It's over now. No more harsh words, and no more disagreements. No more dissension, and no more strife. NASCAR and its drivers buried the red flag like a spear on some old battlefield, and exchanged motor oil by rubbing arms, just like the Indians and white men swapped blood and became imaginary brothers.
Together. Just like that, after a couple of hours at Joe Gibbs' Racing. It's a natural fit-like Elvis and rhinestones.
The meeting came soon after the fall race at Talladega. You remember the big wreck where Bobby Labonte did the backstretch bounce. Well, the dust had hardly cleared when drivers were showing all the charm of a chain saw in a rain forest.
They wanted to appoint a group to go talk with NASCAR about all the horrors of restrictor-plate racing. Same story. Drivers don't eat out of plates. Plates of every size upset them. It's been that way since the sanctioning body prepared the table after a fan handed Bobby Allison a drumstick as he passed by, tearing down the grandstand fence at Talladega in the 1980s.
NASCAR officials, of course, said they would talk to the drivers one-on-one, but not as a group.
One driver said he was going to quit NASCAR and go run IRL. "Fine. That's the fastest route I know to fade right out of the racing picture," his advisor told him. "Ask the next 10 race fans you meet to name five IRL drivers."
The driver asked three fans and hasn't mentioned IRL since.
Then on the afternoon of November 1, NASCAR officials, including President Mike Helton, sat before about 90 Winston Cup car owners, crew chiefs and drivers. It was an open format, not forceful and unsympathetic like so many NASCAR courts of injustice. It has not been an uncommon practice in previous times to inform unhappy competitors that, "It's either our way or the highway."
Helton says the wind is blowing from a different direction now, and officials have learned there are ways to do things better.
"It's sometimes good on a major topic to get everybody together and, hopefully, they open up as they do to us in front of each other and we get the benefit of all those ideas at one time," he says.
From all indications, the meeting in Charlotte became comfortable. Ideas and suggestions flowed.
Before the meeting ended, NASCAR officials devised a rule package for the 2002 Daytona 500. Test sessions leading up to the race may lead to minor changes, but everybody went home happy for Christmas.
Right after the meeting, the rules were: Cup cars would have rear spoilers at a 55-degree angle rather than 45 degrees. The maximum spoiler height will be 611/42 inches and the maximum width is 57 inches. The restrictor plate remains the same. Removed is the roof air deflector and forward-facing flange on top of the spoiler.
What all this means is that the cars will not punch as big a hole in the air. Thus, the draft will not be as strong and the cars that handle best should move toward the front and stay there.
"We may not be four-wide again, so I think it will be back to where the better teams that know about the draft can take advantage and use that to improve their chances," driver Dale Jarrett said.
"Now we're back to working the draft and seeing the air and all that stuff that we used to talk about," Jeff Gordon said.
Hopefully, both sides kept Joe Fan in mind. After all, those fans up in the stands are still the most important part of racing. Don't open the season with the ragtime show that was Daytona and Talladega only a couple of years ago when you could count on your fingers and toes all the passes in either race. Listen, Joe Fan, if they try to pull another one of those over on you, it is not too late to try fishing.
Fans want a good race, one where they can go home and talk about it for weeks.
Well, gosh! Daytona will be something. For the first time in the history of the sport, everybody is going to love everybody. Competitors will not be fussing over the rules. There will be no politicking in the garage area or the motor homes, or the press box, or even at night in Daytona restaurants.
So, the self-important sporting event that so embodies our time, and the self-aggrandizing drivers who so reflect our time, go hand-in-hand into the new year. The unsavory glorification of excess and an unseemly celebration of self seem so perfect together.
So you wonder, why haven't these people gotten along before? Probably for all the same reasons they will have disagreements in the future.