"Road racing is a participant's folly; oval racing is spectator's delight."
Those were the words that Clint Brawner wanted me to put on a bumper sticker almost 30 years ago. But my, oh, my how times have changed -- as evidenced by this past weekend's Le Mans, NASCAR, F1 and IndyCar races.
In 1987, just a few months before his passing, I had the great pleasure of meeting and spending some high quality time with legendary IndyCar chief mechanic Clint Brawner. When he found I was a member of the world's second oldest profession, i.e. advertising, he told me he had always wanted a bumper sticker or t-shirt that that conveyed his view of the difference between road racing and oval racing.
Clint's opinion was probably valid way back when. His career started and remained centered around roundy-round racing where fans could sit in the grandstands and watch men and their machinery wage battles on two straightaway?s joined by sweeping left turns.
But since the advent of television and cameras-everywhere coverage, the action and excitement of road racing has become every bit as accessible and interesting as left-turns-only events.
Last weekend we all got to see the best of both worlds as F1 was in Canada, the world's fastest sports cars were enduring 24 hours at Le Mans and the best American NASCAR and IndyCar drivers were doing their thing on big ovals in Pennsylvania and Texas.
Unless you are an "I hate everything except what I love" ideologue I will defy you to say one type of racing was better than the other.
At Montreal, where the Canadian Grand Prix was started in the rain, Jenson Button won after crashing with teammate Lewis Hamilton, rejoining in last place and then fighting his way back to take the lead on the last lap when Sebastian Vettel lost traction in one corner. And we got to see it all. Thanks to television coverage we knew Vettel's tires were going away, we saw the narrow lane on a drying track he finally had to veer from and then the pass for the win. It was one of the best races of the season, of any kind.
It was a spectator's delight.
Ron Hornaday won his first NASCAR Camping World Truck Series race of the weekend on Friday night at Texas after 168 laps around a mile-and-a-half oval filled with spins and contact and beating and banging and then a penalty of all things to decide a winner. Johnny Sauter, who dominated the race, made a move to block Hornaday on the last green-white-checkered restart and was black-flagged to come home 22nd in the final results. The race was a pleasure to watch from anywhere.
Jeff Gordon won the NASCAR Sprint Cup race at Pocono but perhaps the most interesting aspect was the ongoing tete-a-tete between Kevin Harvick and Kyle Busch. The Pocono tri-oval has the widest front straight of any and the protagonist Harvick constantly made his Chevy as wide as a rich NASCAR driver's Newell Motor coach is long to block, impede, irritate and annoy Busch And the cameras caught it all.
In France, for the 79th time, they held the 24 Heures du Mans sports car race on the Circuit de le Sarthe, a 13.629 kilometer track that includes public roads. To some participants, those who fell out due to mechanical problems and crashes, this grand-daddy of all road races was indeed folly.
But even here, halfway around the world, we were able to watch and enjoy the world's greatest and most famous sports car endurance race from start to finish thanks to cable TV and the Internet. We were able to revel in the dramatic overall win by the third string Audi over the favored Peugeots after the numbers one and two cars fell out in frightening style, thankfully with no injuries. We got to witness a Corvette win its class 10 years after its first victory at Le Mans in this, the year that Chevrolet celebrated its 100th anniversary.
And we got to watch Andrea Robertson become the first female driver to stand on the podium since 1931, part of the first husband and wife team to earn that same honor, after her Ford GT -- a limited production car built from 2005-2006 only, inspired the famous Ford GT40 built specifically for Le Mans in the mid-sixties --finished third in class.
Finally there was the Twin 275s at Texas, the first IndyCar double-header since 1981, where Penske driver Will Power got his first oval win ever in the second race after Dario Franchitti took the first in his Ganassi entry.
Clint Brawner would have loved it. I don't think he would have been too crazy about the blind draw for starting positions between the two races and I KNOW he would have hated spec cars but the racing was spectacular.
Just like at Le Mans and Montreal.
I will forever treasure getting to meet Mr. Brawner and hearing his views on which kind of racing was better. I'm sorry I couldn't have created at least one bumper sticker, just for him, which illustrated his passion for oval racing.
But most of all I'm sorry he lived in a different era sans hi-tech communications, instant exposure and immediate, electronic gratification.
He just never knew what he was missing.
Read more of Bill Tybur at his website: www.fmfl.net
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