Nascar

IF YOU'RE not a NASCAR fan, if you didn't spend half your life watching Dale Earnhardt power a black Chevy that looked like the devil's own staff car around a steaming track, you were probably like me this week, which is to say, you didn't quite get it. You turned on the TV and watched the armies of mourners tenderly placing wreaths and hugging each other and sobbing at the makeshift memorials for Earnhardt in Daytona Beach, Fla., where he died after...

In the movie, "2001 A Space Odyssey," a computer named Hal becomes power crazy and begins a massive takeover. In the real world next year, it is NASCAR Winston Cup racing that will be taking over your TV screen. It is also taking over and dominating the lives of the people in the sport - and possibly the sports fans. Overall, the Winston Cup Series will have three - count 'em - three weekends off - Easter, Mother's Day and July 1. Beginning in 2001, it will be Winston Cup racing all the time.

Ever just hop in your car and take off, without knowing where you're going or what will happen when you get there? In a certain sense, CBS and NASCAR are approximating that sensation with tomorrow night's telecast of the Pepsi 400.The Winston Cup race will be the first to air in prime time on a broadcast network, and no one is quite sure what the result of the evening will be, since no one has ever tried this kind of thing before."

NEW YORK -- A year ago, car owner Rick Hendrick sat at the podium in the Waldorf Astoria Hotel with driver Jeff Gordon and soaked up the delights that come with winning a first Winston Cup championship.It was supposed to be even better the second time around. This year's champion, driver Terry Labonte, and teammate Gordon dominated the 31-race season.Tonight, Hendrick was supposed to celebrate with Labonte at the annual NASCAR Awards Banquet.But that was before a federal grand jury indicted Hendrick on charges of conspiring to bribe Honda executives.

NASCAR has no intention of bringing Busch Grand National auto racing to this area and was surprised by a recent announcement by the Middle River Racing Association, which is trying to build a racetrack in Anne Arundel County, that it had landed the series.The Timonium-based track developers announced last month at a news conference that the small South Boston Speedway in Virginia was "excited about the opportunity" to give its Busch events to the MRRA starting in 2000 -- the year developers hope to have their $100 million track built.

NEW YORK - NASCAR's Winston Cup Series, whose crews regularly employ "sledgehammer technology" on car parts, took a giant leap into the age of real technology yesterday. NASCAR chairman Bill France Jr. announced Nextel Communications as the new title sponsor of NASCAR's premier racing series. Beginning in 2004, the Winston Cup Series will be known as the Nextel Cup Series. At Nasdaq-Amex Headquarters in New York's Times Square, in a room filled with men in dark suits, France, in similar attire but with a bold purple tie, said he was unveiling "the best-kept secret in sports" and laughed because stories concerning this announcement had been appearing all week.

NEW YORK -- Park Avenue is glittering in holiday lights, and up on the 12th floor at No. 375, the NASCAR offices are humming. The new year is approaching, and NASCAR's outlook is very bright.NASCAR, the sanctioning body for the hugely popular Winston Cup Series, opened this office two years ago to put itself in the loop, so to speak. With Major League Baseball, the NFL, NBA and NHL offices only blocks away, prospective advertisers searching for a place to invest can enjoy one-stop shopping.

NASCAR officials spent the early part of this week meeting in Charlotte, N.C., trying to figure out how to solve the embarrassing officiating problems that have struck Nextel Cup races the past three weeks. In Charlotte, N.C., a caution light mistakenly blinked on and off when a NASCAR official "may have inadvertently bumped the switch with his knee." In Dover, Del., NASCAR needed a 24-lap caution to figure out the running order on the track and settle arguments with the competing teams who disagreed with NASCAR's rulings.

Saying the time is right, NASCAR has mandated head and neck safety devices be worn immediately by all drivers in its three national professional series. Beginning this weekend, Winston Cup, Busch Grand National and Craftsman Truck Series drivers will be wearing the HANS or Hutchens devices. The devices are designed to reduce the movement of the head and neck in high-impact crashes. They have proved in tests that they can reduce the chance of death from basal skull fractures that often occur during such crashes.