Season Over

10/07/06

            Something just dawned on me. Many NHIS ticket holders were surprised to find, in their 2007 renewals, that the July Cup race had been scheduled for July 1^st as opposed to later in the month as is traditional. July 1^st is the normal 4^th of July weekend and that has always been reserved for the Pepsi 400 at Daytona. I, and many others, wondered why NASCAR would change the schedule to put the 400 on the week after the 4^th as opposed to the week before the 4^th. Well, as I was typing today’s date on the top of this page, the answer came to me. On July 7^th, the day of the 2007 Pepsi 400, the date will be 07/07/07. Had Daytona kept its date of July 1^st there would be no 777 race. NHIS has no lights and would have to run on Sunday July 8^th, killing any “lucky 7’s” promotion that NASCAR will probably beat to death and make millions of dollars on.

            To continue with this conspiracy theory thing, and to follow up on the lighting issue, did anyone else find it strange that the power went out at NHIS during the Sylvania lighting 300? Even if the outage was just a coincidence and not a ploy to sell 3 or 4 very large generators to the track, someone from Sylvania had to be sitting up in one of the suites looking like the cat that ate the canary. The lack of power did add to the entertainment of the pre race activities as about ½ of the 100,000 people that were there caught on to the fact that the National Anthem was being sung without a public address system, and started singing along themselves. The other 50,000 people were still stomping their feet and trying to do a ‘wave’ and getting very irritated at the others that kept letting the wave end because they were busy holding their hats over their hearts and singing.

            Just as I was feeling good about the fact that I had climbed off the elevator to the press box about 2 seconds before the power went out, we got word that Ted Christopher would not start the race with the other 42 cars as he had no spotter. Seems the spotter was in the elevator about 2 seconds after I was. Ted started the race 4 laps down after the power came back on, leading many folks to ask what might have happened if Jeff Gordon’s or Dale Earnhardt Jr’s spotter had been caught in a non-moving elevator at the start of a nationally televised event.

            The BES race at NHIS really defined Mike Olsen’s season as he came back from near disaster to finish 9^th while Sean Caisse and Matt Kobyluck were taking pot shots at each other and finishing 14^th and 40th, respectively,  allowing Mike to increase his point lead over Sean. Dover and Lime Rock were both much nicer to Olsen than to Caisse giving Mike his second series championship and putting him in some pretty exclusive company as a multi-time champion.

            The final 3 races had a few big surprises. I don’t think anyone would have predicted we’d have 46 cars show up for the NHIS race, let alone start all 46 of them. Kelly Moore is a past champion and can still get it done, but who would have picked him to win that race? Congratulations to Kelly and to Tim Andrews on winning for the first time at Dover, Tim is a young gun and is working hard to prove himself and won in a race that could have been dominated by veterans. Finally, a grande congratulacion and a palmadita encendido los espalda (http://www.freedict.com/onldict/spa.html) to Reuben Pardo who won the race at Lime Rock, won the rookie of the year award for the season and finished in 8^th place in the season point standings to gain an invitation the showdown. Reuben could well be the best thing to happen to Armando Fitz since Terry Bradshaw announced he was leaving the team.

As always, send Questions, Comments, Hate Mail, and Indecent Proposals to, Fish c/o Busch North Scene or e-mail them to fishy@ctel.net