Weekly Roundup: Like Al Pacino Said To Cameron Diaz Edition

Warning: nine-hundred-word rant ahead.

Christina wants to connect with Tony as he toys with his ring. . CHRISTINA ... I remember when my dad designed that... (an awkward silence) I guess I'll have to wear mine on a chain around my neck, huh? . TONY How 'bout you win one first? . CHRISTINA I was just trying to -- . TONY (getting up) No. Win one first. . He walks away. --- "Any Given Sunday"

I'd be lying to you if I didn't say that I was surprised by the way much of the crapcan-racing community has responded to my various articles and comments on "MiataCrashGate". Presented with a video of two drivers each making potentially deadly mistakes after cruising by an empty flag station, many participants have responded with hamster-wheel rationalizing that would shame Mohammed Saeed al-Sahhaf.

"His brakes were locked! There was nothing he could do!" This would be a great excuse for why your great-uncle Emmett slid into a mailbox coming home from the company New Year's Eve party in 1963 but it shouldn't apply to racing drivers.

"Nobody was hurt!" Well, if you fire a pistol into the air repeatedly while in the middle of Times Square, chances are that nobody will be hurt, but I guarantee you that action will be taken to correct the situation.

"That station doesn't need to be flagged!" Really? Even when there are one hundred and sixty-eight cars on track, some of which were being steered by untrained novices who had never been on this, or any other, track before?

"You got out of a car that wasn't on fire!" Yes. It was an unflagged situation. There were cars coming at my door at full speed, making passes for position. And it's doubly ironic that the loudest bleating about this comes from people who think it's 100% okay to run into stopped cars at full speed! What the fuck am I supposed to do, sit there until Ferkel can enter a car in the series and ram me in the door from 200 feet out? I've sat in cars for an entire NASA race because that was the safest thing to do and there was flag coverage. This was a unique incident and I put the video up because I wanted to raise the level of discussion about flagging in amateur racing.

"You just don't understand LeMons! You don't understand racing! You're an armchair quarterback who criticizes other people from the safety of your desk!" Well now...

The above photo represents some of my best finishes in various race series. I'm not Scott Pruett or Johnny O'Connell but I don't mind recounting my highlights:

NASA: multiple wins in multiple classes, podiums in others, Mid-Ohio track record, finished 2nd in the 2007 National Championship.

AER: Race win and overall win, fast team lap.

ChumpCar: Overall win, fast team lap. Wish I had the trophy from that race, it was badass.

LeMons: Overall win, fast team lap, fast race lap.

Skip Barber MAZDASPEED Challenge: Two podium finishes in two races, on a new track, against a full field of seasoned participants.

Koni Challenge and B-Spec: Class-competitive times, ran as high as 2nd place before experiencing a mechanical.

I don't run much Time Trial, but I've run more than one PTE event where my fastest lap of the race would also have won Time Trial E. In my sole overseas Time Trial event, I placed second of 17 entrants and was the first American to stand on the podium of Sepang, ever. As an autocrosser, I've won more SCCA Regional events than I've lost and I PAXed top half at the only Nationals I attended. In 2006 I not only beat every other participant to win the watch at the AMG Challenge in Joliet, I also beat the entire professional staff of the event and Tommy Kendall. Recently, I set the fastest time of the week at a Cadillac customer event at Austin, beating over 150 other drivers. This wouldn't matter much except that I did it with a broken leg. A few years ago, I drove a stock Shelby GT500 to VIR and set a time that would have been 14th place in that year's Grassroots Motorsports annual competition. I did it with the radio on and with a passenger in the right seat.

So who cares? Well, it's only relevant for two reasons. The first is this: while my opinion is hardly infallible when it comes to this or any other subject, it's not ill-informed when it comes to club-level racing. I'm not sitting at home watching videos and making judgments based on what I've read in magazines or learned from playing Need For Speed or something like that. I've logged hundreds of hours on track in everything from a 1963 Ford Falcon to a World Challenge McLaren. I've been the cause of on-track incidents and I've been the innocent victim and I've been somewhere in-between. I've been suspended from NASA for contact and I've beaten an entire field of American-Iron-class Mustangs and the like in a NASA enduro driving a Civic DX, by myself.

The second reason is this: There's way too much smack being talked by people whose closest exposure to a podium is cheering in front of one. I keep hearing about how easy it is to win in multiple sanctions from people whose only victories came in LeMons Class C. The truth of the matter is that some wins come easy and some losses come hard, but it takes more than luck to win again and again, in different cars, from New Jersey to Northern California. So while I'm not going to say that I'm the best amateur racer out there --- far from it --- what I am going to do is assert that I am qualified to comment on the subject. If you disagree, then you can start by winning in five different sanctions, and then I'll listen to you a bit.

Alright. Enough of the rant. Let's see what Bark and I managed to write this week. Well, Bark has... nothing. I blame that Kimpton lifestyle he leads. How can you get anything written when they keep inviting you to wine tastings and the like?

For TTAC, I had something on smog in Beijing and something about motorcycle taxis in newly-industrialized India. Yes, it was "international week" for me. Not sure why.

At R&T, I had the meanest-spirited article in human history. As a counterpart to that, I wrote a gentle, old-school-style thing about buying motorcycles and preparing for winter. It's exactly the kind of article that used to appear regularly in the pages of R&T and as far as I can tell it went entirely unread.

This weekend I'll be sitting down in Charlotte, NC with Gene Haas of Stewart-Haas Racing to discuss his all-new American Formula One team. To say that I'm excited about this would be an understatement. Gene Haas knows a lot more about winning than I do, that's for sure. The only question is: is there room on any of his teams for drivers who can't even turn the steering wheel left?