The time to be young
Young drivers are cracking the Cup ranks, and having overnight success -- that was never the case a few decades back.

Just look at Kasey Kahne, who in his rookie season of 2004 made a strong bid to qualify for the Chase while finishing an impressive 13th in the championship standings.

Most of the young drivers today by the time they reach 20 have 10 or 12 years of experience in different forms of motorized racing.

All the young drivers we are seeing arriving on the NASCAR scene began getting racing experience at around eight years old.

In contrast, I started getting my racing experience when I was 21.

There just weren't nearly as many feeder and lower level racing circuits around back when I was young.

Another factor is today's young drivers coming into NASCAR are gaining rides in cars that are so much better engineered.

And when you combine that with a young driver not having any preconceived notions of how to best get that car around the track, and thus listening to what the engineer tells him to do, you can hit on success pretty quickly. 

In some cases, the open-minded young drivers pick up an advantage over the veterans whose experience has set them in their ways -- ways that are sometimes hard to break despite the pleadings of those who have worked on the engineering of the car.

And a lot of what's being done to the cars today is different from when I raced.

Take for instance, the front springs, which in the 1970s were about 75 percent of the total weight of the car.

Today, it's the reverse, with the springs weighing a lot less overall, and the majority of that  weight is in the rear of the car, not the front.

More races on the way?
In 1985, they were 28 Cup races.

A little more than a decade later in 1996, there were 31 races.

In 2001, the number jumped to 36.

And if the wishes of the tracks could come true, there would be about 46 races a year.

It's too taxing a schedule on crews and teams, and the burnout factor becomes an issue.

But I wouldn't be surprised if they get a track built in New York for the Cup schedule to expand to 37 races, and then that's an odd number, so how about a track up in the Northwest and that would make it an even number of 38 races a season.

I think if it gets to 38 races, they'll have to look at racing up until the first weekend of December.

Who would have thought that a few decades ago?