1,000 Greatest Drivers: Bernd Schneider/Rich Vogler

Testing, 2-2-3, testing...

It was nice to see North Wilkesboro Speedway return to the NASCAR Cup Series schedule as a points race, something I never expected to see again in my lifetime. I never watched a race there live because my dad didn’t have cable at the time, but I did follow the last race in 1996 via NASCAR’s new timing and scoring app. The race may not have been a barnburner, but then few races there ever were. The track had fewer lead changes per race than any other modern era track, there were usually very few crashes or cautions of any kind (especially in later years), and as a result, fewer cars tended to finish on the lead lap there than even on the other short tracks. Famously, the last time someone lapped the field in a NASCAR Cup Series race came there when Geoff Bodine lapped the field in 1994. The first two races where every starter finished the race in a full field happened there, too. Aside from all the times Dale Earnhardt and Ricky Rudd wrecked each other in 1988 and 1989, most people don’t remember any flashy highlights from the track.

Therefore, it shouldn’t have come as a surprise when many of the same trends happened in this race. Only three cars failed to finish, there were only three cautions other than the two stage breaks, and five cars finished on the lead lap, the fewest since Bristol in 2024 and Dover in 2004, and both those races were pretty weird. This one was not. It was fine though. Even though few North Wilkesboro races will ever make the highlight reels, it was still a nice throwback to most of the things that were good about NASCAR in the ‘90s. One of the best things to say about the track is that having so few cautions means that the final results were a very accurate measure of performance, and that honestly mostly remained true even though there was a caution during green-flag pit stops, which is unusual.

But the real ways this race felt like a ‘90s throwback were drivers complaining about the heat and the importance of testing. ‘90s races tended to be much more hot and grueling than races in recent decades because the tracks on average were more physical prior to the cookie-cutter intermediate era, the races also tended to be longer as several 500 lap and/or mile races at Darlington, Dover, and Rockingham were reduced to 400s, and the drivers were less athletic because the NASCAR garage didn’t really embrace athleticism until Mark Martin traded in his alcoholism with a strict athletic regimen in the late ‘80s, then Buddy Parrott hired the first pit crew trainer when he was Rusty Wallace’s crew chief in the early ‘90s. You have to be in much better physical shape to race nowadays, but admittedly, there’s been 30 years of climate change since and they made the arguably dumb decision to hold the North Wilkesboro race in July when the spring race was typically held in April and the fall race either in late September or early October. The race was also slightly longer, as it lasted for 450 laps as opposed to the standard 400-lap distance from back in the day. That didn’t really bother me - I’ve always been pretty indifferent to race lengths - but it did surprise me since it was the first time I can remember that they ever actually increased a scheduled race distance (not counting things like overtime finishes and the like). Even if the on-track action might not have been scintillating, the fact that the race was more challenging than usual still made it compelling.

However, the main takeaway I have from this race is how pivotal testing remains. One of the rather unheralded NASCAR trends of the ‘90s was more and more races being decided by which drivers got to test at a certain track leading up to a given race. In the ‘80s, drivers and teams could test as often as they wanted, and that was indeed how Martin helped build Roush Racing from the bottom up. There was not yet big money in the sport, but teams’ ability to test was only limited by the size of their budget. In the ‘90s, that changed. I don’t remember what year it happened, but at some point in the early ‘90s, each car was limited to seven tests on active NASCAR Cup Series tracks per year. I believe there was an exception carved out for the Daytona 500, so you could test during Speedweeks as many times as you wanted. Aside from that, however, teams could no longer test at every track unless they either participated in tire tests (which was the most common way to flout this rule), which meant many teams had to make up for this by testing at tracks that did not currently hold Cup Series races. This is what created the multi-car team boom. Multi-car teams typically didn’t run any better or worse than single-car teams prior to this point, but since it was 7 tests per car and not per team, that meant 2-car teams got 14 tests a season and 3-car teams got 21. Hendrick Motorsports was the first team to properly adjust to these new rules because they shared their data across all their cars unlike the few other multi-car teams at the time, which had their cars competing with each other, and that is one of the main reasons for Hendrick’s late ‘90s dominance, and you don’t see many people talking about that. NASCAR eventually closed this loophole and changed the limit to 7 tests per team in the 2000s I think, after almost all the previously-existing single-car teams were already dead… Whether teams tested at a track or not determined tons of races in this era, most notably when Jeff Burton led all 300 laps at Loudon after he was the only driver to test there with a restrictor plate. Gee, how impressive. (That’s why I didn’t select that as his best race.)

