so I felt if I could keep the 12 with me I’m gonna be in a decent spot, but it just didn’t work out.

    For Keselowski, the winningest active plate racer in the Cup Series (seven), he remains winless in his 15th attempt to win NASCAR’s crown jewel.

    “It’s just one of those deals,” he said. “We were mixed up in the middle of the soup most of the race. We executed really well in the final stage and put ourselves in position, but that’s just the way Daytona goes.”

    Byron and Bowman, whose drafting triggered the wreck, finished first and second.

    “Yeah, I feel really bad about that because I feel like that was — things were getting really intense with the pushes, and I felt like it was getting to the point where I couldn’t handle all the pushes, and you just try to get through those moments,” he said.

  • Wayne Auton: NASCAR’s school principal

    Wayne Auton: NASCAR’s school principal

    Wayne Auton called Brad Keselowski to the hauler at Homestead-Miami Speedway on Nov. 17, 2006. The night before, Keselowski “just piledrove” Jack Sprague on the cooldown lap of the NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series Ford 200.

    “Wayne calls me in the hauler and he says, ‘What happened on the cool down last night?’ ‘Oh, a little disagreement,’” Keselowski said. “I don’t remember his exact words, but I don’t think they were something I’m supposed to say.”

    Auton played a tape of Keselowski plowing into Sprague, and the VCR ate the tape. Not being a tech-savvy guy, he tried to stop it, but pressed fast-forward and tape shot out.

    “He was just so mad,” he said. “Like, smoke coming out of his ears mad. He just told me, get the hell out of here and don’t ever do that. Don’t do that.”

    Keselowski exited the hauler trying not to laugh or snicker, but Auton made his point.

    The 2024 NASCAR season marks Auton’s last as a series director. A title he’s held since 2012, as XFINITY Series director, and was the original director of the Truck Series. Much like Mike Helton, Auton is a “no-nonsense” official who’ll — to borrow a line from former Cup Series race director, David Hoots — “Put a stop to all that jimmy-jackin.’”

    Of course, he didn’t always yell. After Noah Gragson and Harrison Burton fought in the garage at Kentucky Speedway in 2020, he called both of them to the hauler.

    “I was expecting we were gonna get yelled at and be in trouble,” Burton said.

    He said, “Just don’t do it again, boys,” and left.

    Of course, he had a lighter side. He’s a “stand-up guy” who, much like NASCAR writer, Chris “Skippy” Knight, calls you every holiday and checks that you’re doing well. Plus, he’s a bit of a snarker. One night during Talladega weekend in 2018, Jim Utter, Knight and I ate dinner at a nearby Mellow Mushrooms. Skippy looked to see if any other NASCAR people were there. I pointed him towards Auton in the main dining room (also the MRN crew, but they don’t factor into this part).

    Skippy tapped Auton’s shoulder, as we went to our table. A few minutes later, he came over and talked to us. At one point, Utter, tongue-in-cheek, said something to him. I don’t remember exactly what he said, but it was about a penalty Elliott Sadler received during the race*.

    Auton laughed and gave Utter a close to the waist middle finger.

    *After that, I asked Auton what Sadler did to receive the penalty. He said that a driver could use pit road to avoid a wreck (like he did), but can’t also stop in their box for service (like he did).

    Auton’s “firm, but knows when to dial back” approach to officiating earned him the respect of the drivers in the XFINITY Series garage.

    “Me and Austin Cindric joke all the time that Wayne is the ‘not in my series guy.’  He’s awesome,” Burton said. “We all love Wayne, but for those few moments I was really scared of Wayne, that’s for sure.”