Daytona 500 Rambling Thoughts

As I've mentioned before, we are NASCAR fans. Sunday we watched the season opening Daytona 500 together; not just the race, but the pre-race stuff too.

Although it was the 50th running of the race, they spent way too much time going over the same stuff again and again, showing the same clips, playing the same interviews. Just once would have been plenty.

Yes, it was sad that Dale Earnhardt died during the last lap of the 2001 Daytona 500, but let the man rest in peace now. I think if it's only mentioned a couple of times during each race and pre-race show, that would be fine.

They could have easily cut the pre-race stuff down to an hour...EASILY.

Trisha Yearwood was there to sing the National Anthem. She did a fantastic job of it. She didn't try to doctor it up with riffs and extra stuff. She didn't try to draw it out to a 12 minute song. She sang it straight and to the point, and it sounded wonderful.

Darrell Waltrip...good old Darrell Waltrip...I normally like the guy, but it just wasn't his best day in the broadcast booth as far as I'm concerned. And the "group" command of "Gentlemen, start your engines" is great when it's done by one person, but when you want all the past winners of the race to do it, it just doesn't come off very well.

In the past few years the directors have struggled somewhat. It seems that they can't get to any on-track action quick enough and we just miss seeing things by a split second. Sunday's race was no exception.

I only heard one reference to the fact that Dale Jarrett is retiring after the fifth race of this season, and heading into broadcasting, but a couple of UPS commercials drove the point home. I've always liked Dale Jarrett and think that he not only has done a lot for the sport, but has remained a good role model for the younger drivers.

It did not fall on deaf ears, however, when Dale Earnhardt Jr. once again made it clear that he's having a WONDERFUL time at Hendrick MotorSports. I'm sure that his step-mother Teresa noticed it too. I'm not getting involved in their issues, but Jr no longer drives for DEI, the company his late father built and Teresa now runs. I'm sure that there's more to it than has come out in the press though.

It would have been nice if the race had started at an earlier time. Starting at 3:30 pm eastern time was a little late in my opinion. I had things to do as evening rolled around and wanted to be able to do them without missing any of the race.

Anyway, just a few thoughts on the subject... Ted and Alex will be going to Bristol, TN in a little less than a month for a race weekend. About 6 years or so ago I was fortunate enough to be able to get tickets to the Bristol races for spring and August, and I will probably never give them up! We can never use the August tickets because that's always when school is starting, so we always sell them, and have absolutely NO TROUBLE doing so. A couple of times we had to sell the spring tickets because of things going on here at home, and again had no trouble. But once you get Bristol tickets in YOUR name, you never give them up!

And I won't!!