"He Crashed Me" Redux?

Sometimes an unavoidable delay in your plans can prove to be a blessing.

For a couple of weeks, we at the People's Pigskin had planned a post urging NASCAR fans to pick up a copy of He Crashed Me So I Crashed Him Back, Mark Bechtel's authoritative look at the 1979 NASCAR season and how it helped make stock car racing a national phenomenon instead of a regional curiosity.

Yes, I know the People's Pigskin is hardly the first site to praise the book, but there is a fresh point to be made.

Bechtel does chronicle the entire season, including the yearend shootout in Ontario between Darrell Waltrip and Richard Petty. And the book does have some flaws. (Half the "footnotes" could have been incorporated into the main text with minimal effort.) But one of its strongest aspects is its look at the now-famous 1979 Daytona 500.

He describes what would prove a perfect storm for NASCAR: a blizzard that brought most of the eastern United States to a standstill, CBS' eyebrow-raising agreement to televise the race live in its entirety, the last-lap crash between Cale Yarborough and Donnie Allison (allowing Petty to win the race) and the subsequent fistfight between Yarborough and the Allison brothers that was seen by millions, many of whom have been watching stock car racing ever since.

Though no one involved with NASCAR goes so far as to endorse fistfights, lots of people still credit the fight with expanding the sport's audience by an order of magnitude. And none of the participants in that fight have suffered image-wide in the long term as a result.

Which brings us to Carl Edwards and Brad Keselowski.

For the second time this season, Edwards and Keselowski banged heads last week during the Nationwide race at Gateway International Raceway. Keselowski (intentionally or not) collided with Edwards early in the final lap, and Edwards responded by colliding with Keselowski. The second collision allowed Edwards to win the race.

NASCAR has been telling anyone who will listen this season that it is letting its drivers "have at it" on the track, responded to the latest incident by fining Edwards, docking him points and putting both drivers on probation for the rest of the season. Is this the end of "have at it"? Hardly. But you have to wonder what would have happened if NASCAR had responded this way when Allison and Yarborough had their most famous incident.

(A fantasy racing aside: Edwards and Keselowski will remain in the lineup polls as long as they are still driving, but it would take a real leap of faith to vote for these drivers while they seem to be wearing matching targets on their rear quarter panels.)