NASCAR might have something here.
Stock car racing’s recent history is littered with good beefs. Kurt Busch and Jimmy Spencer. Brad Keselowski and Carl Edwards. Kevin Harvick and Chase Elliott. Give us an hour, and the list could be enormous. Stock car racing has plenty of feuds. What it needs is good rivalries. A good rivalry, really. Not since Earnhardt vs. Gordon has there been one good, consistent rivalry that gets the people going. The sport hasn’t found its Hamilton vs. Verstappen. The sport hasn’t found its modern, captivating, animosity-laced one-on-one duel.
A lot of this is because NASCAR is so competitive. NASCAR is hard to dominate these days, and so a rotating cast of characters moves in and out of the top ten. It’s like baseball. It takes a big sample to figure out who’s the best. Another part, though, is that the drivers are so similar that it gets hard to distinguish them from one another. There are differences—William Byron came up through iRacing, Christopher Bell’s an Oklahoma fan, Bubba Wallace is Black—but those differences are superficial. Change their clothes, and it turns out Ballerina Barbie and Doctor Barbie are both just Barbie. It’s not that the drivers lack personality. It’s that the NASCAR personality is too uniform for us to forget that these guys are mostly friends.
I’m not sure if Denny Hamlin and Kyle Larson are the two best drivers in the series right now. They do, though, stick out. I’d argue that Larson is the best, that Kyle Busch has the best ongoing career, and that Hamlin is the sport’s biggest celebrity. Hamlin has been very good, but he’s always been an A-minus. He hasn’t won any championships, and that doesn’t change when you project his results on the old no-playoff format. He’s won the Daytona 500 three times, but two of those were sandwiched between Austin Dillon and Michael McDowell, which is too random for us to forget that superspeedway racing mirrors plinko towards the end. Ultimately, though, Hamlin doing more off the track than on it is better for what this rivalry could be.
In Hamlin, we have a top-five driver who’s one of the most established veterans in the series. He’s a podcaster, a team owner, a friend of Michael Jordan, and a bit of a spokesperson for and against the series. We know a whole lot of the things on Denny Hamlin’s mind. We get a lot of insight into Denny Hamlin, the person. He’s a Tobacco Road kid, raised outside of Richmond, close enough to North Carolina to be a NASCAR guy as opposed to. a driver who happened to end up in NASCAR, like Jeff Gordon or Jimmie Johnson.
In Larson, we have a driver’s driver, a guy who just loves to race. He wants to win the Indy 500. He flies around during the week to drive dirt tracks. He’s got a bigger scandal than Hamlin in his past—he’s no white hat—but at this point, he’s primarily known as one of the best drivers in the world, and as a half-Japanese Northern Californian, he’s cut from one of the more unusual NASCAR molds. Once he could afford it, he moved out of North Carolina. He’s not the most NASCAR guy.
Busch and Keselowski and Joey Logano are all unique, as are Byron and Ryan Blaney and plenty others. All of them, though, fit more neatly into the NASCAR box than Larson and Hamlin. Larson is cut from that different mold. Hamlin has become a business beyond what we generally see from active drivers. In the white bread world of speedways, this pair sticks out. This is why the recent prospects of a rivalry are so tantalizing. This is why we want to see it explode, and not like beef. Not through a fight or wrecking each other. We want to see these guys race for wins, knowing each is getting sick of the other. More likely than not, this fizzles. That tends to be how these things go. But there’s a chance. We’ll take it.
Other NASCAR:
- Hamlin and Larson are in the headlines, but again, NASCAR’s too competitive for them to be up front where we want them. Consecutive top-tens for Larson, and Hamlin finished strong yesterday after giving up on his gas tank, but it was Joey Logano who won. I don’t know whether it was more impressive that Logano kept gas in his tank that long or that he managed to hold off Tyler Reddick while knowing his engine was about to sputter. Ridiculous finish, and in a great way, as Logano continues to ease into being a quiet, good veteran driver.
