Alright… I’ve watched and read a lot about what happened at Richmond Raceway on Saturday night during the NASCAR race. First off, let me say that yes… I am a big Earnhardt Jr. fan. Let me follow that up with the fact that no, I don’t care for Kyle Busch. But all the flak flying around on the NASCAR website and the rest of the internet about the situation is getting ridiculous.

It all boils down to one simple thing : Kyle Busch sped into, or “gunned” the turn into turn 3. Everyone who reviewed the replays has stated that’s what they saw… even Darrel Waltrip, who is a Busch fanboy in the extreme. I watched the race, and I’ve been watching NASCAR for decades, and as you can see by reading my blog I’ve done a considerable amount of online and offline NASCAR racing with various racing sims… and I know a gunned turn when I see it.

The NASCAR announcers have tried to explain it away as “hard racing”, so have many of the fence sitters and Busch fans.

But irregardless of those opinions, the simple fact remains - Kyle Busch sped into turn 3, and caused the accident that knocked Dale Jr. out of the lead.

For anyone who may not be as familiar with circle track racing, and NASCAR in particular (or who may be newer fans), “gunning” a turn happens when a driver cuts into a turn harder than they should. For some background, there are typically three lines a driver can run on any given track (as a rule). They are the “preferred line”, the “low line”, and the “high line”. The preferred line is the line around the track that any driver will usually run when they are not in traffic or side by side with other cars. This line runs high up against the wall in the straights, then drifts all the way down to the apron in the turns, and then drifts out against the wall again as the driver accelerates out of the turn. This line provides the largest possible angle into the turn and as such allows the driver to maintain speed in the turn. By contrast, the high line is the line run by the “outside” car in traffic. This line is run up against the wall, and in the turn typically at least a car and a half of width from the apron. A driver running this line is usually able to maintain his preferred line speed into and through the turn, but due to the increased distance he has to travel in the turn (by not being down on the apron), he’s actually running a bit slower than he would be if he was running the preferred line. The last is the low line. This line is run by the “inside” car (or cars) in traffic. Typically this is run down the middle of the track in the straights, and up against the apron in the turns. This line is the most difficult to drive (at least, it always has been for me), because the entry into the turn is sharper than the preferred or high line… and thus requires the driver to slow the car (or brake) earlier when entering the turn to keep the car under control. If a driver enters the turn “at speed”, as in, entering at the preferred line or high line speed, the car will drift (or “push”) up the track into the high line until the driver slows the car enough to settle properly into the turn.

This is all simple physics.

A driver usually guns a turn due to a number of different reasons… the most common being stress, or the hope to “get their nose under the car” ahead of them in the turn for a fast exit and a pass during the next straightaway. It is almost always a mistake, and almost always causes an incident. Even if two cars, side by side, are racing to the checkered flag, there is no call for bashing or hitting (i.e., “dirty racing”). The guys running the Sprint Cup are professionals, and they all know when they gun a turn, and the results of it when they push it. Gunning a turn is an irresponsible move, and it’s not done by accident.

Furthermore, racing etiquette has a simple rule regarding passing - It is the responsibility of the passing car to make the pass cleanly. If the passing driver cannot cleanly make the pass, then they should back off until they can. This is just good clean racing etiquette, and helps build a driver’s reputation as a clean race driver… thus gaining the respect of those on the track with him. Drivers who tend to not follow this simple rule of etiquette are not highly thought of, regardless of their skills.

With all these things in mind, the incident at Richmond was simply completely unecessary. Busch had a faster car (or, at least, was running a slighly faster line). There were less than 10 laps left to go, all he had to do was bide his time and wait for a clean pass. Instead, as has been his habit since he started racing in Cup, he tried to force the issue early by “getting his nose under” Earnhardt into the turn, thereby gunning it, and slipping up the track as a result into Earnhardt and knocking him out of the lead. The irony is that by doing so, he also screwed up his own chances of winning the race… and this isn’t the first time Busch has done this and lost a race as a result.

The other side of the question is whether or not Busch meant to hit Earnhardt. While I don’t necessarily think he meant to hit Jr., he did speed into the turn… which clearly indicates one of two possibilities. 1) He didn’t care if he hit Jr. or not, or 2) he was actually trying to hit Jr. My personal opinion is that of #1. I don’t think he was actually trying to hit him, but he obviously wasn’t too concerned if he did… and, his post race interview clearly showed that to be the case, with his typical “it was the other guy’s fault, not mine” attitude.

