The 2024 running motorsports thread

So… what about the spin out when Dillon seemed to have the race wrapped up.

Now, the ending was bullshit, but was how we got there shady?

Granted, I don’t watch much NASCAR. Just curious.

 

It's probably not so much Dillion as it is a manifestation of what the sport has become. When Joey Logano is calling someone out for being a punk, that speaks volumes.

 

The Stenhouse-Preece wreck was the result of two guys running out of talent (again). They’d do that in lap 16 if they happened to be near each other.

 

Was just talking to another former racing writer tonight about how none of these younger guys would have sniffed a Cup ride 40 years ago. They just don't have any talent other than running into each other because they don't know how to pass.

Larson is amazing. Bryon and Bell, pretty good. Elliott confounds me, and not sure about Reddick and Bowman. But you could throw the rest of those guys out with the dishwater. Do that to Buddy Baker, Donnie Allison or David Pearson? You'd be about three inches shorter after surgery to repair your skull.

And yeah, Earnhardt "rattled cages" but he got there on his ability, not his name. And despite the post-death sainthood, he was hated by a pretty good sized group of fans for some chickensh-t moves he made, particularly Labonte at Bristol. And he took a few bad spills, too, so he knew it was dangerous to go tit-for-tat at high speeds.

Childress' grandsons are legacy pledges.

 

Won't happen so long as the two drivers most motivated to wreck him are still chasing the championship.

 

Almost every driver they interviewed after the race echoed Logano's thoughts.
Ross Chastain had a good line when he said, "I'm just glad I wasn't part of it."

 

Hated Dillon’s maneuver.

Expected but deplore NASCAR’s typical failure to discipline.

Can’t stand Rick Allen’s bellowing.

 

A little more from Logano:

 

Even if Dillon tried to claim he missed the braking on the corner or that he was somehow brake-checked on the Logano hit (neither of which is plausible among those with a functioning synapse), the one on Hamlin is so obviously intentional as to be farcical. Like some bullshit straight out of Days Of Thunder or Talladega Nights. Any racing series worth a damn penalizes Dillon the max for that.

Except NASCAR of course. Clown series.

 

I actually thought Hamlin might have been trying to move up and block. There are a couple of other angles where it looks like his car was angling to the right to get in front of Dillon, but that might have been caused by Dillon clipping his right rear and turning him.

 

Hamlin is very often a little bitch, but sometimes you don't get to choose the right messenger.

We're so numb to NASCAR crash fests and their total lack of credibility in race management. We're so used to cars being bulletproof. We're so used to drivers not only walking away from wrecks, but going ape-shit at the perpetrators that one very important thing is forgotten.

Despite the many improvements over the years, this is still a dangerous-ass sport.

Maybe that's what it will take to put a stop to this shit? A driver gets hurt. A driver gets killed. Probably not at a bull-ring like Richmond, but it's not as if this culture doesn't exist on the high-banked, high-speed tracks.

Never happen, you might think. Famous last words. Never thought I'd see an IndyCar death until Justin Wilson died after being hit by a tire. Never thought I'd see a 1970s style inferno in a Formula One race until Romain Grosjean went head-long into the Armco (the kind of accident that killed multiple drivers in the 70s) at Bahrain and was extremely fortunate to survive the impact and the inferno.

One of these days someone is going to get hurt in one of these immature rubbin' is racin' incidents. NASCAR standing by and letting it happen is negligence of the highest order.

Then again? I'd love for one minute for these NASCAR drivers who complain in post-race interviews to actually carry their disgust into meaningful action. Those F1 death-traps in the 70s partially changed because the drivers stood up to the organizers to the point of boycotting races, etc.

Since the France family busted up the driver's effort to organize in the late 60s/early 70s, drivers from one generation to the next have all been meek as fuck in standing up for themselves.

I'd love, just once, for those drivers to hit NASCAR where they live. They are the stars, for the most part, they are the attraction, even if the "attraction" has plummeted in the eyes of the general public over the last 20 years.

If NASCAR isn't going to enforce its rules or crack down on dangerous shit on-track, then the drivers should take matters into their own hands.

They won't, though, because they've had 50-plus years of meek, chicken-shit, yes-man culture to confront to do so.

All of this is almost separate to a different problem - these crash-fests used to happen just infrequently enough to be a sort of novelty when they did. Now they happen all of the time.

It's cliche and boring. Without sanction, they're codified into the culture of the sport. No wonder they have a fraction of the audience they once did.

 

Nah. Dillon goes low outside of the middle lane he had been in to avoid the Logano wreck ... that he almost certainly caused.

Hamlin is already passing him low (no need to block) and Dillon makes no effort to take evasive action in the clear middle lane he had just been in to avoid contact. He goes into Hamlin's rear right.

If you watch it frame-by-frame, you can see that Hamlin doesn't really ever move up. The camera angle switches at a bad time, but when it does, Dillon had already hit Hamlin or was in the process of doing it, which makes it appear Hamlin was drifting up (as you noted). I don't think he ever did. I think Dillon took him out.

It was like some shit I used to do in the old Papyrus video game to win a race or get my lap back. Complete horseshit, but if it goes unpunished ...