Huh? What craziness is this that NASCAR officials have created?
By Mike Mulhern
mikemulhern.net
LAS VEGAS
The greatest comeback in NASCAR history?
Consider one Bobby Ginn.
He spent less than a full season on the stock car tour as a team owner, first rescuing one financially beleaguered racing franchise, then having to bail out himself because of sponsorship woes.
And the real estate man hasn't been seen in a NASCAR garage since sometime in 2007.
Vanished.
But now – and isn't this so appropriate, after all the wheeling-and-dealing shenanigans that NASCAR officials have allowed, in the trading/selling of Sprint Cup team numbers – Ginn sits second in the NASCAR championship standings.
Huh?
Yep.
Because NASCAR executives allowed the shuffling, and reshuffling, of the car number that Ginn once owned, and that 'team-number' is now owned by Richard Childress, who has changed the number to 33 and put Clint Bowyer in the car.
Bowyer's second-place finish in Sunday's Shelby 427 puts his team – Childress' new fourth Cup franchise, albeit logoed with Ginn's name – second in the Sprint Cup points standings, just behind Jeff Gordon, heading this week to Atlanta.
Will Ginn surface in New York City for the awards banquet if Bowyer hangs in there?
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Selling a Points Position
NASCAR needs to cut out this practice of other owners being able to purchase a position in the standings. I have no problem with owners switching driver/car numbers around so long as it is a car they owned the previous year, but this practice of naming a "co-owner" or buying a Top 35 team in name just to get a Top 35 points position has to stop. The only way to stop it is to vacate that spot in the Top 35 when it comes to making the first 5 races this season. In other words, if three teams go out of business in the offseason, there would only be 32 guaranteed spots for the first five races until the new season's owner points were used. Penske should not have been able to buy Bill Davis' points position, and DEI/Ganassi-Earnhardt should not have been able to do the same thing last season. There are other examples, too, but you should not be able to buy your way into the field. You should instead have to race your way into it.
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