It’s an interview and a quick photo gallery with guy who drives the hauler for Jimmie Johnson’s No. 48, Jim “Tiny” Pollard. (At least he drove for them last season; he’s not listed on the crew roster at NASCAR’s media Web site.)
Among the highlights:
• It’s a 52-hour drive from the Hendrick Motorsports complex in Charlotte to Infinion Raceway in Sonoma, Calif. Pollard says it with the confidence of a man who’s timed the drive — especially since the just-completed drive to Fontana is “40-some hours.”
• Seventy-five thousand miles may sound like a lot, but Pollard says that’s actually not so much when you average that out over a full year.
• Pollard considers himself no different than any other trucker hauling freight. That certainly is laudable, but you can bet he turns heads driving down the highway. And, as I’ve also said before, I’d bet that few folks are driving a rig as nice as his with hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of equipment in the back.
Fans, of course, care about the drivers and the owners and the crew chiefs. That’s the deal; they’re the point men and that’s how it works. But there are so many support people behind the scenes, there’s got to be a hundred great stories waiting to be told.
I think about the time I interviewed Woodbridge native Keith Eads, now a tire specialist for J.J. Yeley at Gibbs Racing. Eads, kind of on a whim, begged for any job he could get with a low-level team; he snared one and eventually parlayed it into a gig with Roush Racing and now Gibbs.
It’s a great story, risking everything for a chance at your dream. Eads made it work.
And it’s hard to imagine there aren’t many more folks like him in the NASCAR garage.

There are multiple viewpoints here. Hill’s comments, presumably recent, shield his employer a bit. Fox may give up Sunday afternoon ratings to ESPN, which broadcasts the Busch series. The Busch boys are in Mexico for their second annual south of the border run.
If you really, really want to watch some stock car racing, what will you do on Sunday afternoon? Flip on ESPN. Unless you find “Maid in Manhattan” and “Never Been Kissed” on channel 5 irresistible. Which is cool.
But I’ll go out on a limb and predict ESPN will have better ratings than most of the Fox affiliates around the country for the same time slot.
NASCAR, of course, sets the schedule, and you can be sure the off weekend has nothing to do with the moon or a leap year. The Mexico race is the only one on any of the top three circuits outside of American borders. Given its plan for global (or at least North American) domination, NASCAR needs to have Mexico on board.
An off weekend means guaranteed availability for Cup stars, should they want to participate. The entry list doesn’t feature any more Cup drivers than ran at Daytona, so that seems to be a wash.
But more importantly, the spotlight is focused on Mexico. The hard-core media corps who cover the series (think NASCAR Scene, etc.) will be going to Mexico. No Cup race means not having to compete for attention; because, obviously, the Busch series is always going to lose that contest.
That’s especially important this year, since the newness of the Mexico race has largely worn off.
Given what it’s trying to accomplish, it’s hard to blame NASCAR for what it’s doing. At the same time, it’s hard to blame Hill for complaining about it.

More than circumstances bind Johnson and Kenseth, though. They are both top-quality drivers with double-digit wins and Cup championships on their resumes. They both drive for top-notch organizations that have won four of the past six series titles.

So should it really be a surprise that Kenseth didn’t need Reiser at the track to win?

It shouldn’t be, especially given Kenseth’s success at the fast 1.5-mile tracks — California, Michigan, Texas and the old layout at Las Vegas.

Those four tracks account for seven of his 15 career wins; throw in Rockingham, another mid-sized fast track now off the schedule, and that’s nine wins.

Kenseth knows how to win at these places, and that’s a smart strategy given the dominance of mid-sized tracks on the circuit. Until the past few years, he was rarely a threat at short tracks — he won at Richmond in 2002, but has wins at Bristol in each of the past two years — and does not have a restrictor-plate win. (Though that seems to be more of a Roush Racing problem; that organization hasn’t won a restrictor-plate race since 2003.)

This isn’t to diminish Reiser’s role in the operation. But he probably wasn’t too concerned about missing this weekend.