No, I don’t like Kyle Busch. And yes, I’m an Earnhardt fan. But this isn’t about Earnhardt losing the race because he got knocked out. This is about, as far as I’m concerned, a race driver deliberately gunning a turn rather than being patient, and knocking a guy out of the lead (no matter who the leader was… I’d be just as upset at the situation if the roles were reversed). The incident was no different than Dale Earnhardt Sr.’s infamous win at Bristol when he spun out Ricky Rudd for the win years ago. It’s irresponsible, “dirty” racing… and I don’t care for it, nor for a driver that continually sinks to it. There’s no call for it.

If a driver wants to race that way, then as far as I’m concerned they need to get out of NASCAR and go somewhere else. There’s plenty of smash-em-up derby’s out there… they need to find one and then they can bash to their heart’s content.

Well, a bit late perhaps, but just a quick blurb about my trip to Las Vegas last week for the Microsoft Management Summit.

I finaly got the chance to attend MMS last week for the first time.  It was a blast… I learned so much in only five days I felt like my head was going to explode.  Hopefully I can utilize most of what I learned at work soon, as it mostly deals with the latest SMS program, Systems Center Configuration Manager 2007 (or SCCM 2007)… however, much of it still applies to SMS 2003.

Anyway, it was a lot of fun, and I hope to be able to attend the conference again.  The wealth of information and learning opportunities was just incredible.

Danica Patrick finaly won her first race! Woohoo!

In Japan, at the Twin Ring Motegi racetrack, she outran everyone else and had more than a five second lead over the second place driver to cap her first win of her IRL career. This is great news, and it’s a big deal in Auto Racing and Motorsports in general, for three reasons :

First, a lot of IRL drivers over the last three years of her racing career have bitched and moaned about her having an “unfair advantage” due to her small size and weight (5′2″ in height, and only 100 lbs). Notable drivers in this category have been Robby Gordon of NASCAR fame who, true to his whiney pissy nature, said he’d refuse to race against her until this was dealt with by a ruling. This was interesting because even with the claim, Danica didn’t win a single race in her first 3 seasons, although she garnered an impressive list of top 10 finishes and pole positions. For the 2008 season, IRL finaly mandated a new rule that the car weigh-in would now include the driver’s weight… which made the weight argument moot. And, ironically, 3 races into the season with the new rules, she wins her first race.

Second, her win is a big deal because she is now the first female race car driver to win a major closed course auto race against multiple competitors as a “first female” to win in a top tier motorsport, and the first female to win an open wheel race.

The third issue is mainly due to chauvanistic perspectives and comments by many other drivers and critics. In several interviews she’s made comments that have irritated a lot of retired race car drivers. One notable comment was made by none other than Richard Petty, who claimed -

“I just don’t think it’s a sport for women, and so far, it’s proved out. It’s really not. It’s good for them to come in. It gives us a lot of publicity, it gives them publicity. But as far as being a real true racer, making a living out of it, it’s kind of tough.”

As much as I respect Petty for his NASCAR career, that’s just piggish and, frankly, a lot of horseshit. The primary reason there’s not a lot of female race car drivers is because of people like Petty and the discrimination against female drivers in motorsports in general, which makes it even more difficult for them to get anywhere in the sport than it already is.

But, as far as I’m concerned, this is awesome. I’m not an IRL fan really, and don’t follow the sport much, but I’ve paid more attention to it lately specifically because of Danica and have rooted for her and hoped for a win for a long time now. Now that she’s got a win under her belt, it’s going to boost her confidence in a big way, and I personally see her getting more competitive in the future as a result. I hope she becomes a big contender as her career progresses, because I’d love to see more female race car drivers in motorsports in general.

Way to go Danica! Keep it up!

I flew a return flight from Portland, Oregon (KPDX) to Salt Lake City, Utah (KSLC) last night… first time I’ve flown in more than a month. Flight wasn’t too bad, there were lots of clouds and as a result a lot of turbulence, which necessitated me requiring the pax to keep their seatbelts on… which they, naturally, didn’t care for.

Despite not having flown for that length of time I ran through the checklist pretty much normally with little mistakes… the only thing I forgot to do was switch the ignition on both engines to CONT for the takeoff roll (which I did after I was running up when I remembered). I really enjoy flying the PMDG 737… more than any other airliner I’ve flown in flight sim. The attention to detail, and the procedures are what really sell it for me.

