After an outstanding season, racing luck caught up with Dallas Colodny last Saturday night at Toyota Speedway in Southern California.
Colodny qualified fourth in the NASCAR Auto Club Late Model division, and was running third in the first of the twin races when his car was damaged in a racing incident on a re-start. Colodny raced back to 17th from the tail end of the pack with an ill-handling car. Unable to get the handling problems fixed between races, Colodny was only able to manage a 13th place in the second race. However, he maintained his rookie of the year lead and his fifth-place points position going into the final race of the season on Oct. 3.
° Another local racer, Mackena Bell, will be heading back east to the Motor Mile Speedway in Radford, Virginia for the Drive for Diversity Combine October 16-19. Bell is hoping to qualify for one of the 10 slots available in the 2010 program. Drive for Diversity will see wholesale changes next season, with all 10 cars run out of one shop under the Revolution Racing banner.
Max Siegel, former honcho of Dale Earnhardt, Inc., will maintain his role as Chief Executive Officer of both Revolution and The 909 Group, which is the marketing and management arm of the program. Drivers in D4D program will compete in the Camping World East and Whelen series at a variety of east coast tracks. So if Bell is selected for her second year in the program, she will be relocating to Charlotte, North Carolina and will be immersed in racing as never before.
° The Chase for the Championship started off with a bang in New Hampshire last Sunday, and continues at the Monster Mile tomorrow. Juan Pablo Montoya dominated at New Hampshire much as he did at Indy, but came up short again as wily veteran Mark Martin held him off in the closing laps. I've said it before and I'll say it again, NASCAR owes Martin one, and maybe this year he'll collect. And post-race inspection revealed that Kyle Busch's car was too low in the left front in post-race inspection, reportedly due to a dislodged spring. Busch and team owner Joe Gibbs were each docked 25 points, and crew chief Steve Addington was fined $25,000 and put on double secret probation for the rest of the year. One wonders if the penalty would have been stiffer had Busch been in the Chase. And given the circumstances of missing the Chase, maybe Addington would prefer to be sent home until January 1.
The hot topic these days is "race fixing", both in Formula 1 and NHRA. The recent departure of Flavio Briatore and Pat Symonds from the Renault team, and Renault's two-year (suspended) banning from the sport arose out of Nelson Piquet's staged crash at the Spanish Grand Prix last season.
But more recently, tempers flared at the NHRA Indy Nationals when Tony Pedregon accused John Force of throwing a race to put Pedregon's brother, Cruz, out of contention. The confrontation and near-fisticuffs were caught on TV, and Force was fined a hefty sum for pushing an NHRA official. You know, it used to be that we racing aficionados took pride in our sport being above the sleaze routinely reported about steroid-enhanced, gun-toting, girlfriend-beating, drunk-driving athletes in football, baseball, and basketball.
Lately it seems that racing's halo has slipped a bit with the suspension of Jeremy Mayfield and the subsequent court wrangling, and now allegations of race-fixing in two major series. Now, there are those who have long held that NASCAR influences race outcomes with "phantom" cautions late in a race, and in years past it was alleged that this or that driver got "the call" and pulled off a miraculous win. But that was the sanctioning body trying to crank up the excitement. These more recent incidents involve racing teams and in the case of Renault appear to be pretty blatant, not to mention dangerous. The problem, of course, boils down to the root of most problems in sports, business, personal relations, and nearly everything else in our society - money. And I don't see that changing any time soon.