1,000 Greatest Drivers: Ryan Newman

If you believed they put a man on the moon...

He famously doesn’t. Anyway, I mentioned in yesterday’s Dale Earnhardt post that I was a bandwagon Newman fan for a while. This was really only during his rookie season in 2002. Around this time, after years of being picked on, I began to embrace my identity as a nerd for the first time in my last two years of high school and I do think owning it made me marginally cooler than I was in middle school and junior high (maybe not so much in my adulthood...) As I was about to go off to college, I thought it was cool that Newman was one of the few college-educated NASCAR drivers and I was intrigued by his engineering background. Obviously, twenty years later, people are a lot better able to recognize that merely going to college doesn’t make you smart and Newman in retrospect seemed like kind of a dumb guy except for his abilities as an engineer, although I am not one to talk since I know many, many people would call me a dumbass for being so overeducated yet such an underachiever in the career world. I stopped watching NASCAR and racing in general entirely in 2003 and the first half of 2004 after I couldn’t stand the increasing pandering to rednecks that FOX was doing relative to CBS and ESPN and particularly couldn’t stand the increasing jingoistic militaristic pageantry as the entire NASCAR industry marched in lockstep with the neocons when I was opposed to the Iraq War before it started. After I got back into racing in the second half of 2004, I no longer really cared about Newman, but I guess to an extent nobody did because his best was already behind him.

This concludes the wave of non-championship-winning Daytona 500 winners who I consider to be locks except for Mario Andretti and A.J. Foyt who I’ll do some other time (maybe in the weeks leading up to the Indy 500) and I obviously had to throw Earnhardt in on the anniversary of February 18, although I ended up being two days late. I’m now going to be jumping around between drivers primarily from other series for a little while, and I suspect I will write those columns faster actually because I am overfamiliar with the contemporary NASCAR drivers to the extent that I consistently write a lot more about them and therefore have more to compress to cut it down to 500 words.

I tried to contact my mom’s bank about switching her home equity line of credit from being auto-deducted from my bank account instead of hers so the checks don’t bounce and we don’t lose our home, but at the moment her bank is not letting me talk to them until I get a power of attorney signed and notarized. The people at the rehab center keep telling me that she is too cognitively impaired to sign a power of attorney form although neither of us agrees, so I need to find an outside power of attorney to handle this so I can have official access to her bank account. I also contacted Caring Transitions to try to conduct a living estate sale to help clear out the house and they will be doing an assessment on Tuesday. I doubt we have much of value but at least if I can sell anything, that is less money I have to put up front for the cleaning so that’s probably my best course of action to make the house more habitable for my mom to be allowed to return, because she desperately does want to leave the rehab center and it seems like she would rather do in-home hospice. Hopefully, by the time the estate cleanout happens, there will no longer be six feet of snow on the ground.

And I definitely want to thank the guy who signed up for my highest $150 tier a couple days ago. I will be sending you my complete 4 MB master data file containing basically every driver ever, but it’s admittedly not quite finished yet. I may allow you to request which driver(s) you want me to write about (as long as it is somebody who I intend to include on the list), and I’ll try to think of other perks I can throw in later. I really appreciate it, especially right now.