He escaped unharmed, despite barbecuing in that very space only a few minutes before the collapse. The only casualty, he said, was an aluminum fishing boat that “got tacoed up pretty good.” He also sent along photos to show just how ridiculous the snow has been; that’s his mailbox at right.

So it could be worse.

We’ve had a mostly bearable winter in metro D.C. Extended periods of snow on the ground have been largely absent. But temperatures seem to be a bit colder than in the past; it feels like we routinely miss our average highs on a given day. To the north in eastern Pennsylvania, in my hometown, my poor parents have gotten pounded with storm after storm — some ice, some snow — though not to the degree of Mark in Idaho.

I dare say we’re all sick of winter.

But therein lies the beauty of watching races in Daytona and California and Las Vegas. The weather there is warmer (in theory, anyway; Dario Franchitti complained of the cold after exiting his car when the Fontana race was finally postponed).

The weather in Vegas as I write this is 65 degrees and sunny with an expected high of 76. The temperature on Sunday is expected to dip to 62 — chilly for the desert dwellers but sounding plenty nice compared to our current temp of 40 (and Mark’s temp of 31).

Before long, we’ll be in the 70s and complaining when the high is only in the 60s. We just have to pay the price now for such weather.

From Vegas, the Cup tour goes to a presumably warm Atlanta before creeping northward to Bristol and Martinsville. Perhaps by then we’ll begin to see the first vestiges of spring. With any luck, we’ll be complaining about the summer humidity in no time.

It’s hard not to be jealous of folks who are enjoying the weather in Vegas. One of our colleagues, Lynn Hrivnak, is doing just that. She’s got tickets to the race and hopefully, come Monday, she’ll tell us a bit about it.

For those of us left behind in colder environs, we can only take heart in knowing that warmer weather is coming — preferably sooner, not later.

• ENJOY THE RACE on Sunday. Maybe it’ll be a better show than last week or last year.

(Photo by Mark Lovlien; used with permission)

At right, that’s Gov. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) talking behind the podium with Nationwide driver Brett Rowe. They’re unveiling the Marshall University paint scheme for Herd Racing’s No. 75. (Catch the connection?)

Based on the AP story previewing the event, Herd Racing is as grass roots as it gets. There are no corporate sponsorships — Marshall allowed the use of its logos but isn’t paying for them — and Herd Racing is relying on the generosity of the public and alumni to defray the costs of racing this season.

Collegiate logos in NASCAR isn’t a new idea; Herd Racing goes about it in a much different way, but the idea itself has been done on and off for several years.

Sterling Marlin ran a University of Tennessee paint scheme in the Busch series several years ago. (A quick aside: I call it the Busch series because that’s what the name of the series was then; but that’s a blog for another day.) In the aftermath of the Virginia Tech shootings, each of the Cup cars had a small “VT” logo.

Marlin’s Tennessee was a one-and-done scheme that, if memory serves, he ran at Bristol. The Tech logo was a kind gesture from NASCAR to a healing university that ran for a full month until the series left Richmond.

The Marshall scheme apparently is permanent; if the team can find sponsorship that results in actual revenue, that may change. In that aspect, this plan is far from the norm.

But it’s surprising that schools don’t try more marketing with NASCAR, especially the schools in NASCAR’s fan base. Southern ACC and SEC East schools could get a nice windfall and not just from the exposure. Say a Nationwide driver runs a Crimson Tide scheme at Talladega; think about the potential boon in souvenir sales — even if that driver isn’t one the fans would normally cheer for.

The team gets a cut of sales, as does the university.

There’s a limited market for this sort of thing, however. By default, it would have to be a large university with a sizeable fan base that translates well to NASCAR; i.e., more North Carolina, less Oregon. And to maximize earnings, it would have to be run in a state where the university resides; how many Vols fans at a Bristol race would want to buy something adorned with a University of South Carolina logo?

And the scheme would almost have to be employed in the Nationwide series. There’s simply too much money in Cup sponsorship to “donate” for even one race; a one-race deal in Nationwide — or even the Truck series — is much more economical.

I’d like to see the Marshall scheme do well; that would make for a pretty neat story. But the reality of it that probably isn’t going to happen. The AP says that it took eight volunteers to build the car from the ground up; the mega-teams in Cup have that many full-time people on a pit crew that flies in the night before a race. The numbers are a bit more manageable in Nationwide, but not much.

