(July 20, 2010 RaceTalkRadio.com)

Listening to the babble online from Carl Edwards’ fans and apologists defending their guy this week has been laughable. Maybe I am indeed missing that “Fan Gene” because I don’t understand such fanaticism. Saturday night at Gateway Raceway Carl Edwards was wrong…end of statement. The excuses thrown out there have included the age old “Keselowski had it coming” and the fan favorite “Earnhardt did it too.” The fans justifications are bad enough but NASCAR’s wish has come true.

Brad the Tease

The “He had it coming to him” defense is being used early and often to explain away Carl Edwards’ actions at Gateway. So if a person fires a paper wad at you that makes it ok to pull out a gun and blow that person away? After all, that person had it coming! If a young lady is raped and brutalized does it really matter that she was wearing a bikini at the beach? Dressing like that she sure had it coming! Brad Keselowski is an aggressive driver. There is a big difference between an aggressive move paid back to him in kind and a down right dirty move like we saw Saturday night. Even if Brad had it coming to him according to the logic, I am hard pressed to figure out what Shelby Howard and others did to deserve their fate.

Fuzzy Earnhardt Memories

My co-host on the “Doin’ Donuts” radio show said it so well the other day…many fans’ only real memories of Dale Earnhardt in this sport come from quotes and actions in movies! The legend of Earnhardt has grown to the point that this was a Wild West sort of guy that took the rules into his own hands and put every driver on the track in jeopardy in order to win races. This guy Earnhardt was known as the Intimidator so you know he did this every week just like Carl did to Brad. Yes Dale Earnhardt was an aggressive driver that hated to finish second. But in my memory banks there were only two times that he pulled actions that even come close to what Carl Edwards has done at Atlanta and Gateway this season. But I suppose we can blame our fuzzy Earnhardt memories on great story telling in the movie business.

Ratings Wish Came True

The only thing lacking in Saturday night’s crash at Gateway was the lack of a video highlight showing the car becoming airborne so that video could be shown on every media outlet! Maybe any publicity is good publicity after all. But when so many drivers who rarely speak up have spoken out against Carl Edwards, NASCAR knows they have an issue they need to address. It has been a long time since the drivers agreed on anything! Even guys that are not exactly pleased with “Bad Brad” didn’t think much of Carl Edwards’ choice of pay back.

Thankfully nobody got hurt at Gateway but hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of equipment was torn up for no reason. That is no big deal to Carl Edwards or Roush-Fenway Racing but what about the smaller teams that got caught up in the mess? Carl Edwards deserves a fine big enough to rebuild the cars that he destroyed on Saturday night. This isn’t the first time we have seen this issue and without a sizeable penalty the problem will never go away. This isn’t so much an issue with the “Have at it boys” arrangement it is a problem with one driver. NASCAR’s wish of a video highlight worthy of the non-racing media came true. But one of these times we won’t be so lucky and their worst nightmare will come true again instead.

What do you think about NASCAR’s penalty (if any) to Carl Edwards? Tune in tonight to hear the QUICK CHANGE gang discuss this and more! It’s the fastest growing game show in NASCAR and its here every Wednesday night at 8pm ET on RaceTalkRadio.com!