The arrival was not too bad, a bit sloppy on the BEARR4 arrival, but carried it through ok none-the-less. I didn’t have a few of the RNAV waypoints in my FMC, so I had to manually fly the arrival through the last part just prior to the turn to intercept the localizer. I went ahead and let the FMC catch the signal and run the autoland procedure until just before touchdown. However, I was too busy flipping switches and didnt’ flare quite enough… as a result the landing was just about as rough as trapping on a carrier deck.

After that I taxied to the gate, shut her down, booted off all the pax, and filed the report.

Well, after checking and hunting and hunting some more for online racing series that catered to my available time slot (after 8:00pm PST), I was only able to find the two I’ve mentioned before - Late Night Racing Series, and Serious Racers Only.  I emailed the admins of each series with some questions, and sat back and waited for replies.  I finaly got one from Serious Racers… they answered my questions, and it looked like it might work out, but I wanted to hear from Late Night before I made a decision.

Two weeks later, still waiting.  But then, I guess that comes as no surprise.

I decided to do some further research, and find out how active these series actually are.  I found out after hunting around and looking at the race results that neither series manages to field more than about 10 drivers a race on average, and in most cases less than that.  As much as I want to run online, I’m just not going to waste my time with running against a field of less than a quarter of the full field size.

So, it’s off to run offline championships until I can get the time, or find a league that runs in my time slot.

Ahh well… probably for the better, but who knows.

I’m still painting my nVidia car… there’s some things I just don’t like about it I want to change.  For a change of pace I decided to update my Snap-on Racing car.  I found a good template for a changed paint job, and used that with some edits of my own and color changes… and wow, it really looks good.  I think now I’ll most likely use that as my Cup car again… I’ve always been partial to Snap-on as a sponsor.

Since I lost my hosting service due to insufficient funds to support it, my good friend has allowed me to move my blog here to his service in the meantime until I can get a new hosting service to put this thing on… and I really appreciate his help.  Being without a bit of web space of one’s own feels like being handicapped to a degree.

So, I’ll be happily blogging away now online.  I’ve updated this thing occasionaly when it was offline just to keep up to date, so some of the entries may be new.

I’ll also be slapping my domain name northskyairways.com onto this space as an addon domain too, so that should happen in the next day or so.

Well I decided that I’m going to need to completely re-install NASCAR Racing 2003 Season on my system if I plan on racing online… I’ve copied the same install folder to and fro from my Windows installation for almost three years now, and due to the copy process the registry settings required to allow new driver setups don’t work correctly. Hence, I cannot create new cars, or import new painted cars, into the game except as Cup cars.

So, I’ll probably be doing that tonight. I don’t plan on re-installing the GPL mod from Project Wildfire (now defunct), since I don’t race open wheel… it’ll just be the NASCAR mods of the Cup damage files, BGN / National Series install and setups, and CTS install and setups.

I did some setup practice at Phoenix International Raceway the other day, in light of the Nextel Cup race running there on Saturday night. I’ve usually enjoyed running there for the most part, but I couldn’t get a decent setup worked out. I ran almost 100 laps testing out different settings, and finaly was able to get a setup that worked well enough that I could run consistent laps, but it was in no way competetive. By contrast… when I checked out the track using the BGN mod, the default “fast” setup there, with my settings for the toe out, front weight bias, and right rear shocks was extremely stable, and I was able to run consistent 29.4XX speed laps.

The actual race there on Saturday night was really good. For a while it looked like my man, Dale Earnhardt Jr., would quite possibly win the race, but then his tires just simply wore out and he was passed by Mark Martin. Martin was doing excellently… but due to fuel concerns at the last 10 laps had to pit (along with almost the entire rest of the field) for a splash of fuel. Jimmy Johnson and Clint Boywer stayed out… with Jimmy in first and Boywer in second and gambled on fuel. With the interval between Jimmy and Boywer more than 10 seconds, Jimmy was able to slow down enough to conserve the fuel required for the win. Great race… lots of good driving by all involved.

I’ve been struggling with trying to paint a good design on my #33 nVidia car, and haven’t had much luck. I’m really not all that good with geometric designs unfortunately, I can create and modify text and numbers and standard graphics really well, but geometric designs I just don’t have the knack of. As a result, everything I’ve tried just doesn’t look good to me. So I started looking around online for some base scheme templates, and found a couple that actually don’t look too bad… the person(s) that painted them created them in layered form so I can edit the colors to my needs which was nice. I’m still working on it tho, the nose of the car is fairly bland, and I want to try to spice it up a bit. Once I’ve done that I’ll have two versions of the car, a predominantly white and green car, and a white, green, and silver car.

