Taking blame

Kevin gets slammed by several of his fellow drivers for an incident at Daytona. Shane disses DJ and gives him a nationally-televised finger at Bristol. At Texas, Tony blasts Stanton, who blasts right back with videotape that "proves" he was wrongly accused.

And then there's poor old Jimmie, who after being fingered several times already this season for on-track incidents, appears ready to start singing the refrain from a 1950s hit, "Why's everybody always pickin' on me?"

Class and accountability are two words that don't seem to be in the vocabulary of quite a few NASCAR drivers these days. Whenever an on-track incident occurs, hardly anyone is willing to admit fault.

Rather, even if the evidence is overwhelming to the contrary, the common response given by singled-out drivers always seems to be to blame the other guy.

Thus far this season, we've had numerous on-track mistakes. Yet I can only recall just a few instances where a driver shrugged his shoulders and sheepishly admitted, "Yep, I messed up. It was my fault."

The first that comes to mind was when Dale Earnhardt Jr. got into the side of Brian Vickers at Las Vegas, knocking them both out of the race. Instead of copping out and saying Vickers did something to him, Junior was a man and admitted he was the offending party.

"It was a big mistake on my part," Earnhardt said afterward. "It's my fault and I apologized to [Vickers]. I don't make too many mistakes, but today I made one and I feel real bad about it."

Three weeks later, Bobby Hamilton Jr. caused a multicar pileup at Bristol. To his credit, he admitted his culpability. "Leave it to me to do something stupid and tear up a bunch of race cars," Hamilton said. "I'm sure I'm a pretty good SOB right now."

Then while battling for position at Martinsville, Jeff Gordon inadvertently – although some might say intentionally – forced Kurt Busch into the wall en route to taking the checkered flag.

Still, Gordon apologized after the race: "I didn't mean to get into [Busch], but there wasn't a lot of give in either one of us."

Other than those rare exceptions of self-blame, almost every other multicar wreck that has occurred in Nextel Cup or Busch Series racing this season has been followed with some variation of "I was just minding my own business when (fill in the name) got into me."

But not this past Saturday in the Aaron's 312 Busch race at Talladega. What resulted from a costly multicar wreck late in that race wound up being one of the classiest moves thus far this year.

Joe Nemechek, Denny Hamlin, Paul Menard and Casey Mears were among a tightly-bunched group of drivers jockeying for the lead. Nemechek tried to squeeze by Hamlin but ran out of free real estate and clipped him, sending Hamlin, Mears and several others spinning and slamming.

Quite naturally, many of the drivers involved in the wreck were angry at Nemechek, who is normally considered one of the cleanest drivers in the business.

Last year, when Ricky Rudd ran second to Nemechek at Kansas, he had this to say: "Joe will race you close, but he'll race you clean from start to finish. He's one guy I never have to worry about if he's alongside me. I can't say that about a lot of other guys."

When it came time to talk about Saturday's crash after being released from the infield medical care center, Nemechek could have passed the buck or tried to blame someone else.

But not Front Row Joe.

Nemechek stood in front of the TV cameras and microphones and readily admitted he was at fault for causing that wreck. He screwed up, he knew it, and he quickly accepted the blame.

"I take responsibility for what happened and I apologize to the other guys involved," he said.

It would have been easy for Nemechek to say something different, but his mistake was his story and he was sticking to it. That it also happened to be the truth made his actions all that more admirable.

I commend Nemechek for admitting his faux pas. He stood up, took the blame and didn't try to weasel out or put the blame on someone else. He showed us what class and accountability truly are.

"I take responsibility, but we'll learn from it and go on," Nemechek said.

It's an example from which other drivers could learn a great deal.