Hitting to all fields: Final thoughts on Richmond

Pardon me for stealing the title this week from my dear ol' buddy Garry Brown -- who ably pens "Hitting to all fields" on Wednesdays for the print and online issues of The Republican in Springfield, Mass.

But this week, reeling under the weight of more than 850 emails in less than 24 hours -- and a triple-weight of misunderstanding and innuendo -- just had to switch-hit and try to put out the fires with some spray hitting.

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He's going for the win, so get over it

Guys, Saturday night I was writing about less than three laps of balls-out racing. I don't care about what caused the caution, because if it hadn't been Denny Hamlin's tire blowing out, who knows what might have happened?

That's what used to freak me out when I worked in the PR Department at Daytona. The second day of Speedweeks people would come to me and say there was a forecast of rain the day of the Daytona 500. What were we going to do?

Excuse me? That race is literally 10 days away. Trust me, we got a plan -- and if it rains, we'll put it into motion. But I ain't gonna lose sleep for nine nights worrying about what might happen if it rains.

Same thing with races -- until the checkered flag falls, you don't have a winner. These aren't gimmes. And as countless races have shown, anything can happen. We'll never know if Dale Earnhardt Jr. would have won, because stuff happened before the checkered flag came out.

All I have to say about Denny Hamlin is that he was trying to win a race. When and if he felt his tire going down, he was going to try to maintain as much speed as he could to finish as well as he could.

He is not paid to quit, so he was gonna try until the tire blew up -- or he was made to leave the racetrack.

I monitored both his radio and NASCAR Control for a part of the race, but my scanner was inoperable where I was for the end of the race, so I have no idea what was being passed on it -- either between he and his team, or his team and NASCAR.

But I can guarantee you that about every person who is griping over the fact that he happened to be Kyle Busch's teammate are operating from the narrow, hind-sighted perspective of disgruntled Junior fans.

I can about guarantee you no one on either Gibbs team told Hamlin to stop on the track; and I'll equally guarantee you helping his teammate was the least thing on his mind.

As far as the circumstances of Hamlin's role in the finish, that was up to someone else to write about. But I can tell you I certainly would have liked to know what he was thinking when he figuring out he had a tire going flat.

Give it time. I'm sure he'll be asked this weekend in his availability at Darlington.

One-way KB?

I was writing about the less than three laps Kyle Busch and Earnhardt got to race before they crashed in the effort. I don't know what anyone thought, but I figured they were going to race as hard as each of them could to try to win.

If they made a mistake, oh well. They were trying -- both of them were. They could have done a lot of things differently, but at the moment, they were trying as hard as they could.

What they did the 395 laps or so before that was irrelevant to the lap they were on. I thought the run Earnhardt got off Turn 2 was absolutely amazing, because I also thought that Busch had him beat when they ran through 1 and 2.

Junior made Busch run as hard as he did into Turn 3 and Busch made the decision not to give up; you saw the outcome.

I bet very few readers have ever felt the left-to-right weight transfer over the centerline of your vehicle at 100 miles an hour or so -- but it's a wonderful thing you feel in the seat of your pants.

These guys were going almost half-again that fast and I believed Saturday night, and Busch confirmed it again Monday afternoon, that he had to turn right to save his car. Again, the Junior conspiracy theorists want to believe Busch turned into their boy to wreck him. But wrecking him obviously would put Busch winning the race at risk and he wanted to win, not wreck.

As far as where he was and what he knew would happen -- so what? That's racing. I'll never forget the Daytona IROC race in which Al Unser Jr., one of the greatest open-wheel drivers of all time who certainly held his own in his IROC forays, moved up on Dale Earnhardt at the end of the backstretch.

Big E had to be laughing his ass off in his car, because he didn't lift, he held his wheel straight because he knew that Unser was going to turn himself into the wall when he hit Dale's left front fender, and sure enough, that's what happened.

Different color cars, different venue, but the same scenario -- and you have no expectation that competitive drivers would do any less in trying to win. At least, winning race drivers wouldn't.

But that takes me to the point of one-way Kyle. Only time will tell if he ever comes close to reaching any marks achieved by Dale Earnhardt; but one thing I, along with many other people have noticed is that what's OK for him certainly isn't OK for anyone else to do to him.

That was chapter and verse that was written by Big E, if you remember, in particular the lovely move Jeremy Mayfield pulled on him at Pocono -- or my all-time favorite racing clip of all-time, from North Wilkesboro in 1989, when Earnhardt gave away, in my opinion, what would have been his tie-breaking eighth championship.

Near the end of the race, Earnhardt was racing Ricky Rudd for the win, with Geoff Bodine in third. Rudd maybe had a marginally faster car and Earnhardt left him the slightest crack on the bottom heading into Turn 1 and Rudd stuck his car in there.

Rather than hold his line and settle into second, Earnhardt tried to shut the door, Rudd didn't lift and they both spun, letting Bodine through to win; and Rusty Wallace to move higher into the top 10 and shave points off Earnhardt's lead.

Sapped of a certain amount of momentum, Wallace eventually overcame Earnhardt and won his only Cup Series championship -- but it was Dick Berggren's attempt at a post-race interview with Earnhardt that was a classic.

Asked by Berggren "what happened," Earnhardt, with his trademark schoolboy smirk, said Rudd had driven down into the corner and "knocked the [expletive] out of me.

"They ought to suspend that son of a [expletive]!"

It is an example of how Big E never bought into the "what goes around comes around" aspect of on-track punishment he was so fond of delivering.

And Busch the younger, as he's displayed many times, shows the same unbalanced behavior. Nashville was a great example. Busch made the mistake that cost him the win, but after the race he refused to properly address his failure.

Friday night's Nationwide fracas with Steve Wallace might have been initiated by Wallace, but Busch immediately settled it by returning the favor and retaking "his" spot. That should have been the end of it -- but by going to confront Wallace, he removed his right to expect anything less than the helmet shaking the boy gave him.

If Busch ever learns to balance his emotions, not only will he continue to be a force on the racetrack, he'll also gain in the court of public opinion.

Fanning the flames

If anyone's a fan of the original Frankenstein movie, you can't forget the scene in which the villagers, armed en masse with torches, chased down the good doctor's "monster" with the intent of causing his demise.

Well, I have it from good sources that the scene post-race at Richmond on Saturday night resembled that, sans torches.

I'm truly sorry the FOX cameras missed the display of middle fingers that my boys told me resembled "the wave" as Busch made his way around the track under caution. That would have been a sight.

I think I understand passion, but I don't think I can fathom, as your guy gets whacked out of the way and potentially out of Victory Lane, taking several hundred dollars worth of scanner equipment and headphones and rearranging them into a dozen pieces on the ground.

And I'm mostly glad Kyle Busch gear was in short supply as the crowd made its way out of the stadium, as my boys told me the mob was actively seeking and speaking their intent of laying waste to any "M&M's fans" they might come across.

And since it was inanimate, the funniest had to be the guys who relieved a nearby convenience store of a Kyle Busch cardboard stand-up, then proceeded to stomp it in the parking lot, before announcing they were "taking it back to camp to find a bonfire."

Ah, passion.

The opinions expressed are solely those of the writer.