Headlines, controversy, changes, and tragedy. 2007 had it all.
By: Drew Hierwarter
The 2007 racing season is now well behind us. And what a season it was. As usual the NASCAR Nextel Cup Series was the 300 pound gorilla in the room, dominating the headlines all year long. From the beginning of the season in Daytona with the debut of Toyota, it was a year of big stories. Teams had to struggle trying to prepare and race two completely different styles of car, there was the loss of Bill France, Jr., that other Junior announcing that he would leave the family business to go off and race under the Rick Hendrick banner. Fines and suspensions, and personnel changes, and mergers and acquisitions, and open wheel drivers coming over to the “dark side” all contributed to turn attention away from the action on the track. And finally, the dominance of Hendrick Motorsports overall, and the Chad Knaus lead 48 car driven by Jimmie Johnson in particular, certainly made this season a memorable one.
The biggest story of the 2007 NHRA Powerade Drag Racing season just might be John Force Racing. The team suffered through the early season death of driver Eric Medlin. Then team leader John Force struggled, failing to qualify for several events and losing in the first round in others. And just when everybody had written him off, a mid-season surge brought Force charging back into to the championship picture. It was beginning to look as though this might be Force’s year again when a devastating crash brought the whole thing to halt. The best story in the JFR year was the rookie debut of daughter Ashley Force who proved that she can drive a nitro funny car as well as anybody.
In open wheel racing, Formula 1 was, once again, the soap opera that we expect it to be. And on our side of the ocean, the IRL and The Champ Car Series have all but disappeared in the minds and hearts of American race fans. Dario Franchitti won a rain shortened Indy 500 and shortly thereafter announced he was switching to NASCAR. That started a sort of mini-exodus of several other Indy car stars to the point that some were joking, “Would the last driver leaving an open wheel series please turn out the lights.”
But that’s enough about 2007. As of this writing the 2008 Daytona 500 is only 68 days away. The Rolex 24 Hours of Daytona will be here even sooner than that. For this coming year the Nextel Cup Series will be called the Sprint Cup and the teams can focus all of their resources on one type of car. The Busch Grand National Series will be called the Nationwide Series. And the Craftsman Truck Series will probably have the best racing of the three once again. The IRL and the Champ Car World Series will try to gain some attention with only one star driver each. Formula 1 will continue to be technically interesting, politically intriguing, and unimportant to most Americans. And the NHRA is beginning to see the fruits of its new marketing partners and will likely be much more visible in the new year.
It will be wonderful to hear the sound of race engines once again.