Brian Vickers Diary: Slow cars a difficult issue

Darlington has always been my favorite racetrack, and the more I go to these other places, I enjoy seeing them and racing them very much, but Darlington is by far the favorite. It just has so much character. It's so different, so challenging.

It's very tight and just a lot of fun. We didn't run as well as we normally do there this past time, but we finished 23rd. If 23rd is a bad day, hey, we're doing OK. Most people's bad days result in a 40th-place finish, or 38th. The soft walls changed the competition this time around.

	The No. 25 Chevrolet is still looking for a top-20 finish in 2004. Credit: Autostock

If you like the track and ran good there before the walls, you'll do the same now. The line was the same, the little trick and quirks of the racetrack were the same and I think the Darlington stripe meant more now than it ever has and more people were getting them than ever have, but you had to go slower. You had to back the corners up.

The wall sneaks up on you quicker. You used to have some room to play with. You could get off in there and get pretty close to the wall, but you always had a little extra room. Well now, you don't. You use every bit of it up, so you've got to slow your pace down a little bit, especially on long runs.

The track's tighter, so you've lost racing room to slide up the track and you have softer tires, so the fall off's going to be even higher. So you have to really be cautious of taking care of your stuff there, moreso even than you used to.

Slow cars were another issue at Darlington. That's a tough issue right now. And I've been a new guy on the circuit, a new guy in NASCAR when I came to Busch with my own team. That was tough. We didn't have sponsorship, so I've been there. I understand.

But at the same time it's difficult, because it's not that we don't want to see these guys get a chance and have fun and learn, it's an issue of safety. We want them to be out there. We welcome them, but for whatever reason they were nine seconds off the pace. Some of them were.

BRIAN VICKERS  •  Driver Page  •  Diary: Darlington. Finally.  •  Diary: Lovin' Atlanta  •  Diary: Learning so much from the Hendricks  •  Diary: First Daytona an experience to remember  •  Hangin' with Vickers on the set of TRL  •  Hendrick team not resting on laurels for '04

This past weekend the minimum speed was 34.50 seconds or something, and they were running 39-second laps. By the rulebook they should have been black-flagged. Why there were still out there, I'm not sure. I don't have that answer, and it's a safety issue because you're running that fast, especially on a track that narrow, you don't have room.

When you come up on somebody 10 mph faster or 20 mph faster than them, you don't have the room or time to try to avoid them. They don't know which way you're going and you don't know which way they're going, and it becomes a mess. I don't have the answer. I'm glad I'm not in NASCAR's position because it's a tough decision to make.

They want them there. They don't want to deter people from having the opportunity to race. But at the same time, we just need to be more careful about taking them off the racetrack if they're not up to speed, because of their safety and the safety of everyone else. We just need to pay closer attention to their speed and make sure they are maintaining the minimum speed.

It's no different than if I had a wrecked racecar and went back out on the racetrack. If I was running 35-second laps they would have black-flagged me. It's happened before. I've been in a wreck and gone back out on the racetrack with a torn up racecar and was maybe a half-second slower than the minimum speed requirement, and they black flagged us and made us come in.

And they should have. It's a safety concern. That's the right thing. Why they didn't do it with cars running 39-second laps, I don't know.