It’ll be nice to track their progress, but they’ll have a difficult go of it. The Marshall car will have a difficult time running with the herd.

(Photo by Jeff Gentner/Associated Press)

There is, however, hope that Sunday will be different. The track has had a chance to cure, something the drivers believed would help. A couple of offseason tests there were largely uneventful, certainly not newsworthy to the level of last year’s race. Perhaps Goodyear will be bringing a softer tire as well to provide better grip.

There’s hope that Sunday will be better, since — barring a complete abomination — anything would be better than last year.

But we won’t really know until they take to the track. If you remember from last year, the Nationwide-nee-Busch race was also marred by wrecks and uncontrollable rides, a scary bit of foreshadowing for Sunday’s Sprint-nee-Nextel Cup race.

And, as the series makes its way through the season, this will be the third of many firsts as the COT debuts at yet another track. With each passing week, it seems as though it should be easier to figure out how the model will react at certain places. But the COT at mid-length tracks is still a new phenomenon; saying that Sunday’s race is without unknowns is laughable.

NASCAR needs this race to be a winner. They’ve taken heat for their handling of the rain delays at California, and rightly so; any goodwill boost they got from Daytona is largely gone.

Who knows whether they’ll get it. We’ll just have to wait until Sunday.

• BIG THANKS to Damon for the comment on Monday’s post. He writes that he was out in Fontana for the race and takes us through his afternoon.

I’m glad it worked out for him in the end.

(Photo by Terry Renna/Associated Press)

Those summaries, distributed to members by The Associate Press, were tweaked, hence the difference. Gone was the driver’s winnings, replaced a formula NASCAR made up called driver rating. (They’ve since added winnings — a pretty meaningless stat — back into the summaries.)

NASCAR’s own description of driver rating: “Formula combining the following categories: Wins, Finishes, Top-15 Finishes, Average Running Position While on Lead Lap, Average Speed Under Green, Fastest Lap, Led Most Laps, Lead-Lap Finish. Maximum: 150 points per race.”

In other words, it’s not much different than the NFL and college versions of the quarterback rating: a quick way to compare statistical analyses.

Here’s the problem: there’s no context to it. We know that 150 is the maximum, but what does that mean? Is the maximum even achievable?

We know that, according to the QB rating formula, quarterbacks can and have had perfect games. And here’s what we know about driver rating, based on the stats from the final half of the 2007 schedule.
Only twice did a driver achieve the 150-point max, Clint Bowyer in New Hampshire and Kurt Busch at Pocono. Matt Kenseth’s win at Homestead came close at 149.8. On the flip side, the best rating at Talladega was Denny Hamlin’s 109; the best rating at Atlanta was Busch’s 124.2. Most top ratings were somewhere in the 130s, but at least we have a baseline.

What is unusual is that, in eight of the 16 races, the winning driver didn’t have the highest driver rating. There was no bigger disparity that at Talladega, where race winner Jeff Gordon was actually 20th in driver rating. At Daytona, winner Jamie McMurray finished eighth in driver rating.

In the remaining six cases, the winner was either second or third in driver rating.

On its face, this is reasonable. The best car and the best driver don’t always win the race, a simple fact. But most of the time, they are going to win. Over the course of even 400 miles, the best equipment and talent will separate itself.

It’s hard for me to believe that in nearly half the races, the best driver or the best car didn’t win the race. That seems illogically high to me, since there were only a handful of true fuel-mileage finishes last year — Casey Mears at the Coca-Cola 600 and Juan Pablo Montoya at Sonoma spring to mind — than what the driver rating seems to indicate.

Then again, some people think the QB rating formula needs a tweak, too.

Maybe driver rating will become an accepted statistic yet as QB rating has. But until then, there still is no context to understand what the number means. (Then again, this could very well evolve into a chicken-egg argument.)

We had a discussion about agate a few months ago on one of the message boards I frequent. Someone wondered why a newspaper would ever bother using AP’s golf agate that included the score with relation to par — you know: 1. Tiger Woods 64-72-71-66—273 -15. (AP also sends a version that doesn’t include the score with relation to par.)

I countered I couldn’t understand why you wouldn’t use it. Relation to par gives you an indication of how well the golfer played and how the course was playing. At 15-under, Woods had a decent tournament; if there are scores at like 13-under and 12-under, you know the course wasn’t terribly difficult.