Kenseth would have been fine just the same. These are, after all, his tracks.

• THANKS TO NJC for the comment on the entry about NASCAR and its consistency. I can’t disagree with his first premise, but that’s more of a societal issue, one that would take me far too long (and far too off-track) to get into.

It’s hard to argue the second premise, too, in theory. But auto racing is limited in its scope; if you want to be involved in the sport at a young age, you’ll probably be driving go-karts. Unlike the stick-and-ball sports, there’s a definite lack of entry points into the sport; football and baseball can accommodate kids of many sizes and skill sets and benefits from a well-established feeder system.

Racing doesn’t have that luxury. An argument could be made for improving it, I suppose, but as for now, that’s the situation and it doesn’t seem like it’ll change anytime soon.

As always, your comments are always welcome and I’m happy to respond to anything and everything you throw at me. Except you, spammers, keep that trash to yourself. No one cares.

Of course, the teams that compete in NASCAR-sanctioned races and the drivers that drive in NASCAR-sanctioned races are subject to NASCAR’s rules. That, however, doesn’t give NASCAR latitude with such draconian rules.

The sanctioning body has long said that it considers teams and drivers to be “independent contractors.” NASCAR may help smaller teams hook up with sponsorship, but a team of Childress’ stature wouldn’t need much help. How long did Harvick sit around without a sponsor this offseason? Not very long.

Shell was on board long before the haulers rolled into Daytona. And it came on board knowing full well that while it was welcome to sponsor a team, NASCAR wouldn’t much accept it.

You don’t have to look far to find an example. Jeff Burton, another Childress driver, is sponsored by Cingular. Cingular was recently bought out by AT&T; when Childress tried to switch sponsorship to AT&T, NASCAR threw a hissy fit. Why? Because Burton runs in the Nextel Cup series, of course.

Teams with pre-existing sponsorship – like Ryan Newman, sponsored by Alltel – were grandfathered in. Now that Burton technically wants to change his sponsorship – not by his own doing – he’s run afoul of the law.

How far does being an independent contractor go? NASCAR oversteps its bounds by including in its contracts that it will do its best to limit competitors’ appearance. If it wants to insist on independent contractor status and all the things that go with it – lack of a pension and overall health insurance, among many other things – then it should have no right to dictate how teams fund themselves.

It shouldn’t, but it does. Welcome to NASCAR.

Could you imagine if the series went through Daytona’s endless qualifying every week? (Shudder.) Fortunately, now, we don’t have to worry about qualifying races and bumping each other out of the field. Now it’s practice, qualify, race. Easy enough.
Within the past week, both Dale Earnhardt Jr. and Jimmie Johnson likened Daytona to a different season entirely, given the incredible amount of preparation they do for a restrictor-plate track.
With any luck, from here on out, we won’t have to worry about anymore cheating scandals, either. Our guess is that if it happens, the media volume won’t be nearly as loud. Without the hype that comes along with Daytona, the networks and their news divisions won’t care nearly as much. (Well, except for maybe ABC.)
There’s this guy over at That’s Racin’ who makes a generally unfruitful stab at how boring California races are. But he raises a good point amid the one-liners: See if Fox’s cameras allow a glimpse of the grandstands, just to see how full they are. USA Today detailed Fontana’s attendance problems last year. (Take note of Jeff Gordon’s quote on the lack of quality racing at California.)
OK, so maybe it isn’t all good news for teams and drivers and fans. But there is better news on the horizon: The second race in the two-event western swing is at Las Vegas, which will be packed. Moreover, the track has been revamped and speeds have increased greatly — to the concern of some drivers.
We’ll have this week to overcome the Daytona hangover and another week to overcome the California hangover (which, of course, happen for vastly different reasons). Then, things will get exciting.
• OFF THURSDAY, BACK FRIDAY: We’ll file a missive from the Robinson gym on Friday afternoon, thanks to Robinson’s wireless connectivity. Cheers for a state championship site that has its stuff together.