- Last week (apologies for the absence, we’re trying to flip to a biweekly cadence here but we’ll see), it was Christopher Bell grabbing the checkered flag, with his car the fastest whether racing wet tires or dry. Bell nearly dominated Nashville as well, and should probably be the championship favorite right now? It feels like the opposite. It feels like the best car/driver cycles in and out. Bell’s great because he’s boring enough to be lovable. Big cheeks, too. Always wanna pinch ‘em. How is he about to turn 30? Has he shaved yet?
- Chase Briscoe is officially going to Joe Gibbs Racing to fill Martin Truex Jr.’s seat next year. No surprise there. Big relief for Briscoe, though, who had to deal with the brief terror of possibly being out of a job with multiple mouths to feed.
- Evidently the Aric Almirola fight with Bubba Wallace was real and not made up on Twitter, in a big win for the future perceived credibility of things made up on Twitter (somewhere, Kyle Busch’s fist just clenched). Nobody seems to be defending Almirola, and the thing is being handled, but surprising that two guys actually got in a physical altercation during a meeting. Makes a return to Corporate America sound more fun, honestly. I want to see my coworkers fight!
“The Entire Population of the World Knows Who Was Responsible”
If F1 drivers are as competitive as F1 drivers are romanticized to be, and if Lando Norris’s McLaren car is as close to Max Verstappen’s Red Bull car as it’s appeared the last couple months, Norris and Verstappen’s famous friendship is going to get very tense these next few weeks.
Was Verstappen at fault for the contact? Sure seemed like it. Is this out of character for Verstappen? Sure doesn’t seem like it. Is Norris good enough for this to matter? I hope so. Ideally, Norris keeps answering questions through gritted teeth, Andrea Stella keeps dropping these dramatic generalizations, and Jos Verstappen stays just out of the center of the frame, ready to jump in and elevate the whole conflict. Ideally, these guys are racing for the win again this weekend at Silverstone in front of legions of election-exhausted Brits ready to give the Dutch guy hell. (Unrelated, but whenever F1 goes to Austria I forget that Verstappen is Dutch. I think he’s Austrian. This only happens with Austria. I don’t understand.)
We, of course, are in a tricky situation here. Max Verstappen, a driver we dislike, is being accused of racing too hard, a behavior we like. It’s a pickle. Do we pile on Verstappen? Do we beg F1 to just let guys race and deal with the consequences of racing as they arise?
Thankfully, we don’t have to settle this contradiction. Someone else will. The European world and various authoritarian regimes will decide for themselves. The question they must answer is as old as cars: Is rubbing racing? If so, does that go for all rubbing, or only the kind that happens between F1 bosses’ hands and Max Verstappen’s gear shaft?
Other F1:
- George Russell won, despite the verbal assault from his boss. It would have been so funny if George Russell crashed because he didn’t expect to hear Toto Wolff screaming in his ear. It would have been so F1.
- Alpine jumped into the Carlos Sainz speculation game last week, and I will say: It does seem like Sainz should go to a non-feeder team. Ferrari understandably cut him loose, he’s not a Red Bull guy, and I wouldn’t want to sit behind George Russell in the Mercedes/Williams hierarchy if I was Sainz. That leaves Aston Martin, Alpine, and the new Audi team. Aston Martin’s full. Audi is high-risk. Alpine tracks.
I Know Nothing About Álex Palou
Álex Palou retook the lead in the IndyCar standings last weekend at Laguna Seca, and I have just realized I know hardly anything about Álex Palou. Álex Palou, I say, the Spanish guy! He is good at IndyCar! And then I have nothing else to add. It goes blank after that. Were Vroom Vroom publishing twice a week already last week, maybe I’d have taken the time to learn something about Álex Palou. Alas. I will have to wait. Thankfully, IndyCar takes some huge breaks. There will be plenty of opportunities in which I’m forced to fill the IndyCar space.