However, tire tests were still unlimited, and that could create some weird skews at times, especially Bodine’s baffling 1994 season, where he won 5 poles, 3 races in dominant fashion (including the aforementioned North Wilkesboro race), led a career-high 1,744 laps (third-most for the season), but only finished 17th in points because he had 15 DNFs including eight engine failures and six crashes. After Alan Kulwicki’s death, Hooters, in keeping with their sleazy image, immediately stopped sponsoring the #7 car only a couple weeks later, so when Bodine bought the team he didn’t have steady sponsorship. Bob Newton, the owner of Hoosier Racing Tire, decided to reenter the sport for 1994 and managed to convince Bodine to switch to Hoosiers and become the tire brand’s lead test driver, since he was the only marquee name Hoosier had signed for its second go-around. In exchange, Newton arranged for Bodine to land the Exide Batteries sponsorship. Being the lead test driver for a tire manufacturer allowed him unlimited testing like the old days, and you could really see it on track. At every track where Bodine had tested, he dominated; on the few tracks where he didn’t, he was usually nowhere to be seen. The aggressive tire setups led to a lot of crashes, but admittedly his brother Brett intentionally wrecking him out of the lead at the inaugural Brickyard 400 because he was cheating on his wife with Tanya Tucker was not something that could really have been foreseen. Nonetheless, that all explains why that season was such an outlier for him. The tire test loophole gave him far more testing opportunities than any of the better drivers and teams had, which drastically inflated his performance, even if his bad luck meant his season was still underrated. (Hoosiers are also the only reason the hapless Loy Allen became a sometimes-qualifying juggernaut and Rick Mast won the pole at the inaugural Brickyard.) Bodine had had a general decline for years starting in 1991 and he didn’t just suddenly improve in 1994; he just got to exploit a weird loophole. After Hoosier withdrew in 1995 and all drivers were on Goodyears from then on, he had a precipitating decline. I remember reading Shaun Assael’s book Wide Open back in the ‘90s where Geoff conspiratorially argued that Goodyear gave him worse time compounds that year to punish him for being Hoosier’s factory driver. Possible? Sure. But my guess is that it was a combination of him no longer having unlimited testing and his divorce that led to his disastrous 1995. His wife Kathy obviously left after he cheated on her, and part of it was also that Ernie Irvan’s crash a couple weeks later scared the bejeezus out of her from what I have heard. Now, I believe Kathy was instrumental in the day-to-day operations of the team (much more than for example Teresa Earnhardt was) so the divorce obviously also hurt the team, and that was entirely his fault. His career significantly unraveled after he lost the Exide sponsorship to Roush in 1996, and then he had a sad, slow end to his career.

That leads us to Joey Logano. In the run up to the 2024 All-Star race, Logano had tested for 800 laps, way more than anyone else, en route to dominating that event, so it shouldn’t have been as much of a surprise that he won in dominant fashion as it was. This is the real way this race was a throwback because it once again proved how having a significant testing advantage over the rest of the field could inflate your performance more than it otherwise should have been. Now, unlike Bodine in 1994, Logano does not have the same kind of testing advantage at any other track, so he’ll be back to his usual piddling lackluster mediocrity in no time. He’s not suddenly back and he doesn’t have momentum. He just got the opportunity to seize on an artificial testing advantage like Bodine in 1994, and he’ll be back to his usual 1995 Bodine-caliber performance before long. I was just hoping Erik Jones would make the Chase over him and now it looks like that won’t happen.

