NASCAR nod to Geoff Bodine; Hailie Deegan mimics Dale Earnhardt; Chevy gasses the Malibu

Well, we’re getting closer.

Incrementalism, they call it.

It ain’t much, but it’s … something?

Geoff Bodine, who can’t even get nominated for the NASCAR Hall of Fame, got to be Grand Marshall in Darlington this weekend. Kinda.

For the Sunday race? Nope. But for the Saturday parade downtown that’s part of the annual “Throwback Weekend” at Darlington. At 75, I reckon, you don’t turn down remembrances, but it’d sure be nice to see him treated as well as so many of his contemporaries.

Bodine won 18 races during his 18 years of full-time racing, including the 1986 Daytona 500 back before the occasional randomness of plate-racin’. But before his NASCAR career he was the Richard Petty of modified racing in the Northeast, and frankly, some NASCAR Hall of Famers are enshrined for little more than such things.

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“How many minor-league ballplayers are in Cooperstown?” a knowledgeable Bodine fan asked me recently.

Well, a lot, actually, but none of them were enshrined for what they accomplished before their big-league careers.

For whatever reason, Geoff Bodine, like Smokey Yunick, can’t get through the nominating committee, which is a different subset of racing insiders than the eventual Hall voters.

It’d be nice if someone on the northern end of the food chain would give the thumbs-up to these nominations, then let the voters decide.

As for Smokey, he’s a well-deserved member of some automotive Halls of Fame, though I can see arguments for and against him deserving induction into the NASCAR Hall. I could be swayed either way.

But with Bodine, if the abstract argument is whether he’s as deserving as the weakest link already inducted, it’s not even arguable.

A nod to Dale Earnhardt and his ... Ford?

I’m no fan of the so-called “special paint scheme” because, hell’s bells, there are special paint schemes every week, dictated by whichever team sponsor paid for the right to adorn the Chevy, Ford or Toyota in this particular race.

In the days leading up to Darlington’s spring throwback, you get two or three press releases daily about this or that team’s tribute to some racer of yesteryear. It involves running a somewhat similar paint scheme the driver employed at some part of his career.

It was cute at first, but has run its course. No lie, I think I saw where an Xfinity team is running a Robert Pressley tribute paint scheme. I guess Ramo Stott didn’t make the cut. No knock on Pressley, by the way … solid dude who did well in the old Busch Series but never had upper-rung Cup equipment.

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Anyway, where were we … special paint schemes?

Not a big fan, but found one I liked for this weekend: Hailie Deegan’s Dale Earnhardt tribute, with good reason. She runs the No. 15 in the Xfinity Series, and did the throwback to Ironhead’s two years in Bud Moore’s No. 15 Wrangler Ford, complete with a replica yellow-and-blue paint job.

Naturally, on “social” media, there were plenty of haters who didn’t like the idea of an Earnhardt tribute going on a Ford, given Dale’s long association with Chevy.

Not a lot of history majors out there in the NASCAR boondocks sometimes.

By the way, during Earnhardt’s early years, team owner Rod Osterlund was fond of trotting out an Olds or (Gasp!) Buick at Daytona and Talladega.

Chevy halted the Camaro, and now kicks Malibu to the curb

In Earnhardt’s very earliest NASCAR days, he also drove a Chevy Malibu, back when Cale Yarborough was wheeling one to Victory Lane with stunning regularity. Dave Marcis won in a Malibu a couple times in the early-’80s after the make went from muscle car to a banker’s boxy ride.

Today, the Malibu is becoming a throwaway instead of a throwback. General Motors announced this past week it will no longer make the Malibu, which evolved from a Chevelle trim to muscle car to company car to mid-size grocery-getter during its nearly 50 years on the Chevy car lots.

GM had already postponed manufacturing of the Camaro beyond the 2024 offering. It’s expected to return someday soon without a gas tank. In the meantime, the Camaro — or perhaps we should say “Camaro” — will remain Chevy’s NASCAR representative because NASCAR’s constitution allows for a make to remain in play for some indeterminate amount of time.

It’ll eventually need to be determined, however, because of the following sentence that might floor you: The Malibu’s demise leaves the Corvette as the only Chevy car powered by internal combustion. There’s no massaging the Corvette to NASCAR specs, so something will have to give — or take.

In a sane world, the next time we see a Camaro it’d be a hybrid, not an EV. Consumer sentiment and long-term common sense is slowly leaning away from EVs to hybrids, but the electrification crowd won’t give ground without a fight — strangely, they never run out of energy.

— Reach Ken Willis at ken.willis@news-jrnl.com

This article originally appeared on The Daytona Beach News-Journal: Hailie Deegan channels Dale Earnhardt; Bodine nod; Chevy gasses Malibu