
Welcome to the latest Happy Hour mailbag! You know how these work: You write us with your best rant/ joke/one-liner at happyhournascar@yahoogroups.com or on Twitter at @jaybusbee, we respond to your messages, everyone goes away with a smile on their face.
We've got the greatest day of the motorsports year coming up this Sunday. Combine that with the unofficial kickoff to summer, and you've got one hell of a good reason why it's a very good thing there's no work on Monday. You listening, NFL? This is how you do a celebration. Make Super Bowl Monday a holiday and then we'll talk. Till then, we have Racing Sunday and then a blessed day to recover.
To your letters, starting with the issue of Jimmie Johnson sandbagging:
If Dale Earnhardt Jr. had won the All Star race, everyone would be saying it was the greatest race format ever! Be thankful Jimmie Johnson did sandbag, or he probably would have won all 4 segments. [Those complaining about Johnson's win are] the same bunch of whiners that couldn't appreciate JJ winning 5 in a row. I personally thought it was impressive to see a team come out with a strategy & execute it to perfection. No matter how you tweak the length of segments or pit stops, no one was outrunning the 48 Saturday night! Get over it!
— Jeff
Collinsville, Ill.
Do you think 20 years from now they'll still be talking about "fireworks" and "no holds barred" and "tempers flaring" and great All-Star race memories and show replays of Kyle Petty and Davey Allison followed by Earnhardt and Elliot? NASCAR is living in the past, especially when it comes to the All-Star race. The meatball nostalgic fan thinks that even in this current format that Dale Earnhardt or Rusty Wallace or Bill Elliott would've tried to win all 4 segments anyway and then run away in the 10-lap shootout.
— Eric
Chicago
First off, let's lay this out there: yes, Jimmie Johnson sandbagged the last three segments of the All-Star Race. There's no other way to put it. Good strategy? Absolutely. Crap racing? Also, absolutely. But Eric makes an excellent point: Johnson did exactly what the wise drivers of earlier days would have done before him: used the rules to his own advantage. Do I have a problem with that? Aesthetically yes, competitively no. You do what you do to win, and it doesn't matter if you don't look pretty doing it.
Longtime readers of this column know I don't have a whole lot of patience for some of the Sacred Whines of the NASCAR faithful ("It was better back then," "Jimmie is a cheater," etc.) Those of you displeased with the All-Star race, which would be everyone who's not a 48 fan, unfortunately need to accept that Johnson gamed the system to his own advantage, and did so in a perfectly legitimate fashion, like it or not.
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