FONTANA, Calif. – One of the unforeseen bonuses of NASCAR’s three-race stretch in Arizona, Nevada and California turned out to be the trip home.
As drivers embarked on long flights back to their residences in North Carolina, they took advantage of the Wi-Fi on their private jets to chat with fans – and each other – on Twitter.
Dale Earnhardt Jr. good-naturedly dissected the weekend, Kyle Busch showed he was mad at the world again, Kasey Kahne apologized for incurring the wrath of Danica Patrick and Martin Truex Jr. crew chief Cole Pearn broke Twitter Rule No. 1: Never tweet while angry.
Actually, Pearn’s tweet (he said Joey Logano had “squinty, douchy eyes” after Logano had an on-track incident with Truex Jr.) might have been the most entertaining post of the night. And he didn’t have the excuse of a boring flight home, since Furniture Row Racing is located just one time zone away in Denver.
Pearn later apologized for the tweet, acknowledging the previously mentioned Twitter Rule No. 1 (“Well, I guess you shouldn’t tweet when you’re mad,” he said). But the Twitter trash talk was a reminder that there’s likely more ahead in the coming weeks – though not confined to social media.
NASCAR has enjoyed a good-natured start to the season among its competitors, who are largely happy with a lower downforce package that allows them to truly race more than last year and has provided several excellent Sunday shows in the first five weeks.
Drivers can battle side by side without incident. They can make passes. And then they can laugh and swap stories about it afterward.
But it’s all fun and games until someone gets short-tracked. So the good times won’t last, because NASCAR’s short tracks account for three of the next four races -- and it’s highly unlikely the drivers will leave Martinsville Speedway or Bristol Motor Speedway with warm and fuzzy feelings toward one another.
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In other words, there might be more moments like Patrick's angry gesture toward Kahne on Sunday, when she walked up the apron to point at him as he drove by after he wrecked her. Those moments certainly get fans talking.
That’s a good thing, since it adds to the week-to-week storylines that keep people coming back to see what’s next. And NASCAR needs that to reverse the downward slide in television ratings, which have declined year-over-year in each of the first five races.
After a break for Easter, the weekend at Martinsville could get more fans to tune in after what happened last fall between Logano and Matt Kenseth at the paper clip-shaped oval.
Kenseth’s blatant takeout of Logano in November was perhaps the defining moment of last year’s Chase for the Sprint Cup. It showed how normally rational drivers can lose their heads in the heat of NASCAR’s playoff and left officials scrambling to define where the line is between hard racing and manipulation.
It was an ugly incident and wasn’t good for the sport, but Martinsville has highlighted the moment in its TV ads leading up to the race. And let’s face it: Though no one wants to see anything like that again, everyone is wondering what will happen the next time a similar incident occurs.
Retaliation is part of the game on short tracks, and NASCAR has tried to spell out exactly what happens in various scenarios. For example: Intentionally taking out another driver while racing for position is viewed less harshly than doing so while one driver isn’t on the same lap. But no rule can account for every situation in a sport where drivers seem to find a way to do things that have never been done in six-plus decades at the sport's top level.
So although drivers have pleasantly sailed through calm waters of bigger tracks in the first five weeks, they're about to have a lot less space. And when the seas get choppy, someone is likely to get upset.
The spillover likely will extend beyond mere tweets.
Follow Gluck on Twitter @jeff_gluck
