Is bedlam on its deathbed?

By ED HINTON
THE ORLANDO SENTINEL
ORLANDO, Fla. -- Some who've known NASCAR president Mike Helton throughout his near quarter-century involvement in stock car racing say they'd never seen him as upset as he was last Sunday.
He'd just watched disaster narrowly avoided several times within a few seconds.
The scenario was a sort of perfect-storm argument against the antiquated and dangerous practice of racing back to the caution flag.
On the frontstretch at New Hampshire International Speedway, Dale Jarrett sat helpless -- except that he re-buckled and re-cinched his safety harness, after looking into his rearview mirror and seeing the bedlam coming.
Jarrett's Taurus was wrecked and immobile, pointed forward, a sitting duck on the track, should any driver in the onrushing traffic make the slightest error.
Jarrett's wreck had brought out a caution flag, and yellow lights in all four corners of the track, but under NASCAR rules, drivers technically didn't have to slow down and maintain position until after they passed the yellow flag at the start-finish line. Thus the term, "racing back to caution."
Driver's discretion
By the "gentlemen's agreement" under which drivers police themselves in such a situation, it's the race leader's option whether to come back to the line all-out, or slow down and cool off the field.
The leader this time was Bill Elliott, who has never made a foolish move on a racetrack in his life, and wasn't about to now. Elliott slowed dramatically and quite appropriately.
Bobby Labonte passed him flying, to get a lap back. Kurt Busch did the same.
Then here came Michael Waltrip and Ryan Newman, not trying to unlap, just racing each other for position.
Nobody hit Jarrett. He had in effect dodged several 3,400 pound bullets -- rather, they had dodged him.
After that, the NASCAR corporate jets had barely arrived back in Daytona Beach when a series of intensive meetings began. They have continued all week, according to sources inside NASCAR headquarters.
New NASCAR chairman Brian France, who took over from his father, Bill France Jr., on Monday, is said to be leaning heavily, along with Helton, toward banning the practice. Unless lieutenants who directly conduct the races can give the two top executives sufficient rationales for status quo, the bedlam's days are numbered.
Whether an announcement comes before the Dover races, or is deferred, may depend on whether the younger France, 41, is worried about being perceived as changing too much, too fast.
For many years the gentlemen's agreement worked -- but among the likes of Richard Petty and David Pearson. The angriest I ever saw Petty was in the garage area at Daytona when he raged in the face of brash young Darrell Waltrip for gaining several positions after a caution had come out -- legal, but highly unethical in the King's judgment.
Different breed
But with billion-dollar TV, $15 million sponsorships and enormous pressure, come young guns who race in a mode that borders on desperate. And, just to hang on, some veterans have joined in the banzai.
Every position in every race has come to mean so much that the gentlemen's agreement has deteriorated into a matter of, if it's legal, do it.
For decades, NASCAR has been the only major form of racing in the world to allow racing back to caution. Part of the reason in the early years was that scoring was done with pencils and paper, and freezing the running order at the moment the caution lights came on was virtually impossible. Now, electronic scoring is much more precise.
Bobby Allison returned from racing in the Indianapolis 500 in the 1970s as a staunch opponent of racing back to caution, pointing out that at Indy, "they figure there's a good chance the wreck that caused the caution is between you and the flag stand."
Twenty-five years later, at New Hampshire, Dale Jarrett sat helplessly between the racers back to the caution and the flag stand. The danger couldn't get any clearer.
So finally, hopefully, NASCAR is about to decide that enough is enough.