The quickest way from Charlotte to the U.S.-Mexico border follows the Gulf Coast of Texas south to Brownsville, the southernmost point in Texas. Traffic can be a problem at the border crossing; as I check on it now, there’s no delay in Brownsville. But further west in San Ysidro, Calif., there’s a 90-minute wait — at 8 a.m.

There’s really only one team that could reasonably expect a pass (with Kenny Wallace aboard this weekend).

From Brownsville, there’s still nearly 800 miles left to Mexico City. It’s double that to get from Brownsville to Fontana, Calif., but a decent amount of that trip is spent heading northwest — miles that wouldn’t have been logged on a straight trip from Charlotte to Fontana.

But, for pure comparison, Yahoo maps lists the drive from Charlotte to Fontana at 2,386 miles. Charlotte to Mexico City is 2,101 miles (or 100 miles or so less than the drive to Vegas).

Still, the chance for long delays at the border crossing make it an unenviable trip.

But once they get there, the racing should be decent. Juan Pablo Montoya got his first NASCAR win there a year ago — pictured above — which served as a bit of foreshadowing: He got his first Cup win at Sonoma a few months later.

The course is reminiscent of oval tracks in one way: the sweeping, right-hand turn leading to the start-finish line. Beyond that, the track is littered with chicanes; there’s a tight turn that leads to a double chicane on the backstretch (the first smaller, the second larger) before a short straight that leads to the sweeping right-hander.

That’ll have to be your racing fix for the weekend. The Cup guys are off until a week from Sunday at Talladega.

As usual, it should be worth the wait.

• SPEAKING OF TAKING TIME OFF, I’ll be leaving you to your own devices tomorrow. For my wife and I, tomorrow is move-in day.

It’s really way more than that, but that’s the best catchall phrase I could think of. We hope to have our two cats, Grace and Hank, out of the apartment before the movers arrive (which could be as early as 8 a.m.).

We focus on moving for most of the morning. At noon, all hell breaks loose (or could break loose): During the course of the afternoon, we’re scheduled to have the DirecTV guys come and hook us up; someone from Cox Communications to get us onto the internet (perhaps you saw last night’s South Park episode; if not, go check out AllSP.com with the caveat that South Park is not for the young or the easily offended); lastly, we’ll have a handyman dropping by to help us out with some small stuff around the place.

We’re not very handy. But I did buy the 1-2-3 Home Improvement book from Home Depot, so maybe that will increase my handiness.

Or it’ll just make me a good candidate for one of those Holiday Inn Express commercials.

(Photo by Chris McGrath/Getty Images for NASCAR)

It’s weird, looking back like that, how perspective in retrospect looks so naïve. I don’t know why I trudged on with the NASCAR musings as I did; the timestamp doesn’t appear on the post itself, but our content management system shows it was posted at 12:42 p.m.; I don’t know whether that’s when it actually appeared online or when it was created.

I go back to my friends at SJ, posting in real time about who knew what. The first post of mass casualties came at 12:25.

Maybe, when I started writing, I didn’t know all that had gone on. At least I hope so. Anything other than that would have been an unforgivable mistake.

It’s weird looking back. The initial discovery of names and lives that, by now, are seared into our memory: Liviu Librescu. Ryan Clark. Seung-Hui Cho.

I don’t want to portray myself as someone who was anywhere near being on the scene; there were a lot of people way more affected than I. But I couldn’t help but think of all those people — alumni that are friends and colleagues, those who mourned the loss of friends or family.

That alone is heartbreaking.

I thought of Chris Lang, a fellow sportswriter for our sister paper down in Lynchburg. He’s from this part of the state originally, but wound up at Tech and, after a fling out west, came back not far from where he went to college.

I thought of P.J. Pcsolinski, the wrestling coach at Hylton. In the down time amid a tournament, we’d often talk about Hokie football or making the drive to Blacksburg for home games.

I thought of all the people who would need years, maybe decades to recover. Saying that their lives were changed forever simply feels too trite, even if it’s not far from the truth.

So, today, we take a break from talking about brakes, laps, performances and trends. We pause to offer a prayer for those who still mourn, for those that, a year past, can never really escape from that cold, windy, awful day.

We pause to remember, because we cannot forget.

(Photo: Ward Burton at Phoenix in 2007, the first NASCAR event after the Virginia Tech tragedy; by Harry How/Getty Images for NASCAR)

Was last year the renaissance it seemed to be? Gordon won six races a year ago, including four straight at this time last year. The six victories were his best since 2001, when he also won six times. He was the points leader for most of the season: he took over the top spot after the fifth race (Bristol) and led until the start of the Chase, 21 races later.

In the Chase, he led the points four weeks (three consecutively) but gave way to Johnson after the third of Johnson’s four straight wins in the Chase at Texas.

Last season was a statistical anomaly for Gordon. His win total had trended flat since that 2001 season, the last time he won a title. From 2002 to 2006, Gordon never won more than five times in a season (he did that once, in ’04) but always won at least twice. Still, he was largely an afterthought when it came to the championship discussion.

Certainly, victories are but one way to measure a driver. But in the past decade, only one driver has won a title with less than three wins: Matt Kenseth’s one-win championship season in 2003, which helped bring about the Chase in the first place.

And that brings us to this season. Based on what’s happened so far, he ranks third in the Hendrick camp, ahead of Casey Mears but behind his other two teammates.

