|
Elliot's performance has been sporadic for the better part of a decade now... Brilliant on a couple of weekends a year, but lost in the wilderness most. I would have said he should have retired quite a while ago, but if he still wants to stick around, and can still have a couple of top-threes every year, so be it.
Terry Labonte... Hang it up, man...
Rusty lost his streak of one win a year. That's the only thing that's changed. He's gone an awful long time without being a championship contender, but he's still a threat on any given Sunday.
Mark Martin's going to have to hang it up pretty soon just because of age, not because of a lack of pace.
These things happen in every form of racing... One dominant generation retires, and another steps up to replace them. NASCAR's gone through it before, and they'll go through it again. Actually, this is the fourth distinct generation of NASCAR drivers that we've been seeing appear in the last couple seasons. That's a lot fewer changes than F1 has gone through, where the shelf life of even the very best drivers is less than 15 years. And Indycars (CART and IRL both) are resembling F1 more and more in terms of driver turnover. Unless you've got a famous family name and you're being paid loads of money to hang around past your sell-by date (Little Al, Mikey).
|