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June 30, 1998
Today Jane Smith
In spite of all the smoke, ashes, and evacuations going on around us, today is a good day. Why, you may ask, could today be good when so many things are bad? Because those big, bright, colorful semi-trucks will be going thru the tunnel at Daytona for the Pepsi 400. Those shiny semi's with two race cars per team that will race for the first time under the lights at Daytona International on July 4th.
That thought makes this day a little more bearable.My mom has told me stories of the days when she went to the beach at Daytona to watch the races. The worse part she said was standing up all the time and being covered by sand from the cars. But she still remembers the excitement in the air when those stock cars came into town for the races. So today in a way, history meets the present because for those of us who love racing, that excitement still exsists.
For those of you who are threatened by fire right now, my heart and prayers are with you. Somehow Florida will get through this just as we get through hurricanes, tornados, and whatever else thrown our way. Once again, history repeats itself, becomes the present, and then is history again.
-Jane
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June 23, 1998 What We All Have In Common Jane Smith
This weekend, due to the untimely death of the track owner of Orlando Speedworld and New Smyrna Speedway, my family and I found ourselves at a loss as to what to do. Well, we always race every weekend and our tracks were closed so what do you do when you can't race - you go check out other tracks.
In our case, we are lucky to live around quite a few tracks and it was just a matter of which track would we like to visit. We went car-less since each track has it's own rules and we did not know for sure if our car would qualify under their rules so the car got the weekend off.
We visited two local tracks that we had never been to before. Each had good points and bad but one thing remained the same and that was the difference of opinion that we all share in the track officials decision. Even in this weekend's NASCAR race at Sear's Point, pit crew chiefs had different opinions than the officials. As we all know, the officials have the last word but arguing must be our common bond in racing. Sometimes it feels like the rules are changed in certain situations but in the end, the officials really are doing only what they see and know to be right.
The more I am around racing locally and the more I watch racing on TV, I see that this is a never-ending battle between officials, racers, and their pit crews. Each believes they are right and in some cases the officials do not see exactly how things happen and make a bad call. Usually they do apologize but that does not help sore feelings when a race has been lost because of a wrong call. But we have to remember, an official is also human and humans do make mistakes.
No matter if you are a local racer, a NASCAR driver, a Busch driver, or any other series of stock car racing, at one time or another, we will do what we all have in common and that is argue with our track officials. Unlike drag racing, which has an electronic eye that says you have jumped the gun, we only have human eyes for our mistakes. Racing has been around a long time and hopefully will be around for a long time and no computer will ever replace human eyes. And at one point or another, we will share that common bond and argue. That is just racing.
Jane