It’s much harder to deduce that information from simply seeing a 273.

At the moment, it’s hard to link driver rating to any sort of true indication of driver performance. Maybe in time that will happen, but that’s not the case now.

I’m not naïve enough to think that NASCAR gives a (fill in your own expletive or euphemism here) what I think, or even what you think. You, the paying public, are merely revenue suppliers.

Any other company that cared about its consumers wouldn’t have forced them to sit around for six hours while it flipped coins on whether to postpone the race. (And that says nothing for the crews, drivers and officials that had to wait on NASCAR’s word and spent an even longer day at the track. By NASCAR’s own schedule, the garage opened at 8 a.m. local time on Sunday, and I’d bet that virtually every team was waiting to get in there at that time.)

I can’t help but wonder what the sponsors’ reaction would have been. Companies like Home Depot and Pepsi and Budweiser, throwing millions at race teams to pitch their products. If NASCAR had run the race in the dead of night, Home Depot and Pepsi and Budweiser would have been no more distinguishable than the home foreclosure auction company that put a 30-minute infomercial on WTTG at midnight.

It never came to that, of course. NASCAR made the right decision in spite of itself.

But the lack of foresight leading up to the decision brings us back to NASCAR’s ever-sinking credibility.

Who can forget the sight of a track worker taking a diamond cutter to the track to help channel water off the track — days after part of the track was dug to help alleviate a similar situation on a different part of the track? Is there no light bulb that goes off in anyone’s head that says, wow, we might have a real problem here?

After the final red flag, I followed the discussion from home over at SJ, which had folks at the track (and folks who knows folks at the track) checking in. Among their dispatches:

“Allegedly going to resume at 11 p.m. EST.”

“Restart now scheduled for midnight EST.”

“10 p.m. PST — race to go full 500 miles, again per FOX.”

“I have since heard from a source close to Fox people that it’s now a 2:30 ET start.”

“I’m now hearing 2 a.m. ET.”

“Someone in NASCAR has some sense after all...PPD for 11 more hours (1 EST green flag).”

If this is accurate — and I have no reason to believe it’s not — the restart was pushed back five times.

Five times!

At what point do you reach the conclusion that it’s just not going to happen?

Had NASCAR considered that a 16-hour day might for some crews might be just as dangerous as the spots of water on the track? Had they thought, you know what, our fans have suffered enough — let’s try it again tomorrow? Had they thought the people paying the money wouldn’t be pleased to know that their eight-figure billboards were being seen by a handful of people, both at the track and on television?

Apparently not.

Given such apathy toward fans and anyone else who had to be at the track, the signs all point toward one conclusion: arrogance. We’re NASCAR and we’re going to do damn well what we please.

That kind of iron-fistedness is a hallmark to the older generation of the series’ leadership, like Bill France Jr.’s legendary my-way-or-the-highway approach.

Perhaps this is what Brian France meant when he promised a back-to-the-basics approach.

• WE’LL UPDATE WITH RESULTS later. It looks sunny — for the first time all weekend — and maybe, just maybe, they’ll get this thing in.

• AND AS PROMISED: A lightly-packed grandstand saw Carl Edwards take the lead from Jimmie Johnson with 14 laps left in the never-ending race. Those fans presumably had a better view of the race-winning move than the people watching on TV, who were subjected to a Sprint promo heralding Johnson’s win off of pit road. By the time we saw live action again, Edwards was in position beneath Johnson starting the pass. Thanks again, Fox; at least the greatly-reduced Monday afternoon viewing public missed your miscue.

From then on, it was no race. Edwards checked out; Johnson and Jeff Gordon — who restarted the previous caution in second — were nowhere to be found. Last week, we talked about the uncompelling margin of victory at California races; this one will show the race ended under caution (Dale Jarrett hit the marbles and spun a few seconds before Edwards was due to cross the finish line) but the margin would surely have been a second or greater.

And that also didn’t take into account that, before Edwards’ pass and not long after the final restart, the front six were spread over the length of the backstretch. That’s not great racing.

But that’s what we’ve come to expect in California.

Any momentum that NASCAR might have had from Daytona was lost in a bizarre, maddening weekend on the other side of the country. The series faces a salvage job in Lost Wages on Sunday; but given what happened last year, that’s no sure thing either.

(Photo by Reed Saxon/Associated Press)