DOING WITHOUT TALLADEGA NIGHTS.

Byline: TIM HADDOCK

MOTOR SPORTS

With the NASCAR Nextel Cup Series All-Star Challenge this weekend at Lowe's Motor Speedway in North Carolina, it's a good time to reflect on what has happened so far this busy season.

Dale Earnhardt Jr. is available, Hendrick Motorsports is unbeatable and the fans at Talladega are uncontrollable.

Let's start with Earnhardt Jr. He announced before the Cup race at Darlington Raceway in South Carolina that at the end of the year he will leave Dale Earnhardt Inc., the team his late father and stepmother, Teresa Earnhardt, founded. Earnhardt Jr. said he wants to race for a championship-caliber team. He also reportedly wanted more control over the team -- 51 percent would have satisfied him. Teresa Earnhardt apparently wasn't willing to share, which resulted in Earnhardt Jr.'s wanting to depart.

Probably the biggest mistake of Teresa Earnhardt's NASCAR life.

Hendrick has been particularly tough this year. It has won all fiveraces with NASCAR's Car of Tomorrow. It has won eight of the 11 races thus far. Jeff Gordon looks poised to win his fifth Cup championship. Jimmie Johnson leads all drivers with four wins and looks like Gordon's toughest competitor. Kyle Busch won the first Cup race in the Car of Tomorrow and has emerged as a championship threat. They are still waiting for Casey Mears to make some noise.

With the Chase, the 10-race playoff to determine the Nextel Cup Series champion, no lead in the standings is safe after the first 26 races of the season.

In any year before the Chase started, Gordon would be all but unchallenged in his pursuit of the Cup championship. But once the Chase begins, the top 12 drivers in the standings get bunched up and the Cup championship becomes a bit of a crap shoot.

As for Talladega, it might do NASCAR a world of good to just blow up the place.

It's one of the reasons restrictor plates were invented. It makes for contrived and dangerous races that might be fun to watch, but next to impossible for the drivers to complete unscathed. Every driver goes into Talladega expecting a huge crash. This time around, there wasn't one, but that was because most every driver behaved himself.

But the quality of racing at Talladega is not the reason to blow it up. The fans are.

Fourteen Talladega NASCAR fans are no longer allowed to buy tickets to races because of their behavior, throwing beer cans and bottles on the race track, after Gordon won the race there in April.

How sad is that? There is a place in Alabama where some people's money is no good. This is one of the poorest states in the union, and 14 people can keep their cash and watch the race from their motor homes in Mobile. If only there was a way to direct a hurricane in the direction of Talladega. Heck, even a small tornado would do.

Next time Las Vegas Motor Speedway or Nashville Speedway or Darlington Raceway fans clamor for a Cup race, there is one track that deserves to lose the twoit has. Talladega has become outdated and its fans have become deplorable. NASCAR needs to get out before it gets dragged down by the good ol' boys.

Schmidt gets his Indy 500 entry in

Buddy Lazier, driving an entry for Sam Schmidt Motorsports, grabbed the last starting spot available Sunday in qualifying for the Indianapolis 500.

The first 11 starting spots were determined Saturday. The next 11 were filled Sunday. Lazier had to go out twice, but he secured the 22nd starting position, the first car on the eighth row.

There will be 33 cars starting the Indianapolis 500 on May 27.

Schmidt, a Pepperdine University graduate who also went to school at Village Christian in Sun Valley, said he was not too concerned about qualifying.

The Indianapolis 500 is the only race in the Indy Racing League IndyCar Series Schmidt enters, and his team has had little time to prepare.

"It's a huge learning curve just to get caught up, but they are doing a great job," said Lazier, the 2000 IRL champion and winner of the 1996 Indianapolis 500. "You can only expect so much in three days. We're learning in one day what most teams are taking weeks to get to."

Now that the car is qualified, Lazier said the team can focus on getting it ready for the race.

"We are starting to understand the car, and that is a real relief," Lazier said. "We are here to finish top five on race day. We knew qualifying was going to be our biggest hurdle because we need every minute of time of practice."

The team made one major adjustment for qualifying and it paid off.

"All the practice we have had have been full tanks, and (Sunday) we just opened it up for qualifying," Lazier said. "Now we can go back to where we have been working; it's about race day now."

Helio Castroneves, a driver for Team Penske, won the pole for the Indianapolis 500 with a four-lap average speed of 225.817 mph.

Lazier had a four-lap average speed of 221.380 mph. He bumped Jon Herb from the top 22 during qualifying Sunday.

CAPTION(S):

3 photos, 2 boxes

Photo:

(1) Fans at Talledega weren't kind to Jeff Gordon when he won the NASCAR race there last month.

Chris Graythen/Getty Images

(2) LAZIER

(3) no caption (Honda race car)

Box:

(1) THIS WEEK

(2) Etc.