RYAN MCGEE'S BLOG:
BLAME IT ON THE RAIN

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So what if Kurt Busch was a little damp when he won in New Hampshire?

Enough already with all the whining about rain-shortened NASCAR wins not meaning as much as an old-fashioned full-length green flag finish. Last time I checked, Kurt Busch still received a very large trophy and even larger check for his victory at New Hampshire, even if they were all wet.

The simple fact of the matter is that Busch and crew chief Roy McCauley did a better job of taking in all the elements laid out before them—including the actual elements—and the equation that was spit out of their mental calculators was better than everyone else's.

In other words, they won and 42 other teams got beaten.

Yes, in a perfect world every race would be run to its conclusion in the perfectly neat package of three hours, with a limited number of cautions and a three-wide finish.

And yes, after a few months of that we would become bored.

Races like the one we had Sunday are merely pieces in the most diverse and satisfying motorsports puzzle in the world (though it surely must have sucked to have bought a $100 ticket to sit in the stands soaked to the bone and denied a full 300 laps).

The beauty of NASCAR has always come from the fact that we don't know what we're going to see on Sunday afternoon. One week we may indeed get that photo finish. The next week we may have a fuel mileage race, such as Dale Earnhardt Junior's victory at Michigan earlier this month, followed by a green-white-checkered finish, followed by a race ruled by Mother Nature.

Just as the Sprint Cup season's selection of tracks—short tracks, superspeedways, flat tracks, road courses, even 1.5-mile cookie cutters—provides us with the most varied slate of venues of any major racing series in the world, so does the wide variety of outcomes. Even if some of those finishing orders have more to do with Doppler radar and fuel efficiency rather than simply being faster than the other guy.

In the end, the best teams are the ones that survive each and every situation the best, which forces anyone wanting to be a Cup champ, driver or mechanic, to study up on every single facet of the sport.

That includes watching the Weather Channel.

One year ago, we all knelt at the altar of crew chief Steve Letarte after his ability to forecast the arrival of a rainstorm handed Jeff Gordon a victory at Pocono. Earlier this year we anointed Letarte's comrade, Chad Knaus, when he was able to help Jimmie Johnson squeeze a victory out of the gas tank at Phoenix.

The final wins of Dave Marcis and Darrell Waltrip's legendary careers were both earned due to rain dances, as was the biggest win of Jeff Burton's career in the 1999 Southern 500 at Darlington. All three are considered NASCAR classics.

So, are people ripping Kurt Busch and Dale Junior's wins simply because they are Kurt Busch, the original most-booed member of the Busch family, and Junior, the love-him-or-hate-him Tiger Woods of motorsports?

"Maybe so," Busch admitted on Sunday night. "But we have the trophy."

After one of his perennial national championship contending Clemson football teams had barely squeaked by the notoriously awful Duke Blue Devils in the late 1980's, former Tiger head coach Danny Ford was asked if he would lose any sleep over escaping Death Valley with such an ugly win.

"No sir, I will not. An ugly win is still a win, and I'll take every nasty old ugly win I can get as long as they still give me a 'W' for it at the end of the day."

Like it or not, Mr. Busch got himself one of those ugly, nasty, and in this case, wet W's.

And your driver didn't. Get over it.

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