Seeing red in the checkered flag

By Ron Kantowski

Thursday, Feb. 14, 2008 | 2 a.m.

This is Daytona 500 weekend, which means even sports fans who don’t change their oil in the Checker Auto Parts parking lot might be tuning into NASCAR on TV.

My suggestion is that if you know somebody from North Carolina, invite him over, or else you’ll never be able to understand what Larry McReynolds is saying in the booth. Last year, he kept using words like “hisself,” which I immediately figured out, and “ohl,” which I didn’t, until midway through the race, when one of those lead foots who answers to Dale or Lee Roy “just spun hisself in his own ohl.”

For the record, there are two guys named Dale in the race but none named Lee Roy, although there ought to be, because if this is NASCAR, there needs to be a Lee Roy. Or a Buddy. But to show how mainstream NASCAR has become, there are four Daves, a Dario and a Jacques who will try to qualify, but not a single Lee Roy or Buddy. You can ask Larry McReynolds hisself.

And “ohl”? That apparently is the sludgy-looking stuff in my engine that I’m supposed to change every 24 months.

If you are tuning in to NASCAR for the first time ... well, I don’t believe it. The only things more massive than the grandstands at those racetracks are the TV ratings that stock car racing generates. It’s not quite “M*A*S*H” meets the Super Bowl, but it’s in the ballpark — er, luxury suites.

By now, you have probably forgotten who shot J.R. Had it been Dale Earnhardt or Richard Petty instead of Mary Crosby, that episode of “Dallas” probably still would be the most-watched TV program in history.

But in the event you’ve never spun in your own ohl, or got any on your loafers, here are a couple of things you should know about watching the Daytona 500 on TV:

The race is 500 miles long and it’ll last forever or until the fourth quarter of a Georgia-Tennessee college football game, whichever comes first. But it won’t seem that long because at some juncture — usually within five minutes of the drivers starting their engines — they will start to ram their cars into each other and throw each other the finger.

One of the coolest things about NASCAR is you can cut somebody off in traffic and not get shot. Instead, you may be asked to visit the NASCAR hauler after the race — a euphemism for the sanctioning body pretending it gets upset when guys ram their cars into each other and throw each other the finger when, in fact, “that’s the NASCAR everybody fell in love with.” That’s how one NASCAR official put it last week when Kurt Busch of Las Vegas cut off Tony Stewart of Hicksville, Ind., during practice for the big race.

You know this is going to be a great season when a week before it even starts guys are throwing each other the finger and ramming their cars into each other and they get sent to the NASCAR hauler. This is where Stewart hauled off hisself and punched Busch, near as anyone can tell, because “what happens in the NASCAR hauler stays in the NASCAR hauler.”

I kid you not, NASCAR spokesman Jim Hunter actually paraphrased the old Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority slogan, which was sort of cute the first bazillion times we heard it. He was trying to show how diligent

NASCAR is in disciplining its athletes ... er, guys who drive cars real fast.

You might even believe the smoke Hunter was blowing up everybody’s tailpipe were he not the same guy who was responsible for the “that’s the NASCAR everybody fell in love with” sound bite the night before.

“When I say that’s the NASCAR we fell in love with, I’m not talking about a guy taking his car and ramming another car on the racetrack,” Hunter said, trying to distance himself from his original remark as if it were another Will Ferrell movie about stock car racing.

“I’m talking about drivers getting out and showing that ‘I’m mad, I’m upset’ and venting that emotion. They certainly did that.”

They certainly did, Ricky Bobby.

Then the most important guy wearing a dark blazer with his shirt open at the collar, NASCAR President Mike Helton (think Fred Thompson’s “Big John” character in “Days of Thunder”), told the working press — or at least the guys at the Charlotte Observer and the Greensboro News-Record who were next in line for the ACC basketball beat — that he was putting the hammer down.

He fined Busch and Stewart a carton of Winstons and a bag of pork rinds and placed them on double-secret probation for a whole six races. O-o-o-o-h. Then he invoked the infamous 1979 Daytona 500, which ended with a crash and brothers Donnie and Bobby Allison turning the Turn 3 apron into a WWF cage match, tag-teaming Cale Yarborough with their helmets, feet and fists after they all tumbled out of their wadded up race cars.

“I will remind everybody that after that deal, there were fines,” Helton said in a tone that would have done Big John proud.

I, on the other hand, will remind everybody that if the Allisons and Yarborough hadn’t chosen the first live nationally televised Daytona 500 in history to punch each other’s lights out, we’d all be watching “Battle of the Network Stars” on Sunday afternoon.