Why Rick Hendrick’s ride on the #48 after the All-Star Race was so special

After Jimmie Johnson completed some impressive burnouts following his win in the All-Star Race Saturday night, he had team owner Rick Hendrick hop up on the door and ride along for a victory lap on the frontstretch at Charlotte Motor Speedway to let fans solute possibly the greatest car owner in the history of NASCAR.

The move harkened back to days long gone by when pit crews would ride on top of a winning car as it drove to Victory Lane, and it was an awesome solute to arguably the best team owner in the history of the sport.

Yes, Hendrick Motorsports still has 68 wins to go before it catches Petty Enterprises for the most wins all time, but that number could be in reach in the next five to seven years.

In any case, Hendrick’s victory ride on the frontstretch after Saturday night’s race was a fitting tribute to a great man and a team that just won its 200^th race the week before in the Southern 500 at Darlington Raceway.

All of the leaders involved in both the Southern 500 win and the All-Star Race win are going to go down in history as legends of the sport.

Hendrick will be compared to the Petty and Wood Brothers Racing organizations, crew chief Chad Knaus will be compared to Petty’s crew chief Dale Inman and Johnson will be considered at least one of the 10 best drivers in the history of the sport.

Although it is easy to hate the #48 team and Hendrick Motorsports for all of their success, please still appreciate it. They have put together arguably the best run any team has ever had in NASCAR history.

Everybody loves to think about how great the Pettys were, how great Earnhardt was and how much success Jeff Gordon had in the first half of his career. But, people also tend to forget how much they hated those drivers and teams for their success when it was happening.

Instead of waiting until the success is over, why don’t we properly appreciate the success while it happens.

It might seem impossible right now, but there will be a time when Johnson no longer consistently wins race. There also might be a time when Hendrick Motorsports no longer competes for wins week in and week out. Ask somebody in the 60’s and 70’s if Petty and the Wood Brothers would be struggling just to remain in the sport, and they likely would’ve have said you are absolutely crazy.

Sports have a way of evening out successes and failures. A great team doesn’t stay great forever. Some teams have longer runs on top than others, but success is certainly not eternal, especially in NASCAR.

Go ahead and wish for some other team to rise up and challenge for race wins and championships. But the eventually everybody will get tired of that team too and start to wish for the next team to arrive on the scene.

That is fine, but fans might be left always hoping for the next big thing and never enjoy what they see on the track in the present.

The Hall of Fame is great, but make sure to recognize Hall of Fame achievements when they happen. Hendrick Motorsports, Jimmie Johnson and the #48 team are in the midst of Hall of Fame achievements. It would be a shame to miss them.

The pain of death

Auto racing is a dangerous sport. We all get that. However, that doesn’t change the extreme grief and pain that comes along with death.

Former IndyCar Series champion and defending Indianapolis 500 Champion Dan Wheldon died Sunday after an incredibly bad wreck 11 laps into the final race of the IndyCar season at Las Vegas Motor Speedway.

It has been a while since motorsports lost a driver because of injuries sustained in a racing crash in America. The last IndyCar driver to die because of a crash was Paul Dana in 2006 at Homestead-Miami Speedway, and Dale Earnhardt was the last NASCAR fatality after his wreck in the 2001 Daytona 500.

That, however, doesn’t make it any easier or more difficult to deal with the death of a racecar driver. One death is by far one too many, and each time a series director has to make that awful announcement, it is the absolutely worst words that have to be said. Unfortunately, we live in a sinful world where things don’t always turn out on the good side.

It is horrible to say, but deaths in auto racing have been fairly common throughout
the years. However, now every national race is on television and racing safety has improved to the point where we all want to hope that the latest death is always the final one.

To say the least, those three hours of ABC’s coverage Sunday were difficult to watch. I’m sure many fans felt those terrible emotions that bubble up during a horrific wreck.

First there’s the shock of what happened. No racing accident is expected, especially one with the severity of Sunday’s wreck.

Then there are the hold-your-breath moments directly after the wreck where you make sure everybody is able to either drive away, as Jimmie Johnson did in the NASCAR race Saturday night at Charlotte, or at least walk away.

In the last decade, that has almost always been the case. No matter how bad the wreck looks, the driver is able to get out of the car. We’ve seen it in both NASCAR and Indycar. Elliot Sadler got out of his car after hitting the inside wall at Pocono head-on, and while Mike Conway didn’t walk away from a wreck at the end of the 2010 Indy 500 when he flipped up into the fence, he still came away with injuries no worse than what would put a football player on injured reserve.

But, when that doesn’t happen, then we are left with that empty feeling of not knowing what is going on and what condition the driver is in. At that point a mix hope and fear starts to set in.

In Earnhardt’s case, everybody saw the ambulance rushing out of Daytona International Speedway. On Sunday, everybody saw the medical helicopter take off. At that point best-case scenarios start to run through people’s mind, such as, “Well, he’s hurt, but it probably isn’t too serious and he will be fine.”

Then we wait.

And then we hear the news.

That’s when the bottom falls out of your heart. The series representative makes the announcement, there is again initial shock and then people start to comprehend what that statement really means. Dan Wheldon will not be coming back.

That feeling is the lowest of lows. Yes, there is nothing worse in racing, but there is also nothing worse in life.

Death is bad. It hurts everybody. People lost not simply a racecar driver Sunday; they lost a husband, a father, a son, a brother and a friend.

Emotions in the wake of Sunday’s accident will surely cover the spectrum. Some will be sad, some will say, “Hey, it’s a dangerous sport,” and some will be angry at the series or the race track or the entire situation.

In the end, it doesn’t matter. The hurt of losing someone you personally knew, or knew vicariously through the television, is the worst kind of hurt. Maybe the sport will continue to become safer in the wake of Wheldon’s death, he was the main driver testing a new, safer car model for 2012, but ultimately Sunday was a dark day.

Dan Wheldon will be missed.