NASCAR, and all circle-track events, are auto-racing for couch potatoes. Ditto for drag racing, which aside from the technology needed to get 5000 hp out of an engine, is about as exciting as an ox pull at a county fair. Much like all team sports (to my mind), if you've seen one circle-track or drag race, you've seen them all. Yawn.

While roundy-round racing and piloting a AA Fuelie requires some skill, I really don't think it is much above the level of the average serious car enthusiast–the guy who has been to racing school, does regular track days, maybe has a race-only car. Certainly not better than top amateur road racers. The best guys are very good, but only at a limited number of things–and in cars that are equally limited. One top flight Nextel driver once said he “could take anyone who can fog a mirror and in a day or so have him running at race speed as long as the guy didn't lift off or have to dodge traffic.”

In F1, OTOH, you have hugely powerful cars with prodigious capabilities and amazing technology driven on a wide array of tracks, including city streets, rain or shine. They are hard to drive well and that's why F1 attracts the alpha dogs of racing. To me it's not just the cars–there's a reason Formula 1 is called The World Drivers Championship.

And Jim, since you work for Lenovo, are you finagling your way into the F1 operation?

Having been a driver since about 1980 (started out driving water trucks to drilling rigs in Wyoming and fuel tankers from Wyoming into Utah) I think I've got a perspective on the driver issue. And, frankly, it ain't pretty.

Where there are, indeed, lots of careful and responsible professionals out here, this industry has always had it's bad actors. There are a couple of things we might have been better off if they'd never happened. One of these was the movie “Smokey And The Bandit” which came out in 1977. Hate to say it, but (I think) this led to a big influx of people with gill slits and webbed feet in the late 70s and up through and into the 90s, even. The other thing was a program that, for a while, was making available large sums federal money for student loans for CDL training schools that were springing up like mushrooms for a while there back in the late 80s/early 90s. Pretty much anybody who could breathe on a mirror and fog it could qualify for a “student loan” and go to CDL school. If, after a couple of weeks, they could still fog a mirror, they'd be “graduated.”

The advent of the CDL itself, has been blamed by many for the loss of lots of those seasoned, rock solid, old timer “knights of the road” types. While there's some unfortunate truth to this, it also helped rid the industry of a certain element that, frankly, needed to be eliminated; careless and/or incompetent operators with multiple citations, multiple accidents, and multiple licenses from multiple states. Unfortuanately, there's just something about this job that seems to attract badasses and sociopaths (borderline and confirmed). You can turn off the CB so you don't have to listen to them, but you see them and their sign everywhere. You see them taligating, speeding excessively — or just driving too fast for conditions — and cutting off other traffic whenever they can. You see their tons of trash in the shrinking number of places you can still park a truck. You see their graffiti in the restrooms. And watch your step when you get out of your truck on the way to that restroom; you don't want to step in somebody's discarded poop bag. We like to say these are a minority, and I think they may be, but I suspect they're a bigger minority than we'd maybe like to admit. Anybody who denies we got our problems is probably one of those problems.

Too many people were speculating on Real Estate. It is interesting that the “Realtors” who pushed and pushed home sales and subprime mortgages and other creative loan programs were never called on the carpet for their participation and relationships with seedy mortgage brokers. In fact, many RE companies conveniently had “inhouse” mortgage companies. So, if you could fog a mirror you could get a loan. (Yes all this was provided by the big Wall Street Banks.) Think about who drove the mortgage referrals to bad subprime lenders. Yes Realtors! Realtors urged consumers to leverage up, it is just a fact. Think about it, sell a larger home earned a larger commission and then re-list it when the bank forecloses and sell it again and get more commissions. Realtors are laughing all the way to the bank to deposit commission checks. The Gov't did not properly regulate. The FDIC allowed some banks to wildly lend, while others conservatively watched. A few others, unfortunately, lost their discipline and entered into this flury of activity and are now suffering.

Big party, too much temptation and now everyone has a substancial headache. I hope we have all learned a lesson.