ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, August 25, 1996 TAG: 9608270033
SECTION: SPORTS PAGE: C-11 EDITION: METRO
COLUMN: AUTO RACING
DATELINE: BRISTOL, TENN.
SOURCE: BOB ZELLER
Welcome to the world of NASCAR-speak.
There's ups and downs, give and take, tight and loose, wait and see. A NASCAR engine doesn't break, it blows. In past tense, it's always ``blowed,'' never ``blown.'' Sometimes it blows big-time. But there is always light at the end of the tunnel.
There are no situations in stock car racing, only deals. ``My deal'' can mean anything from a driver's contract to who passes out the playing cards in the press room during a rain delay.
Drivers are never fired. Nor do they ever quit. They ``part ways.'' If someone decides to run a lap as fast as possible, it's a ``banzai run.'' And if a driver happens to win a race after a dry spell (don't call it a "slump") we all know that he's happy for the crew, because they needed it more than he did.
The word ``rapport'' does not exist in the NASCAR dictionary. It's ``chemistry.'' If the chemistry is bad, sometimes you just have to ``play it by ear.'' If that doesn't work, you ``hate it happened.'' The objective is to get ``dialed in.''
I've always thought a NASCAR Winston Cup race driver has two jobs - driving a stock car and signing his name.
But I think they actually have three jobs. The third job is giving quotes.
At every stage of a race weekend, drivers are expected to give concise and accurate summaries of their performances. But sometimes there is not much to say. Or they're not interested in talking but they do because they're expected to.
So they revert to NASCAR-speak.
If you're Hut Stricklin, and you've just crashed your car in qualifying at Pocono, and you don't know why, you still have to talk about it.
``It just got away from me,'' Stricklin said after his accident last month. ``It's just one of those things. We were going all out for it. We felt like we had a good car here. It just wasn't meant to be today.''
Wow. Five cliches in a row. Stricklin obviously has good chemistry with the language. That's stout. It goes without saying that if he knew what was wrong, he'd have fixed it.
Wally Dallenbach was on a roll at Watkins Glen a few weeks ago.
``Everybody is trying hard,'' he said. ``It's just that everything that can go wrong has gone wrong for us this weekend. Maybe there's some light at the end of the tunnel ... But they'll give me a good car on Sunday and I'll get in it and I'll strap myself in it and I'll drive it as hard as I can and we'll get what we can get.''
My personal favorite, however, came in a Chad Little news release earlier this summer.
``I went from the penthouse to the outhouse when we came back to run the Winston Cup race this past April,'' he said. ``It was a serious reality check for me and the team.''
Dale Earnhardt is notorious for making quick exits from race tracks after races. On Sunday evening, he's probably home grilling steaks before you're out of the parking lot.
But Earnhardt has to do a post-race interview like everyone else, so his quick-exit strategy involves NASCAR-speak. Often, he concludes a post-race interview with: ``So we'll take that and go on to [location of next race] and see what we can do there.''
Dale Jarrett has learned well from Earnhardt.
After the race at Pocono, Jarrett said, ``We'll take third and go to Talladega next week and see if we can gain some more.''
What he wants to gain, of course, are more of those ``valuable Winston Cup points.''
Actually, calling them ``valuable'' has become so passe, some reporters laughed out loud when newcomer Mike Skinner used the term at Indianapolis before relieving Earnhardt.
Whatever might be the value of Winston Cup points, we all know, as Terry Labonte put it, that ``whoever wins the championship will be the guy who has the least amount of problems.''
Perhaps someday, when your great-great-grandson goes to work in a grouchy mood, he won't say he woke up on the wrong side of the bed. Instead, he'll say: ``I just didn't unload off the truck good today.''
LENGTH: Medium: 80 linesby CNB