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Sep252012

Tuesday, September 25, 2012 at 10:09AM

September 26, 2012

America's racing reality.

By Peter M. De Lorenzo

(Posted 9/25, 10:15 a.m.) Detroit. On a weekend when the Sports Car Club of America crowned its champions at the 49th SCCA National Championship Runoffs® at Road America, "America's National Park of Speed," no one noticed (see "The Line" - Ed.). I should clarify that. The people racing for those championships noticed. The people at Road America and the postcard town of Elkhart Lake, Wisconsin, noticed. And racing enthusiasts across the country who couldn't be there who followed along on the Internet noticed. But the reality? As far as the rest of the country was concerned, the only racing going on was in Loudon, New Hampshire, where NASCAR was staging the second race in its Chase for the Sprint Cup championship.

Fair? Probably. We shouldn't expect that the traditional stick-and-ball media across the country would be interested in national championship sports car racing for amateurs, as compared to a NASCAR event. After all, it has been ingrained in the traditional media that the only motorsports worth noticing in this country - except for the Indianapolis 500 - is NASCAR. That's the result of a lot of things, of course. The infamous "split" that tore apart Indy car racing just when NASCAR was in its ascendency damn-near killed NASCAR's only real competitor - open wheel racing - for good. And the assorted TV networks that raced headlong into getting in on the NASCAR action - even though it meant paying ridiculously inflated prices - managed to saturate the airwaves with NASCAR content at a prodigious rate. To the point that "car racing" in the U.S. has become synonymous with "NASCAR." And to the detriment of every other kind of racing, I might add.

Take major league sports car racing in the U.S., for instance. Do you think the buyout of the American Le Mans Series by the NASCAR-owned Grand-Am series would have happened without the revenues generated by the NASCAR machine? No, of course not. Jim France could wait out the ALMS until Don Panoz decided that trying to anticipate the whims and wishes of intermittently-lucid French racing officials was not a value-added activity. It also spoke to the fact that despite spending $100 million (or thereabouts) of his own money over the last 13 years, Panoz had to be more than pained to see that the media in this country barely even notices the ALMS to this day, or any sports car racing, for that matter.

Is this column the editorial equivalent of pissing in the wind? That too. No one is going to turn the clock back on the popularity of NASCAR. It is what it is, and for the stick-and-ball media - both print and digital - and the majority of those casual racing fans out there, NASCAR is where you go for either a little or a big dose of racing. That's just the reality of racing in America today.

Still, it will be interesting to see how the NASCAR brain trust attempts to define the unified ISCAR (now the official name) racing series. Will it be an adjunct to NASCAR? Or will it be an integral part of the NASCAR marketing machine that finally gets some much-deserved media attention on a broader scale? It's still a giant "we'll see" for now, but a shred of hope must be retained at this point.

In the meantime I applaud all of the competitors, the dedicated corner workers, and the people of all stripes who made the 49th SCCA National Championship Runoffs® at Road America a huge success.

Because they do it for the Love of the Game, pure and simple.

And there's a lot to be said for that in this graceless age we find ourselves in today.

Publisher's Note: As part of our continuing series celebrating the "Glory Days" of racing, we're proud to present another noteworthy image from the Ford Racing Archives. - PMD

(Photo by Dave Friedman Courtesy of the Ford Racing Archives and Wieck Media)
Smithfield, Texas, April 16, 1967. Jerry Titus at speed in his Shelby American-prepared No. 17 Terlingua Racing Team Mustang in the Green Valley 300 at Green Valley Raceway, the third round of the Trans-Am series that year. The 4-hour event saw Dan Gurney (No. 98 Bud Moore Racing Mercury Cougar) take the win, edging Parnelli Jones (No. 15 Bud Moore Racing Mercury Cougar) by three feet after three hours and 55-minutes. Dick Thompson (No. 11 Grady Davis Ford Mustang) was third, Mark Donohue (No. 16 Roger Penske Racing Chevrolet Camaro Z/28) fourth and Titus was fifth. Trans-Am races back then were lengthy, tough and grueling. Gurney regards this race as one of the toughest races he ever competed in because of the relentless Texas heat. Titus would go on to win four out of the twelve races that year, capturing the Trans-Am Championship for Shelby and Ford. Donohue would win three races that year, followed by Peter Revson (2), Gurney (1), Bob Tullius (1) and David Pearson (1).

Publisher's Note: Like these Ford racing photos? Check out www.fordimages.com. Be forewarned, however, because you won't be able to go there and not order something. - PMD

See another live episode of "Autoline After Hours" with hosts John McElroy, from Autoline Detroit, and Peter De Lorenzo, The Autoextremist, and guests this Thursday evening, at 7:00PM EDT at www.autolinedetroit.tv.