Old Dominion 500
Upset by probation, Bodine vows to re-earn respect MARTINSVILLE, Va. (AP) – Martinsville Speedway seems like the most difficult place for Todd Bodine to begin his NASCAR probation for careless driving.
The .526-mile track is the oldest and shortest on the Winston Cup circuit, and the beating and banging of cars in the Old Dominion 500 is as sure a thing as the track’s famous hot dogs being eaten in bunches.
But Bodine doesn’t plan to change a thing in Sunday’s race.
“I’ve got to put it out of my head and do what I normally do, and what I’ve been trying to do, and that’s race clean and courteous,” he said.
But NASCAR hasn’t seen Bodine’s season as a study in track etiquette, and a multicar crash he triggered last weekend at Lowe’s Motor Speedway prompted them to place the veteran on probation through Dec. 31.
The Chemung, N.Y., native thinks it’s all unfair.
“You’ve got to have a punishment that fits the crime,” he said. “If this was standard punishment for this crime, then I would understand it a little better. There isn’t a driver on the track that hasn’t made a mistake, and then there are some that have made big ones like I did.”
The accident in the UAW-GM Quality 500 started when Bodine made a move to the inside of Ward Burton and Jeff Green, who were running side by side down the front stretch. Bodine’s left-side tires touched the infield grass, his car careened out of control and more than 10 cars were damaged.
Bodine agrees that he made a mistake, but thinks the penalty is too harsh because he felt he was out of options when he crashed. He hit Burton, he said, because he got too far into the moist grass.
“I was trying to do the right thing and trying to do the right thing in this situation turned out to be the wrong thing,” he said.
Bodine has been told that any additional actions deemed detrimental to the sport will lead to an indefinite suspension.
“He’s here, he’s allowed to compete, he’s allowed to do everything he’s been doing before,” Winston Cup director John Darby said. “The only thing he needs to focus on is not making any mistakes. … His destiny is in his own hands.”
Bodine also fears he’s become an easy scapegoat for on-track incidents, a driver who has been labeled as an aggressive toublemaker.
Jimmy Spencer, no stranger to controversy in his Winston Cup career, said there were many drivers who felt Bodine was at fault last week.
“You have to live by the rules and you have to abide by them,” he said. “I think (the probation) was a good decision on NASCAR’s part.”
Bodine will start 32nd in Sunday’s race, which will be the first run on a track with newly milled turns at both ends.
The surface has been a source of mixed reviews so far this weekend and remained so after Jeff Burton and Mike Skinner tangled in practice.
Coming out of a turn, Skinner moved his Chevrolet in front of Burton’s Ford and Burton’s clipped his back bumper, causing Skinner to hit the wall. Both drivers were called to the NASCAR hauler after the crash.
Burton blamed the accident on adapting to the new turns.
“Mike went in the corner high and then was going to turn across because you can do that now,” he said. “He went in high and I dove in under him. … He was expecting me to give him room, and I wasn’t expecting him to come down because that’s not what we used to do here.”
Several drivers have noted that the track is the same for everyone, and some think the racing will be better with more than one groove.
“They’ve hindered running on the bottom more than they’ve helped running on the top,” Michael Waltrip said. “But by hindering the bottom it opened up the top, so hopefully we’ll see a little bit better race.”
Rookie Ryan Newman will start on the pole with Jeff Gordon to his outside. Winston Cup points leader Tony Stewart will start 31st, 24 spots behind rookie Jimmie Johnson. Johnson trails Stewart by 97 points.