After I finished messing around with the template for the night, I loaded up Nascar Racing 2003 Season and started up a practice session at Texas Motor Speedway. I wanted to get a few practice laps in for the night before bed. I ran about 30 laps by myself running a custom setup. Man, the car just didn’t want to settle in the turns, and I had a devil of a time controlling the car exiting the turns “at speed” to keep my lap times up. It was like driving on ice. After that I loaded up a practice scenario with a full field of cars, and tried a different setup. That setup was much better, the car settled well into the turns and I could accelerate out of the turn and pick up speed. I was able to run with the other cars and keep the pace, but was still slipping a bit in the turn and my entry into the turns wasn’t very good, so I wasn’t able to do much passing. I’m fairly sure it was due to me not slowing enough into the turn… a few times I got into the back of the car ahead of me, and spun out twice as a result… so I need to practice more on turn entry and smooth it out.

In all I was happy with the results really… for not having run at a speedway in quite a while (almost all my racing lately has been at Daytona International Speedway) I did pretty good. Now, I need to get into developing my race setup more… despite my turn entry, I’m sure the car has something to do with it as it seems to have a bit of an oversteer.

Additionaly, despite my last NASCAR entry stating I’m most likely through with online racing, the bug has really hit me hard. I started combing through the links I have for online racing series, and did a search for more. I found a few that actually run at the times I can run, and selected two. I wrote them both emails and have gotten back a reply from the SRO League (Serious Racers Only), and am waiting on a reply from the LNR League (Late Night Racing) before I decide which one I want to join. I’m actually really looking forward to joining a League again, and getting back into the racing groove.

By all that is HOLY.

So, for the last few days I’m thinking I got all my theme related issues regarding my links on the right menu bar (under the category headings) fixed. Been posting a few things here and there, making a few edits, etc. Then, today, I happened to click on a link in a post itself to ensure that the link pops open a new window… and what do I find?

The entire link drops down to a whole new line when clicked on!

Further scrutiny proved that this not only happened with links inside the post blocks, but the links for the sub headings and the headings themselves.

So, back to the drawing board. I got so fed up at one point that I started hunting around for other themes so I didn’t have to fight the damned thing anymore… but nothing I found was worth a crap (in my humble opinion… just weird abstract layouts). That forced me to really look into the code and find out where the problem existed. And, I’m finaly happy to say, I found it. The major problem with the code originally was that, when I did the same thing I had to do before in earlier versions it caused the links and headings to drop to the next smaller font size. I figured I’d try to find the main menu block that forced the menu system into a nested outline… and when I found it I simply changed the font size back to 1em. Then I changed the sidebar menu block to encapsulate with an outline tag and forced the link class id… and voila!! At last!!

The code I’d created as a workaround was the code that was causing the new problem with the post links, and figuring this out allowed me to eliminate that code entirely. So, my old themes are back to full 100% functionality once more, thank god.

Well, I got online over the weekend on the days when I felt good enough to sit for a spell and play. I mostly simply messed around with Kelanthir, and got him leveled up to 46th level, and about halfway through that before stopping. I got a few good items through the questing time that I sent to Kenandris. After I was done with Kelanthir, I logged on as Kelandris, got the mail that was sent, and put up a whole new set of Auction House auctions for the new stuff I’d sent her plus old items that hadn’t sold as yet. She’s currently got 48 gold from sales in less than a couple weeks (and that’s simply from selling stuff send to her by my, and Duane’s, alternates… that’s not playing the market). Once I set up the auctions I logged off Kelandris, and though for a moment as to what I wanted to do next.

I decided to play Kendrajaaro for a while, as I’d not played him in quite some time, and need to level him up to 20th as well so he can get his Enchanting and Tailoring skills up. Currently he’s doing all his questing on Bloodmyst Isle, so I spend my time running around completing a few quests. I actually enjoy questing the lower levels with Blood Elves or Draenai… their quests are usually most story driven and robust than the other races and as a result are more immersive. Even so I got caught up in one quest that was a bit more than Kendrajaaro could handle and I died twice. I decided at that point to pack it in for the day.