2002 NASCAR Retrospective

DAVID POOLE Of The Charlotte Observer comments on the 2002 NASCAR season.

It was certainly no surprise to race fans that The Associated Press ranked Dale Earnhardt's death as the biggest story in all of sports in 2001.

Similarly, race fans don't need to be told that safety issues, Jeff Gordon's resurgence, Kevin Harvick's emergence and the competitive parity that saw 19 different drivers win Winston Cup races were also major developments.

What's interesting about 2001, however, is how many stories got blown completely out of proportion. Rarely has so much been said about so little. Therefore, in place of an obvious list of the season's biggest news events, let us close out 2001 with a look back at five of the year's biggest non-stories.

No. 1 - The imminent retirement of veteran drivers At Rockingham in February, days after Earnhardt's death, a rumor swept through the garage that a veteran driver had decided to hang up his helmet. It didn't happen, but as the season went on, those rumors continued. Bill Elliott was supposedly planning to retire immediately after his next victory or the season's final race Atlanta, whichever came first. But he won at Homestead and plans to be back in a Ray Evernham-owned Dodge for 2002. Terry Labonte's name was also in the rumor mill, as were Mark Martin's and Ken Schrader's at times. None of them quit, either, so there's every chance this non-story will have legs again in 2002.

No. 2 - A mass exodus from Roush Racing It was a tough year at Roush Racing, and it wasn't hard to find rumors about major defections. Drivers Jeff Burton and Matt Kenseth found their names linked to other rides despite repeated denials that they were going anywhere. There has been a fairly major postseason shake-up at Roush Racing, with Jimmy Fennig leaving as Mark Martin's crew chief to swap places with Ben Leslie from Kurt Busch's team, and with Burton's crew picking up several new members.

Still, almost all of the key players who were in the Roush operation at the beginning of 2001 will still be there when 2002 starts. But if Roush Racing suffers through another down year in '02, there may be more to this story than there was in '01.

No. 3 - The Pepsi 400 fix Dale Earnhardt Jr. scored a victory in the July race at Daytona that some people figured was just too good to be true. So, without a shred of evidence, they posited that Earnhardt Jr. had been given "the call" to win the first race held at the track where his father had died on Feb. 18. The idea that 42 other race teams would willingly go along with any kind of NASCAR-directed "fix" in any Winston Cup race is preposterous.

It is possible that Earnhardt Jr. had some advantage, perhaps one outside the rules, in the Pepsi 400. When he won at Talladega later in the year, the same car was too low in postrace inspection and the team was fined, although it kept the win. It's a long way, however, from having a race team get away with something to having it get "the call."

No. 4 - Thanksgiving in New Hampshire NASCAR's final race of 2001 was held the day after Thanksgiving in Loudon, N.H., because it had been postponed from the Sunday following the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. It was not an attempt by NASCAR to see how a holiday weekend race would go over in hopes of making it an annual event. It was not a decision forced upon NASCAR by NBC. It was not scheduled on Friday so that Saturday and Sunday could have been possible makeup dates in case of bad weather.

Nobody wanted the long season extended, especially into the Thanksgiving holiday. But in the upheaval caused by Sept. 11, moving one race was not a big deal.

No. 5 - Network television's tyranny and travails As the new television contract began, some believed Fox, NBC and Turner were intent on ruining NASCAR. Despite the obvious question - why try to hurt something you're paying $2.4 billion to broadcast? - some remain obsessed with the idea, Some people actually sit in front of the television with a stopwatch, measuring the amount of commercial time during a race broadcast. You can tell them all you want to that the amount of advertising time in a race is no different from the time in a half-hour or one-hour prime-time show, but they won't listen. They want no commercials during pit stops, no commercials during green-flag racing and no commercials during, well, anything. But they don't want to pay to watch races, either.

There was a report recently that the networks lost at least $100 million on the deal this year. That's likely an accurate number, but it doesn't take into account the millions of new homes hooked up to FX cable and the hours of cross-promotion the networks got for their other programming during race telecasts.

The fact is that the single biggest success story in NASCAR this year was television. The ratings were spectacular. NBC's work in the second half of the season was better than anything ESPN - the sainted martyr of television in the eyes of many disgruntled fans - ever did, and NBC's work still looked lackluster compared with the new standard set for the sport by Fox in the season's first half.