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NASCAR Sprint-Cup Series
JENSEN: Lies, Damned Lies & Racers
Racers are the ultimate combination of optimism, salesmanship and ego, believing they truly are better than anyone else...
Tom Jensen  |  Posted March 09, 2009   Harrisburg, NC
SPEED.com's Editor-in-Chief Tom Jensen. (Image: SPEED)

If you’re a journalist, the absolute worst thing you can ever do is trust a racer.

It’s not that racers are born liars or inherently dishonest. They aren’t bad guys, most of them. In fact, most of them are pretty likeable.

But racers are the ultimate combination of optimism, salesmanship and ego, believing they truly are better than anyone else. Hey, you don’t become a NASCAR Sprint Cup driver without having a strong, maybe even overwhelming, mix of talent and ambition.

I’ve been to press conferences where a team owner who has never won a race introduces the new driver he’s signed for next season — someone who has also never won a race — and the team owner says with a straight face that his team is going to contend for the Sprint Cup championship.

At Pocono a few years back, the pole-winning driver — a fellow who now has four Sprint Cup victories in more than 700 starts — said with a straight face that he thought he was as good a driver as Jeff Gordon, but the reason Gordon had as many championships as he did race victories is because Gordon had better equipment. Honest.

That just how racers are. You can’t compete successfully at this level if you don’t believe you are the best, even if that sometimes clouds your judgment.

I mention this now because it was less than two months ago when we in the media were in Concord, N.C., for the annual Sprint Media Tour presented by Lowe’s Motor Speedway. That event consists of four days of marching from shop to shop listening to team owners, drivers, crew chiefs and assorted others tell you why they are going to have a great season. If I had a dollar for every time I heard the word “excited” during the media tour, I’d long since be retired. Every team at the media tour thinks they’re going to have a great season.

But this year, the one team that seemed to really exude quiet confidence — to have actually gotten their act together — was Penske Championship Racing. The team had done some serious soul searching and come up with a cogent action plan, walking the walk instead of just talking the talk.

And the one guy who may have done the most soul searching of all was Kurt Busch, driver of the No. 2 Penske Dodge Charger. Busch and his little brother Kyle aren’t the most popular drivers out there, but they are both incredibly talented. And they are both passionate about winning. That’s all they care about.

So I guess none of us should have been surprised by the big, fat can of whupass that Kurt delivered to the field at Atlanta Motor Speedway on Sunday, where he led 234 of 330 laps in one of the most dominating performances in recent memory.


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