NASCAR's Top Five

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Pretend you are Kyle Busch. The pressure is on. You have a limited number of chances to get it right.  The big difference between you and the Shrub—if you do something stupid, millions will be clueless about it. This blog ain’t that big.

Here is my list of the five best things about NASCAR—right now, to me, my own self and for my reasons only.

1. Barney Hall, the veteran announcer for MRN, the Motor Racing Network. I actually prefer listening to a race on radio than watching the tube. I have a soft spot in my heart for great radio guys. I grew up listening to Ernie Harwell do play by play of the Detroit Tigers.  And I’ve listened to plenty of MRN broadcasts while on Sunday drives and working in the backyard. Hall has the same easy going, natural way of running a race broadcast. In a small way, I’ve learned in the last year how tough that can be. I respect pros like Barney more so for that. But even before, Barney Hall was my favorite way to get my NASCAR.
2. That TV shot from the top of pit row, when the pits are full of 43 cars for a green flag stop, looking down the length of the pits. The color and the pit signs and the cars and the frenzy. It’s all there and you can’t find it anywhere else.
3. Bobby Allison. I didn’t have to compete against him. Maybe, if I had, I wouldn’t like him so much. But I do. We’ve talked to him a few times and they are the highlights of my time ON PIT ROW.  And he drove the hell out of a race car.
4. NASCAR has a drug testing policy. It sounds pretty loose as drug policies go in professional sports. But, to the best of my recollection, there have only been a couple of incidents of overt drug abuse uncovered in the sport. If you are going to encourage a kid to have a sport figure as a role model—and I’m not endorsing that—it seems you could do a lot worse than having your little tike follow Smoke, Jimmie, Jeff, and Junior. For a sport founded by bootleggers, it’s turned out pretty wholesome.
5. 51.410 seconds. That’s the total margin of victory—from first to second place—for the 42 Sprint Cup races run from the beginning of 2007 through mid May of 2008, according to Bob Zeller of Speedway Illustrated. The average was 1.22 seconds, per race. 

That’s my list of the Top Five Best of NASCAR - as of today, anyway.  What’s your top five?  Let us know in the comment section of this post and we may pick your list as the Shell Gasolines Top Five of the Week.  If we do, we’ll send you a very cool Kevin Harvick bobblehead, compliments of Shell Gasolines.

The Shell Gasolines’ Top Five of the Week is brought to you by Shell - reminding you to help keep your engines gunk-free and running at their best by using high-quality gasolines like Shell.

Photo credit: Icon Sports Media, Inc.