The announcement of the lawsuit was stunning; the suit itself unprecedented. And there’s no shortage of reporting on it, from a solid story in USA Today to opinions on both sides: David Poole, in his blog, sides with NASCAR; Chris Jenkins of the Associated Press seems to take the other side with AT&T.
The situation is analogous to NASCAR’s demands on Kevin Harvick earlier in the season. After Harvick won the Daytona 500, NASCAR told he and Richard Childress Racing to make the Shell logos smaller; again, the result of contract language between NASCAR and “official fuel supplier” Sunoco.
Again, NASCAR is in the wrong, but it’s like the old adage of arguing with City Hall. NASCAR wants both pieces of pie; yet it considers teams and drivers to be independent contractors. As such, NASCAR shouldn’t have any involvement in teams’ and drivers’ business dealings.
What if Burton had a problem with NASCAR’s official insurance sponsor, Allstate? Surely he does, since he appears in commercials for State Farm. What if Harvick gets heartburn from orange juice and doesn’t appreciate Minute Maid as the sport’s official juice? What if Childress accepts MasterCard at his winery, a direct conflict with Visa, the official credit card of NASCAR?
What recourse do they have?
None, obviously.
Playing ball with NASCAR requires adherence with NASCAR’s rules. That doesn’t, however, mean that the rules are right.
Perhaps AT&T’s lawsuit will force a step in the right direction.

Certainly, the drivers have tested and the teams have prepared and NASCAR has inspected. But tests can only do so much.
Even at the track, practices won’t mean much. Not with a bunch of drivers all trying to accomplish something different: One wants to know if they’ve hit the setup, another wants to know about changes on long runs, another’s trying to see if the new car responds to different grooves.
On Sunday, they’ll all be racing with the same mission.
Only then will we know.
Until then, it’s all just guesswork, some more educated than others.
• WELCOME BACK: Kenny Francis and Robbie Reiser are already at the track, getting ready for the weekend — the first time they’ve been in that situation since Homestead.
Francis and Reiser, you’ll recall, were suspended for four races after their cars had violations at Daytona.
At the moment, Francis is the more necessary of the two. His driver, Kasey Kahne, has had nothing but difficulty to open the season. Though he made the Chase last year and is guaranteed a starting spot at Bristol, he’s currently 36th in points. Another bad outing, and Kahne may well have to race his way into Martinsville.
Kenseth, however, is doing just fine. He’s got a win under his belt and he’s fifth in points; barring a serious setback, he’ll be at least fourth after Bristol, when Mark Martin tumbles out of the top spot. This will be the first break in Martin’s reduced schedule.
And Kenseth is always a threat at Bristol as well. Since 2004, he’s got two wins and four top-fives at the short track — an unusual streak of success, given that he excels at mid-sized tracks.
It remains to be seen if Kahne can regain his form or if Kenseth can continue it. But this is Bristol after all and, until we see differently, we must assume anything can happen.

Green said that there’s always another event to prepare for. So not long after the 2006 Rock & Roll 400 ended, he and his staff started preparations for May. And while they’re getting into crunch time for the May race, he said they’ve already begun work on the track’s two other major events: the IRL’s Suntrust Challenge Presented by XM Satellite Radio on June 30 and the second Cup race, the Chevy Rock & Roll 400, on Sept. 8.

“You don’t have time to relax,” he said. “Once one event ends, you start all over ... It’s different series, different media, different markets, different fans you’re trying to reach. It’s dynamic and there are a lot of moving parts.”

There are even more immediate challenges on the horizon. NASCAR will hold a pair of tests at RIR in the coming weeks. Green and his staff are trying to coordinate which drivers will meet with the media, when they’ll head to the media center and which members of the media will be there to ask them questions.

And even before that, South Boston native Jeff Burton will be coming to Richmond to meet with the media and construction workers who are building the new Commonwealth Grandstand at the track. He’ll also be going to Norfolk too, to meet fans and media there. Green is in charge of both functions at both locations.

Beyond the public relations aspect, Green said their advertising campaign has begun. The track’s promotions office works with their advertising agency to make sure ads are placed to make the public aware that tickets remain for the May race. That involves making sure that ads are placed in all forms of media — on TV, radio and in print — in multiple markets. There’s also the matter of letting fans know the options available to them, if they simply want tickets to the race or want a bigger package with pit passes and hospitality options.

The folks in promotions also work with media outlets who want to do promotions of their own, like giving away tickets in a contest.

People in facilities management have begun the massive task of making RIR look pretty. Among their tasks: prepping the parking lots, keeping the infield grass in shape and hanging all manner of banners throughout the raceway — “hundreds” of banners, Green said.

Representatives from the track have also begun preparing for the event in conjunction with local law enforcement, specifically police departments from Hanover and Henrico Counties as well as the Virginia State Police. The meetings concern traffic flow, and ensuring that fans driving to the race can get there with as little problem as possible.