IndyCar got too greedy and big for its britches this weekend. Although I remember almost everyone complaining when they announced their exclusive deal with FOX because of how bad their coverage is, I knew Roger Penske had the right idea here and that having every single race on FOX would lead to the ratings skyrocketing as it has done. As part of that deal, FOX also purchased a portion of the series, so to make that investment profitable, they began giving IndyCar all these plum time slots such as directly following World Cup games to maximize the return on their investment. It worked… until the World Cup ran over. I’m not into soccer at all but I watched a fair bit of the World Cup finals, usually on mute, until the IndyCar race was scheduled to come on. I saw the winning goal at least. After the Spain/Argentina match ran over and a torrential downpour blanketed the Nashville Superspeedway, the race got delayed to Monday. I am not normally one to feel schadenfreude since I feel that schadenfreude is usually wrong, but I did so on this occasion. IndyCar deserved to have egg on its face after that gross White House photo op to promote the Trump Grand Prix last week, where Roger Penske said this, of all things: “We think about the Indy 500 as an iconic race. But this is going to move right up there next to it, as far as we’re concerned, from the standpoint of the best in the world.” Yeah, this hastily put together street race that puts a blight on the sport is exactly on par with the Indy 500. Bleep you, Rog. You deserved to have your cushy World Cup finale lead-in ruined after that. (And for the record, I’d still have a problem if any Democratic President had mandated a race by executive order too.)

As for the race itself, it wasn’t bad or anything but it was just your usual buzzkill. Once again, Álex Palou inherited a race lead he never captured on track since seemingly Chip Ganassi’s team is the only team that can strategize properly. Once again, David Malukas got screwed out of an oval race that probably should have been his as it seems like he’s never had good luck in a race where he had potentially winning speed, and that’s getting as ridiculous as Palou’s good luck at this point. Regardless of Palou winning, Malukas obviously had the best performance. I thought he was going to be out for the weekend after his Saturday morning crash, but he amazingly went from being in the hospital and seemingly likely to miss the race to leading Saturday afternoon practice. Then he made up for being forced to start last by staying out of the pits on the first pit cycle and was dominating and easily in position to win until he got trapped by a caution. I guess you could say it’s his fault for crashing in practice, which forced him to go on that alternate strategy, but I don’t know. That’s sure worked for Scott Dixon and Palou many a time. But just as ever, when Malukas tries it, he’s typically screwed. His drive from last to third while hurt almost gives me Josef Newgarden 2016 Iowa vibes (and Newgarden’s oval performances while hurt this year have also been very impressive). Indeed, his trajectory reminded me of Newgarden’s all along. He’ll never win as many races or titles probably just because the fields are much deeper now than the awful late-2010s fields Newgarden came up against, but he’s breathing the same air. I guess I’m not happy Penske got screwed out of the win after the aforementioned quote. But Malukas did not deserve this. It feels like he could already have 3-5 oval wins by now if he even had balanced luck. Well, he’s still second in points…

The contractor that Onondaga County Community Development connected me with will finally be starting the roof repair tomorrow and then hopefully the ramp replacement a couple weeks after that so Mom will be able to come home. I also scheduled the needed deep cleaning for August 5, so hopefully she’ll be back by the end of August. Fingers crossed. The nursing home was talking about wanting to move her to the third floor dementia ward yesterday, and if that had happened, she’d have never been allowed to leave. Do I think she has dementia symptoms? Yes. On the other hand, I think she’s substantially more coherent than she was a year ago and I think her symptoms have improved. So, I argued hard with the fourth floor social worker about this yesterday and they let me make the call because I had power of attorney. I was worried that Adult Protective Services might intervene on this because they were the ones who forced her into Van Duyn to begin with against her wishes because of her hoarding, but they ended their involvement a long time ago, so I got to make the call.

Here are the originally scheduled drivers for both July 20 and July 21.