DRIVER CODE FROM A DRIVERS POINT OF VIEW -- NOT "NASCAR"

Johnny Mallonee
@johnny-mallonee
9 years ago
3,259 posts

A driver said very early on we were racing at Bristol in 2004 maybe or 2005, and another driver is a mentor of mine, he is one of my heroes and helped me a ton in my career and during that race he ran into the back of my car -- it was all I could do to not wreck," the driver recalled.Martin Truex Jr.

"At the time, I wondered what happened and didn't know what was going on. On Monday, I called him, 'Hey Bud.' He said, 'Hey .' I said, 'Remember that race when you ran into the back of me and I didn't know if there was something that I needed to know there?' He said, 'No, for the last few races you've been racing me hard and I thought you were taking a little more and I just figured if that's how you want to race, that's how you want to race.' I was like, 'Whoa, no I don't want to race like that.' He said, 'Okay, fine then don't and we won't.' 'Okay, cool.' He said, 'See you next week.' That was the end of that.

In "Car racing everybody drives their car and you just have to do what you think is the best and what is the right thing to do at the time and all of us have done all sorts of things. Some of them were right, some of them definitely weren't right," . "You just have to go out there and race everybody the way you want to be raced. In some ways you have to demand the same in return."Phoenix Chase-clinching scenarios

While driver code may still not be the clearest of pictures for one driver -- or any one else on the track or around it, for that matter -- he did get his first lesson in it about a decade ago from a potential future NASCAR Hall of Famer.

Certainly a subjective concept, driver code is interpreted differently from driver to driver, a gray area not unlike baseball's "unwritten rules." There's so many factors in this situation with so many different things happening, it's really difficult to line it all up and say, 'Okay, this is why this happened and this is how to proceed going forward.' It seems pretty complex. I'm just going to focus on my deal and we'll move on." So see you next week is the norm unless ------FORT WORTH, TX - NOVEMBER 06: Brad Keselowski, driver of the <a href=#2 Wurth Ford, qualifies for the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series AAA Texas 500 at Texas Motor Speedway on November 6, 2015 in Fort Worth, Texas.">


updated by @johnny-mallonee: 12/05/16 04:04:08PM