After impressive run at The Glen, Lally deserves ride

Andy Lally needs to be a Cup racer.

Each of the two road races on the Cup schedule always brings up questions -- like, should road courses even be on the schedule?

To bury that issue quickly, not only should they be there, there should be one in the Chase. Like, how about Watkins Glen as the Chase kickoff event?

You got to deal with that upstate New York weather, after all. But whatever you'd deal with in the fall couldn't be any worse than those mid-summer thunder-boomers, could it?

But I'm getting off track, and how ironic that, when you're talking road racing, that getting off track will truly mess you up -- just ask David Stremme and Kevin Harvick -- and not that making a mistake on an oval, won't put you in a wall with dire consequences.

But that perfectly gets us back to Lally.

This is a guy who grew up right in the midst of stock car country, virtually the same place as the Park family -- and we know their NASCAR heritage -- or we should. Lally wanted to be a Cup racer from childhood. His hero was Mark Martin.

But racing was his bottom line, and since going racing most often involves taking the path either of least resistance or most financial feasibility, road racing was what he did.

And he did it well, winning championships and winning races -- like the six professional road-racing victories he has at Watkins Glen -- and accruing experience.

It's strange that in the week before he came to The Glen, Lally, who six years ago had told a visitor at the Barber Motorsports Park inaugural Grand-Am race how much he wanted to go NASCAR racing, spoke of how it had taken this long to get a chance at his first Cup race. (Continued)