We here at NASCAR This Week were saddened to hear the news that Marc Boland, author of the blog Full Throttle, died while riding his Harley on August 11. Full Throttle was a stylish and ridiculously-informed blog about all things racing, including NASCAR present and past, ARCA REMAX, and open wheel racing. The site is loaded with extras, with widgets, a multimedia gallery and a racing quotes section.
There isn't much Marc didn’t about racing, and he had a definite opinion about everything. Comment on one of his stories and he came right back at you.
Marc was much more fearless than the mainstream media in taking on the NASCAR establishment. One anonymous commenter once said, "Marc is the Spartacus of NASCAR blogging, once a slave who has become the leader for an oppressed NASCAR Nation fighting for their freedom from PCNA (Peoples Commissar for NASCAR Affairs, a/k/a Brian France)"
And finally, Marc provided one of the best arguments for NASCAR blogging, for after growing up in the Midwest he was able to maintain his vital voice on racin' from his home in Manila in the Philippines.
Fellow racing blogger Clance’ McClannahan wrote a tender and endearing eulogy to Marc recently on the On Pit Row blog. She knew Marc much better than we did, and her piece shows how intimacy exists even in the far-flung reaches of cyberspace. You can read it here.
What is so strange, in our blogginig world, is that Full Throttle remains frozen in time as of August 9 when Marc posted about Dario Franchitti winning his second race in the IZOD IndyCar Series , winning the Honda Indy 200 at Mid-Ohio. Last year when Charlotte Observer motorports writer David Poole died of a heart attack, his blog Life in the Turn Lane also became an inanimate object. Someone at the Observer figured out how to post to the blog and put up an announcement, but as with Marc's blog (which no one, so far, has figured out how to enter), you can only read it backwards in time -- plenty of good reading in the archive, but the living artery so close to the heart of racing had been severed.
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Last year I asked Marc to provide a guest post for NASCAR This Week, and I’d like to repost it today. It offers a good look inside the man whose sudden fade from the racing blogosphere is a tragedy. Marc's presence will be terribly missed.
-- Ovalscream
In the world of racin’, everyone is welcome to my opinion
By Marc Boland
(originally posted April 13, 2009)
To start I must offer my sincerest thanks for the opportunity to be a guest poster/columnist, although "columnist" is stretching the definition a bit.
Never having received formal training as a journalist I consider myself as just a blogger, an opinionated one I must confess, with a long standing passion for racing mechanical beasts in all their forms.
Short track and superspeedway stock car racing, open wheel and sports car road racing and drag racing.
Hell, having deep roots in the Detroit area I learned early on the excitement and spectacle Unlimited Hydroplane racing offered and still follow the sport some 40 years later.
The Reno Air Races, in addition to the Red Bull Air Race World Championship, has and will continue to spark my interest.
That said, my main interest today and the main topic I blog about, is NASCAR and the current crop of open wheel series'.
When given the chance to write this post I was given a free hand on the subject matter. In the end, and after much hair pulling, the decision was made to take the easy way out.
I chose one of the hottest topics raging through NASCAR Nation that had its genesis during the 2008 season and has continued through the seven Sprint Cup events held so far this year.
NASCAR beat reporters, bloggers and many NASCAR forums have been all a-flutter over the Dale Jr., Tony Jr. so-called controversy. "Will he stay, or will he go" is the common refrain, with an equal number voting for one or the other "Junior."
Or both.
Admittedly there have been a number of screw-ups by both the over-the-wall gang and Dale Jr. (Note to Hendrick, maybe a pit board lit up in neon would help both Jr's.)
It's my opinion people are not looking at the big picture, that picture includes a plethora of teams making pit road errors and drivers getting caught for speeding with regularity. It's not just a Jr. or Hendrick problem.
NASCAR's drive for equality and "leveling of the playing field" have produced cars that differ little in performance and by NASCAR edict can't be "massaged" beyond what the Mythical Rulebook dictates.
The end result shows teams are going where the advantages may be gained. One of those advantages, and one that doesn't entail an initial cash outlay, is on pit road.
Drivers are entering and exiting the pits at the extreme limit and pit crews are making more mistakes trying to make a 13 second stop into a 12 second one.
Not much can be done about the second case unless NASCAR and the teams want to invest in a few hundred robots (and hope they never get infested in an internet-like virus).
Pit road speeding on the other hand can be addressed. Rather than rely on a drivers tachometer to judge speed an electronic rev-limiter should be part of the package.
As a driver drops off the apron headed for the pits he slows to near the legal speed, flips a switch that electronically limits the cars speed to the speed mandated for that weeks track. That limit remains in effect until the car reaches the line used for determining who was first off pit road.
This procedure would virtually eliminate the speeding penalties that are issued in increasing numbers and more importantly, place the outcome of a race where it belongs, on the racing surface as opposed to NASCAR's timing lights and hammering a driver with an end of the longest line penalty. Or worst case, a return to the pits when in many cases the car goes down a lap to the leader.
I'll close this missive with an effort to head-off my critics. This will work, and it's been demonstrated to have worked in Formula One since the FIA instituted electronic rev limits.
There have been some penalties handed down for practice violations but damn few handed out for speeding during green flag racing. It's not a perfect solution, hardly anything is, but it would be far better to see NASCAR hand down speeding penalties once or twice a month, if that many, instead of 3-4 times per race.