Cause of Robby Gordon's fire

[MountaineerTom]

From gastongazette.com

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WATKINS GLEN, N.Y. — What’s wrong with this picture? Do not adjust your set.

The Global Crossing at the Glen played out before another huge, impossible-to-estimate crowd on Sunday as that champion of the local Woodstock set, Jeff Gordon, won for the fourth time in five years. The race had an exciting finish. Yet everyone seemed rather glum.

There was NASCAR president Mike Helton, actually sitting on the steps of the NASCAR transporter, scowling as if he were thinking about Bruton Smith.

There was Winston Cup Series director Gary Nelson striding furtively around, wearing that "Houston, we’ve got a problem" look. Paul Brooks, the Vice President for Broadcasting, seemed strangely concerned.

Allen Bestwick, the NBC anchor, seemed a tad agitated as he left the booth. Benny Parsons was visibly upset. Wally Dallenbach Jr. wore the look of a man who wanted to curse under his breath and might have been doing it.

"You can’t let that happen," said Parsons.

On Sunday, at Watkins Glen, the outcome of a Winston Cup race was affected by the failure of a part, but it wasn’t a part designed to make a car go faster. It wasn’t a part installed willingly by a team. It was a part mandated by NASCAR, provided by a company called Sportvision and placed in the cars in the interest of providing telemetry for the telecasts.

Sunday’s race was televised by NBC, but it could have been Fox, FX or TNT. Sportvision provides the equipment used each week.

If the GPS (Global Positioning System) had not been in Robby Gordon’s Chevrolet, the race would likely have been won by the other Gordon in the race. Jeff Gordon, by his own reluctant admission, might have had to settle for second.

The battery pack accompanying the GPS device in Gordon’s car exploded while Robby Gordon was out on the course. He had just pitted on lap 57. All of a sudden, on lap 58, in front of the press box, there was the blue-and-yellow No. 31, flying down pit road again, obviously too fast. Smoke was belching out of the driver’s compartment.

"Wow," onlookers remarked. "What the heck was that?"

In just a few short weeks, NBC has received criticism for attempting to manipulate post-race victory celebrations and for demanding exclusive and unprecedented access to drivers immediately after the races, but no one had accused them of affecting the outcomes of the races.

Certainly it wasn’t intentional. NBC operatives fell all over themselves saying, "It wasn’t NBC. It was Sportvision. It was their equipment."

Of course, they didn’t say that to a television audience. Whether they knew the circumstances or not is a bit irrelevant. Surely they could have found out. There had to be some decision, at some level of the broadcast, not to let the viewers know that Robby Gordon’s chances at victory had been eliminated, at least indirectly, by television’s hand.

Parsons was right. That just can’t happen.

What did it look like? It looked like some "Mission: Impossible" device had gone off. "This recording will self-destruct in 10 seconds."

Robby Gordon, of course, has been widely criticized this year for letting a childish spat with the driver of a lapped car cost him the earlier road race at Sears Point. He does not have a regular ride. He was driving the No. 31 as a consequence of Mike Skinner’s injury at Chicago in July. He would like to do sufficiently well to either take over this ride full-time, if, as it is rumored, Skinner is not retained in 2002, or gain for himself one more chance somewhere else.

This time there should have been an entertaining "Gordon vs. Gordon" battle for this race. Robby Gordon did nothing wrong. His car self-destructed, and he never got a chance to complete his "Mission: Impossible."

He said he would have won.

"I backed off and played with him (Jeff Gordon) to see where he was strong in case he beat me out of the pits," said Robby. "I did that so I could plan where I would try to get back by him. I got back by him pretty easily and took off.

"To go out of the race with something that’s not driver-related or team-related is a huge disappointment."

In this instance, "huge disappointment" was a huge understatement.

This is like a Barry Bonds home run being shot down so that Luis Gonzalez and Sammy Sosa could draw closer.

This is like an electrical shock being sent through Billy McCaffrey’s hands so that a Broncos-Raiders game can be sent into overtime.

This is, well, not quite like wrestling, but getting ever closer.

Oddly enough, a similar incident apparently happened in Jeff Gordon’s car, of all places, back in February at Daytona. The battery-pack explosion there did not happen during a race, but it bothered Gordon’s team sufficiently that they rejected the installation of an in-car camera for about 10 races. Cars outfitted with in-car cameras carry two battery packs.

All the cars have the GPS device installed as a requirement of the sport’s television contract.

To their credit, the NASCAR officials, so often enveloped recently in the clutches of siege mentality, did realize the significance of this monumental faux pas, hence the terminal glumness at the trailer. Hence the fact that the No. 31 trailer was already closed off and practically headed off the premises within moments of the race’s end.

Spokesman John Griffin assembled the facts and held a briefing. He said that, no, television coverage was not supposed to play any role in the competition, and that, yes, the incident "is of concern to us." He said NASCAR officials had been in contact with Sportvision and "we need answers very quickly."

Those answers will come too late for Robby Gordon. He may never get another chance like the one the boob tube cost him on Sunday.