Forty-five days left. It sounds like a lot. But when you think of all that’s still left to be done, it’s not very much time at all.

Every car on the track, to some degree, has elements of design. Whether it’s the decision to go with a solid color background, as the Gibbs cars do, or more complex artwork like Jimmie Johnson and Jeff Gordon, the COT provides some unique challenges. We talked to two designers, Sam Bass and Chad Martin, to get their impressions of how things have changed for them.

Bass, the noted designer who has had more than 230 of his designs reach the track, said the front and rear ends provide more challenges than the graphics themselves: With a cavity in the front end, there’s a little less room for the graphics; in the rear, the wing mostly obscures the previously-open decklid.

“[On the decklid] some of the logos, you have to condense and stretch them,” Bass said last week from his studio in Concord, N.C. “But 99.9 percent of the people wouldn’t have noticed. You stack wording a little differently ... you might divide the deck in half between the logo and the message.”

The cavity in the front end — which, with braces, looks almost like in inverse spoiler on the car of today — inhibits any ‘up-and-over’ graphics, like those that start at the bumper and run the length of the car, Bass said.

Martin is the sales and marketing manager for The Decal Source, a McLeansville, N.C. company that supplies graphics for 18 Nextel Cup teams as well as several Busch and Truck teams. He said that his designers have had to work around the ‘shelf’ that appears on the front, as you can see in the photo (the COT is on the left side, with the current version on the right).

Some teams, he said, require more work than others.

“It’s fifty-fifty,” he said. “All of the Michael Waltrip Racing cars have a similar look in terms of their striping. Joe Gibbs is relatively plain in terms of striping — there are zero changes on the 20 [of Tony Stewart] from now to the Car of Tomorrow. The Team Red Bull side stripe fits the same, but they had to adjust the size of the word ‘Red Bull’.”

The rear wing is NASCAR-issued equipment, much like a restrictor plate. As a result, there won’t be any signage on the top of the wing like there is on open-wheel cars. Martin, however, said he had been told that NASCAR would allow signage on the side of the wing.

In the middle of the car, graphics are a simpler task. Both men said it’s a matter of stretching and pulling the graphics to accommodate the extra width, which isn’t that big of a deal.

The stated purposes of the COT have been to improve driver safety while also reducing costs for the teams and improving the racing by making a more standardized car. Bass noted another potential side benefit.

“It looks like the tuner cars, The Fast and The Furious, which have been out the past five or six years,” Bass said. “That’s a kind of approach to a young NASCAR fan ... the wing makes it look futuristic and space-age.”

He added that while most of the photos are from a close distance, the fan in the grandstands at any given race won’t notice much of a difference. Gordon will still be identified by the Dupont logo and the blue No. 24, as will Dale Earnhardt Jr. with the Budweiser logo and the red No. 8.

“At the end of the day, if it produces better racing and it’s more economical, it’ll be a win-win,” Bass said. “This year will tell a lot about it. It’ll be pretty neat.”

(Photo courtesy of Ford Racing)

While Jimmie Johnson’s back-to-back wins at Las Vegas and on Sunday at Atlanta hardly qualify as a dynasty, it’s fair to wonder if Nextel Cup racing, or at least the results of that racing, are becoming predictable.
It used to be that Cup racing was for the haves and have-nots, and that’s still largely true. No one expects the Wood Brothers or BAM Racing to compete week in and week out.
But even within that, it’s starting to feel like there are the haves and the have-a-lots. Casey Mears and Jamie McMurray, racing for Cup’s most prominent organizations, are never among the most-feared drivers.
Since the 2005 spring Atlanta race — a full year ago on the race schedule — 25 of the 36 races have been won by a pool of five drivers: Kevin Harvick and Kasey Kahne (six wins each), Johnson and Tony Stewart (five) and Matt Kenseth (three). Each, coincidentally, drives for a different owner.
Only 43 drivers have a chance to win any given race. With some simple math, the big five comprise 11.6 percent of the field on any given week. Yet that 11.6 percent of the drivers, over the past year, have won 69.4 percent of the races.
Is that good for NASCAR?
It’s a little easier argument than for the stick-and-ball sports, which have only two possible outcomes on any given event. But in NASCAR, there are 43 possible winners — technically, though not realistically. It can’t be a good thing when that many drivers are being shut out of victory lane.
By introducing the Car of Tomorrow, which NASCAR will at this weekend’s event in Bristol, the sanctioning body is trying to improve driver safety while simultaneously reducing cost to teams. And, the hope is, make more teams competitive.
That’s certainly a laudable goal, and NASCAR should be commended for its efforts.
But will it only be a matter of time before the have-a-lots figure out the COT, too? Each of those five drivers is, at the moment, the flagship for his organization; certainly, they won’t give up and lay down at the prospect of running the COT.
Only time will tell.