A few hours before the green flag was waved for Saturday's Bank of America 500 at Lowe's Motor Speedway, one group receiving a tour of the track stood out from the others thanks to a forest of boom mikes following it around. It was the newest group of participants in the latest edition of NASCAR's Drive for Diversity combine, aka D4D.
Two days later, 30 young men and women -- black, white and Hispanic -- hit the track at the Motor Mile Speedway in Radford, Va., behind the wheel of NASCAR Late Model rides for two days of instruction and evaluation. NASCAR brass and talent scouts took notes on how each driver handled the flat, .416-mile oval -- everything from how and where they entered the corners to how willing they were to drive it in before standing on the brakes.
On Tuesday evening, that group was pared to 10 finalists who will return in a couple of weeks to compete for four NASCAR Camping World East (think Double-A baseball) rides. The remaining six will get to race one level lower, in NASCAR's Whelen All-American Series. (For a quick profile on the finalists, check out this news story.) The most promising candidate is thought to be 19-year-old Paul Harraka, who won two races and Rookie of the Year honors in the NASCAR Camping World West Series, birthplace of current Cup star Kevin Harvick. For Harraka, winning the combine and making the jump to the Camping World East Series would mean a free ride in NASCAR's backyard and TV exposure that the West series lacks.
The elimination drama played out before a select crowd of NASCAR brass, talent evaluators and family members. The rest of us will get to see it unfold in a 10-episode reality show that will air on BET in early 2010, thus the camera crews tailing the racers at Lowe's.
The newly revamped D4D program is being headed by former Dale Earnhardt Inc. VP Max Siegel. He and fellow former DEI exec John Story will field the finalists' new rides through their new Revolution Racing team.
"No one has done it like we're doing it," Siegel said Saturday. "No one has centralized it like we have. We have a shop in Mooresville alongside all the major teams. We aren't discovering drivers and then sending them off to other teams. We are the team. We're building the cars and putting them in our cars. The support has been tremendous up to this point, and once we start producing real results, it will be even more so."
"Tremendous" might be a little strong. Although there is support for the new D4D initiative in the Cup garages, much of it is laced with skepticism. In the past decade, NASCAR has launched and relaunched its efforts to introduce more minorities and women into stock car racing, including a notoriously disastrous partnership with Magic Johnson.
"There isn't a person in here who doesn't want this to succeed," one Cup Series team owner told me Saturday as the D4D group marched by. "But until one of these programs actually produces something or someone, then most of us won't expect much until we're proven wrong."
To date, the most successful diversity programs have been the ones not officially affiliated with NASCAR, most notably a partnership between NFL Hall of Famers Joe Gibbs and Reggie White that discovered on-again-off-again Cup racer Aric Almirola. That program has continued since White's death in 2004, and its latest discovery is African-American racer Marc Davis, though Davis has yet to make the jump to the big leagues, a great source of frustration for his father (not to mention my colleague Ed Hinton). In addition, there is already at least one independent initiative started in the past year to help minorities land jobs in NASCAR.
But even some high-profile independent efforts have failed. Remember when Heisman Trophy winner Tim Brown was going to start a Cup team? Jackie Joyner-Kersee? The Wayans brothers? Probably not, because those plans never came to fruition.
"We'll win the skeptics over," Siegel says confidently. "I like a challenge."
Speed Mail
I'll be honest with you, folks. My inbox (mcgeespn@yahoo.com) is not what I envision Bruce Feldman's or Marty Smith's looks like. If it weren't for press releases from Truck Series teams, cash pleas from exiled Nairobi princes and accusations of my dating Jimmie Johnson (hey, it's not my fault I have to write about him because he's good), I wouldn't get much mail at all.
But when I do receive inbox fodder worth sharing, I'll make sure to share it with you. Such as this well-constructed query that arrived Sunday afternoon:
Hi Ryan,
In your (Oct. 13) Hall of Fame nominee analysis you mentioned Bobby Allison's 84 wins, "85 if you ask him." What's that all about it? If NASCAR lists 84 how can he differ?
Barry Sykes
Odessa, Texas
Dear Barry,
The dispute centers around a NASCAR Grand National (now Sprint Cup) race run at Winston-Salem's Bowman-Gray Stadium on Aug. 6, 1971. Bobby Allison took the checkered flag, the trophy and the winner's check, but he is not credited with the win in the NASCAR record book.
Why? Because he won the race in a lighter, faster car -- a Mustang, to be exact -- from NASCAR's Grand American Series. The Bowman-Gray event was part of a short-lived experiment that allowed cars from both NASCAR series to be run in the same races. So, officially speaking, Allison won a race in the Grand Am division and Richard Petty, who finished second and three seconds behind, was credited with the Cup win.
"That's the problem," Allison told me when I asked him about the discrepancy at a recent ARCA race in Rockingham, N.C. "To give me credit for the win, they'd have to take one away from Richard. And you know, just like I know, that no one takes anything away from Richard Petty, especially something that would make his win total 199 instead of 200."
Instead, Allison will eternally share his spot on the all-time wins list with the one rival he hated worse than The King, Darrell Waltrip. As of this moment, they are tied for third behind Petty (200) and David Pearson (105). But Jeff Gordon is three wins from bumping them back to fourth place.
"No," Bobby says with that patented Allison smirk. "He's three wins away from bumping Darrell back to fourth. He needs four to move past me."
For more on the 84/85 controversy, see Rick Houston's great story from earlier this year.
Ryan McGee