As we noted yesterday, he finished dead last at Texas; the last time Gordon came in 43rd was in 1999, coincidentally also at Texas. Admittedly, one finish in one race can be nothing more than anecdotal; that day was the worst of the sampling.

But really, this season has been boom or bust for Gordon. Including the run at Texas, he’s finished three races 35th or worse — all due to wrecks or equipment issues. At Daytona, according to Yahoo’s race tracker, Gordon ran strong early but faded; his suspension was the listed reason. At Las Vegas, he spent the majority of the day in the top 15 — and usually much higher than that before the unseemly end. At Texas, Gordon hovered in the high 30s before a crash ended his day.

Every other race has been 13th or better, including three top-fives.

That’s no way to go through a season, particularly for a team harboring championship hopes, as Gordon and his squad certainly do. As we did with Carl Edwards, we’ll call attention to the Kahne Phenomenon; Kasey Kahne won the most races in 2006 but had to race his way into the Chase, beating out Tony Stewart for the final spot.

Once the Chase began, Kahne was no factor for the title.

Kahne had his share of bad luck, as Gordon has had; Kahne also had a few races where his car was just bad, just as Gordon was at Texas — and likely will be in a handful more races this season.
History says Gordon will get to victory lane more than once this season. Whether he’ll get a championship depends largely on whether his spotty bad luck turns around for the better.

(Photo by David Crigger/Media General News Service)

My own belief was that when Hendrick finally broke through — and it really was just a matter of when, not if — they were going to serve notice and have a dominant day. Something was going to click and Hendrick would have a memorable day: multiple drivers in the top five, one of them leading the most laps and one of them (likely the same driver) winning as well.

It didn’t quite happen that way. Johnson led a race-best 120 laps, but wasn’t in contention for the win until those ahead of him started pitting. Those pit stops also led to the race’s skewed margin of victory (seven seconds, which would have been larger had Knaus not urged Johnson to slow down in the final two laps to conserve fuel).

The other Hendrick drivers were decent: Dale Earnhardt Jr. in 7th, Casey Mears in 11th, Jeff Gordon in 13th. A typical Hendrick outing, though not quite as golden as the effort at Martinsville, when Mears was the worst-finishing Hendrick driver: seventh.

That was what I was expecting on Hendrick’s breakout day. Still, four in the top 13 ain’t shabby.

So what lies ahead for Hendrick? It’s entirely possible that this begins a run where they look unbeatable — particularly, as noted in today’s Associated Press story, the next month or so features tracks that Hendrick has been spectacularly successful at: Talladega, Richmond, Darlington and Lowe’s.

Earnhardt will be the next Hendrick driver in victory lane. It may come as soon as Talladega, but Richmond wouldn’t be a surprise either; Earnhardt has won consistently at both tracks.

A win by Gordon wouldn’t be a surprise either; but I’m planning on writing more about him later in the week, perhaps tomorrow.

Perhaps Johnson’s victory will end the silly speculation about what was wrong with Hendrick. Certainly, it was an upset that they hadn’t won; but beyond winning, it’s not like Hendrick’s cars had suddenly turned into pumpkins.

Look at the finishes:

Earnhardt: Best — 2nd (Las Vegas); worst — 40th (California); average — 10.5.

Gordon: Best — 2nd (Martinsville); worst — 43rd (Texas); average — 18.85.

Johnson: Best — 1st (Phoenix); worst — 29th (Las Vegas); average — 10.75.

Mears: Best — 7th (Martinsville); worst — 42nd (Las Vegas and Bristol); average — 23.63.

So exactly half of the drivers are averaging an 11th-place finish. By comparison, points leader Jeff Burton’s average finish is 7.0; Carl Edwards, whose three wins lead the Cup circuit, averages at 11.63.

Johnson ended one streak on Saturday night. But all that time, the Hendrick organization had barely been in a slump.

(Photo by Terry Renna/Associated Press)

It’s a trying time for Petty Enterprises as a group. Kyle Petty was one of only two drivers who didn’t make the field – the other was John Andretti. Bobby Labonte is the only PE driver consistently making races; and he may not be with the organization next season. We already know that his sponsor is gone.

PE’s demise is not news; it’s been happening slowly, gradually for several years. A top-10 finish is something to be treasured these days – a long fall from when the team was one of NASCAR’s stalwarts.

That doesn’t make watching it any less easier. We’ve written many times before about how honorable the Pettys have been, particularly when it comes to their legacy: Richard’s 200 wins and Kyle’s foundation of the Victory Junction Gang Camp. Both men remain wonderful ambassadors for the sport.

But on-track, PE is bordering on irrelevant.

Kyle Petty got a fair amount of ink for his top-five at Lowe’s in last year’s Coca-Cola 600; he and his crew gambled they could make the end of the race with the fuel they had, and they won. But to find his last top-five, you have to go back a full decade.

That’s almost Todd Collins-like.

But unlike the Redskins’ quarterback, Petty hasn’t had the same happy-ish ending. Simply qualifying for races has been a problem. Last year, Petty stepped out of the car for a few races, doing some analysis on TNT. But even then, the myriad drivers that filled in for him – Andretti, Kenny Wallace, Chad McCumbee – at least made the races, even if the finishes weren’t spectacular.

Maybe the Pettys can turn around their operation. But the future is certainly bleak. It’s going to take about the same effort that Yates Racing will need to get their organization back on track.

Until (and if) that happens, we’ll have to hope for the best for a family that’s done an awful lot for racing and the greater good.