Diversity & Prayers

[John DiBartolomeo]

Before I get too far into this week’s Blog, I’d like to recognize the loss of a racer, Lucas McKinney, to a racing accident over the weekend in North Carolina. My prayers and thoughts go out to his family as I can’t even imagine what they’re going though during this time.

I have no first-hand knowledge of how or why the accident occurred, but the one thing which bothers me is that when things like this happen, I wish somehow it could be made known as to the why or how. This may give me some knowledge to go back and look at my own car or program to allow me to maybe see something I’m doing wrong.

I realize drag racing is such a small endeavor in the general scheme of life, but we’re all family here and we care about one another. When an airplane goes down, such as what happened in China this week, the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) is all over the accident scene to assess as to why it happened. Again, I realize how miniscule drag racing is when compared to that, but it would seem like there would be a way to help us all to learn from an incident.

Next up, this may not be totally drag racing related, but it’s something that has been on my mind lately. And it may get me in trouble with some but it’s my belief of the way things should be along with being thankful our sport isn’t like the way our world is shaping up.

I do watch a lot of NFL football. I know some who have chosen not to watch NFL games for a variety of reasons, but for me, I like the almost sudden death type of finality it affords. Maybe; and this may be taken it a stretch; but it almost like drag racing; two go down and one comes back. In the case of football; in past years anyway; there were only 16 games in the normal season; this past year it was extended to 17; but in any event, if you don’t get on a roll winning early in the season, it could mean trouble for your year.

When I think about that in terms of some of these multi-day bracket races, if you don’t start going some rounds in the early days, you could end up going into your pocket pretty deep for entry and buyback money.

But the thing which concerns me in this day and age is something we don’t have a problem with in our sport and that’s diversity. At the end of the regular football season when a number of head coaches got their walking papers, I listened to several reports where it was questioned as to why there aren’t many black head coaches in the league? As of now there is only one, Mike Tomlin in Pittsburgh, and I may even be wrong about that as of now. Here’s my question though: What difference does it make as to a person’s color as to whether or not they’re qualified for the position? Why not hire the best there is? Black, white, Puerto Rican, Mexican… who cares?

As far as I’m concerned, drag racing has really never had a diversity problem. We don’t have black drivers, women drivers, Hispanic drivers. No, we just have drivers. And I truly believe that once that helmet and seat belts are buckled and the engine starts, not one of us is concerned with our competition’s skin color or gender. For that, I think we should all be proud.

That’s it for this week. I’m outta here.