Fuel for your thoughts

March 18, 2013 at 9:58 pm

Originally I was planning on talking about what occurred between Denny Hamlin and Joey Logano this weekend at the Sprint Cup race at Bristol and their lame twitter war. I was going to write a post explaining how lame it is for these guys to basically give each other the modern day glove slap with no real venom and substance. When thinking about it, I realized my post would come off sounding like the transcript of a Ward Burton interview while on a Red Bull binge, so I saved it for later this week.

Instead I decided to post some of my favorite bench racing “what if” questions.

– What if Senna isn’t killed at Imola, how do the next few seasons shape up? Does Schumacher go to Ferrari in 1996? It was always believed that Senna would drive for Ferrari at some point.

-What if Henri Toivonen isn’t killed at the 1986 Tour de Course? Does he go on to be one of the all time greats? A multi time World Championship or the pre-McRae McRae? Does Group B continue and what happens to the proposed Group S?

-What if Al Holbert isn’t killed? Does his proposed open top Porsche GTP car get built and do Nissan and Toyota enjoy their dominance? Do we see the 959 in the US as a legal production car? How does the Porsche Indy Car program turn out?

-What if Tim Richmond doesn’t die of AIDS? How many championships does he win? Does he become Nascar’s first real mainstream star?

-What if Dale Earnhardt isn’t killed at the 2001 Daytona 500? How many more years does he continue to race? Does the “3” remain in Cup today? Does Dale Jr. ever leave DEI and would he be a champion by now?

– What if Indy Car owners didn’t stop caring about the talent in Sprint Cars? Would Jeff Gordon be a multi time Indy 500 champion? Would Nascar be as big as it is if the 24 was still racing open wheel cars?

-Speaking of Open Wheel cars, what if greedy owners and Tony George didn’t destroy what was the best racing series in the world in the 1990’s? Would CART be bigger than Nascar?