NASCAR needs new approach to rain delays

What a bummer.

Not Kurt Busch's win. Crew chief Pat Tryson had a good strategy, Busch won fair and square and the rest of the stock-car racing hot dogs all simply beat themselves by pitting for gas just before the clouds opened at New Hampshire Motor Speedway.

However, there is the nagging sense that those 101,000 NASCAR fans may not have gotten their money's worth in Sunday's Sprint Cup race in Loudon. In fact, they might well have gotten cheated.

Yes, it all went down according to the rules, with rain at the end and all that. And Tony Stewart, who had the field covered most of the afternoon, was in almost a no-win situation, certain to run short of gas if the race were run all 301 laps.

But Kurt Busch? And not kid brother Kyle, who had a miserable weekend in New Hampshire, and then got caught up in an ill-fated, meaningless battle with Juan Pablo Montoya?

Yes, Tryson made the perfect call, and his rivals blew it, and Busch wound up with his first tour win since Michigan last August. However, up until then, Kurt Busch was soundly beaten, not even a player.

Tryson said he didn't need the rainy ending: "To be honest, we were rooting for it not to rain, because we had the fuel mileage to make it to the end, and the other guys were going to have to pit. We weren't really counting on the rain."

So at the finish line -- or rather, when NASCAR called the race finished, with the drivers standing outside their cars in the rain, under umbrellas -- it was Kurt Busch, Michael Waltrip and J.J. Yeley. Rival crew chiefs should be kicking themselves in the rear end for not playing the end game any smarter: rain coming, no question, late in the race, so why stop for gas? Hire better weathermen.

Better question: Why did NASCAR and Turner TNT start the race at 2 p.m.?

No wiggle room there.

If the race had started at 1 p.m. or 1:30 p.m., the fans would probably have gotten a better finish.

Not that the race had that much action anyway, with Stewart running away with things, in what was shaping up as a fuel-mileage finish.

Another fuel-mileage race?

What's wrong with these guys? Their racing gas is free anyway, courtesy of sponsor Sunoco.

Can't these guys bump-and-run and race anymore?

If this car can't provide any better racing action than what it has this season, it's time to junk it.

What was learned from Sunday's rain fiasco?

Two things: That every NASCAR track needs full lighting. Loudon has no lights. And that these 2 p.m. starting times are for the birds.

Putting in lights everywhere and moving starting times back to no later than 1 p.m. local time would give NASCAR officials a lot more leeway on race day when confronted by rain.

This season all but one of the tour's 36 regular-season races start at 2 p.m. or later. The Daytona 500 was set for at 3:20 p.m. starting time but that track does have lights. And the season finale at Homestead is set to begin at 3:45 p.m.

Maybe that helps NASCAR promoters sell more Coke, beer, hotdogs and souvenirs. Maybe it does something for TV ratings. But it doesn't give race officials much wiggle when rain threatens.

And do these late race starts really provide any added value for the fans

The fans that spend good money and brave horrendous traffic jams to attend these high-dollar races deserve better.

Meanwhile some NASCAR executives are finally showing signs of "getting it," with this winged racecar that drivers -- and apparently many fans too -- don't like: They've proposed wide-open testing for 2009.

It's about time that NASCAR opened that door again.

And NASCAR should make an open-testing rule immediately effective: starting with a two-day test at Indianapolis Motor Speedway the Monday and Tuesday after the July 12th race at Chicagoland.

The way that NASCAR has had it the past several years has given the big-money teams an unfair edge against the smaller budget teams. Changing the rules now, though, may be too late to save some struggling stock-car teams.

NASCAR's fans deserve better entertainment than they've been getting lately.

At least this week's NASCAR tour stop, Daytona, is still an almost can't-miss track for fans.

Ford's Jamie McMurray edged Kyle Busch -- then in a Rick Hendrick Chevy -- in last summer's race.

"I didn't know it was the last lap until we were going down the backstretch," McMurray said.

"Even on the last lap you don't know where you're going to finish, especially with the car of tomorrow. You get such good runs and pushes with it that, man, you never know where you're going to finish until it's over."

(Contact Mike Mulhern can be reached at mmulhern@wsjournal.com.)

(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)