Through the cloud of uncertainty that is still circling the NASCAR world over Tony Stewart’s controversial win on Sunday, there is yet another story that is still being played out. It has nothing to do with a call made by NASCAR late in the race, to give an already controversial driver his first win of the season. Nor did it have anything to do with a driver who has been winless, since he came into the NASCAR Sprint cup series. Even though Tony Stewart is my driver of choice, and I do congratulate him and his team on their first victory of the season no matter how he got it, because we the fans don’t have a say-so in the outcome anyways. So we can turn blue in the face wondering if the right call was made or not, but the bottom line is, the win will stay and we will move on to Charlotte this weekend. How beneficial was the win for Smoke, other then he finally got one before the season ended? Well he is still 203 points out of the top spot, and I really don’t think that the win is going to help him win his 3rd cup championship.


Now while the whole NASCAR world was crying cover-up and deceit in the eyes of the NASCAR big brass that made the decision, there was a very valuable lesson that was being taught the whole time our eyes were focused on “The outcome,” or for a better way to put it, “The finish”. How many times as we were growing up, did your parents tell you that, “patience was a virtue”? They would tell you to take your time, and in the end if you were patient enough, good things would happen to you. That was probably one of the hardest lessons that we had to learn, and even as we grow older, it’s still a lesson that’s hard to learn. Well as this weekend came and passed, we were treated with 2 very good examples of just how much patience plays a big part in auto racing.


In the first example was Carl Edwards, whose game plan for the day was to show patience by the way that he approached the race. He decided to pit one lap after the race leaders, to avoid all the confusion that usually happens at a race and a track of this magnitude. He also chose to run at the back of the pack to avoid getting caught in a wasp’s nest of cars, as the front runners battled back and forth for the lead. Carl managed to stay out of trouble early on, and also stayed close enough to striking distance so when the right time would come, he could take advantage and hopefully run up front only when it counted. But we all saw what happened when Carl ran out of patience on lap 174. With 14 laps to go, Carl forgot about the patience that he was exercising for the first three-quarters of the race, and bumped his teammate Greg Biffle way to hard going into turn 3, thus causing Biffle to lose control of his car and as the saying goes, “the rest was history,” as Carl took out 5 of the chase drivers. This was a very good example of not trusting in your patience, as well as your own game plan.


Now while all the drama of the big one was taking place, there was one lone driver that knows about patience better then any driver out on the track. This driver/crew chief combo has mastered the art of patience to a science. Time and time again, we have seen these two work together in perfect harmony, to make what starts out as bad day, a day that many drivers wish they could have had. To these two individuals, its all about the smaller times that they let their patience dictate how a race would play out, knowing that in the long run, or looking at the bigger picture that it would all pay off at the end. Most of us were taught when we were young, how can you handle the bigger things in life, if you can’t handle the smaller ones first?


Patience is how our drivers today keep themselves out of trouble, and this is also one of the main ingredients to winning championships. NASCAR races aren’t won in the first half of the race, but instead they are won because a driver held back, and knew the right time to move ahead, and go for the win. Jimmie Johnson and Chad Knaus have used patience time after time to set themselves up for some of their biggest wins, as well as just to finish races when they looked like they had nothing left. This past Sunday was no exception, even though they are in the middle of the chase for the Sprint cup championship. But more importantly, they are going for a trifecta, which would put them in the same category with Cale Yarborough as the only two drivers to win three championships in a row.


Jimmie started the race from the back of the pack, because of a weird noise that he heard coming from the engine. So as a precautionary measure, Chad decided to pull the plug wires and make sure the cylinder walls were okay. After sticking a scope into the piston chambers and not seeing anything, Chad told Jimmie that he was good to go. Chad knew that NASCAR was going to penalize them for taking the spark plugs out, but that didn’t matter. All that mattered was they were going to have a car that would finish the race. Jimmie and Chad once again talked it over with 14 laps left to go, and decided to just let the race play out, and to take whatever hand was dealt to them. Jimmie had just told Chad over the radio that,” they were lucky to be in the spot that they were in.” Jimmie knew it first hand because he had just missed the big one. Jimmie also remembered early in the race when he was a lap down, and how he and Chad were discussing just how bad the car was.


Chad had enough confidence in his driver that no matter what would happen, Jimmie was the one driver who could get the job done. Chad knew all it would take was to give his driver the confidence that he needed, to know that the car was okay once the race started. Many times in the past, we have seen these two work their magic to finish on the lead lap when it looked like there was no hope. It took a lot of patience and sel####etermination to run the race that Chad and Jimmie ran on Sunday. Not once did either of them ever deviate from their original game plan. They both played the waiting game to a science. It had to be hard for them, especially as competitive as they both are to just lie back, and see where the race was headed since there were only 4 chase drivers left in the top 10, which also included them.


Say what you want about the way they ran the last 14 laps. But they know how championships are won. And these two wizards of the patience game played it exactly how they wanted, not how their fans wanted. Jimmie took the points, and ran ever so slowly – just enough to finish in the top 10 and continue on the path they both know will take them to the Sprint cup championship. Sometimes it’s not how fast you get around the track, but how well you manage the time that you are out there. One of the best examples of watching a driver practice the skills of “Patience being a virtue” is watching Chad and Jimmie out on the race track, during their championship run. I’m out.