Dave Despain, host of Wind Tunnel and Inside Nextel Cup on SPEED, seems to always have an interesting perspective on the world of racing both auto and motorcycle. The Georgia resident spends much of his time talking with fans within each discipline of the sport, which is where Despain comes from on most issues. The following is a discussion about many of the storylines surrounding racing as we move through the middle part of the 2007 season: SPEED: In your opinion, what’s the biggest news story in motorsports so far in 2007? Dave Despain: It may well be the one that’s breaking as we speak, which is the whole Ferrari and McLaren espionage story that’s been kind of bubbling for a long time now. If some of these revelations that have come out over the past week or so prove to actually amount to something that could be huge. Beyond that, I think certainly in terms of the American audience, the continuing evolution of NASCAR is pretty interesting because the pace of change in that series has increased pretty dramatically in the last four or five years. How that all shakes down in terms of whether traditional fans and new fans accept those changes and remain fans I think will determine the future of the series. The development in that area with the most impact this year has been the ‘Car of Tomorrow’ (CoT). The jury is still out on whether people are going to love or hate it. An awful lot of traditionalists seem to hate it, which puts it in the same category, in my opinion, with a lot of the other changes that have come together over the last few years – the change in the championship format being the most notable example. Traditional fans are having a hard time with this, and how that connects to the empty seats and ratings decline we keep hearing about I’m not sure anybody knows. I’m not sure anyone in NASCAR knows, but over time will all of this change – designed to broaden the appeal of the sport – make it a more mainstream, ‘major league’ sport? It’s still way too early to tell or determine the success of that effort, but to the extent that NASCAR is the most popular motorsport in America, it has huge potential consequences for American racing. SPEED: Do you think the CoT is the right direction for NASCAR? Despain: I think they (the CoT) eliminate an awfully important part of the traditional appeal to the sport when they make all the cars the same. With that said, I don’t view the CoT as nearly the departure an awful lot of the fans I hear from think it is. They seem to view this as some huge break with the past because now the cars are all the same. My argument is that the cars have been virtually identical for a long time now. In that context, I don’t see very much difference between the old car and the new car. On the old car, basically the only changes were a few tweaks in the nose, other than that, they were the same. So I don’t see how the CoT is a huge step. But symbolically, for the fans, it is a huge step. They see this as NASCAR officially embracing the idea that this is some type of IROC series. I don’t think traditional fans like that, and I think the consequences of that will be huge. While the CoT races have been good, I think you’ll need a lot more than whatever we’ve run to judge its success in terms of improving the level of competition, lowering the cost of racing and all the other things it was intended to do. On the key issue of safety, again, I think the jury is still out. I think we’ll be able to see how safe the cars really are when we see a few of them hit the wall at 180 mph. Certainly on paper it’s a safer car and I think that’s good and important. Over the last half century, the single most important change in racing is the fact that we no longer maim and kill racers at the rate we once did. Let’s hope the CoT is another step in that evolution. SPEED: Where does Dale Earnhardt, Jr.’s move to Hendrick Motorsports place them among the all-time race teams in history? Is it really that significant? Despain: Well, it certainly makes them potentially a ‘Super Team,’ if their not already a ‘Super Team.’ But it’s so easy to get caught up in band wagons. It was just two and a half years ago all the fuss was about Roush being a ‘Super Team’ with five cars in ‘The Chase.’ There were calls to do something about this because they were called a ‘dynasty’ and way too powerful. Now, two and a half years later, we’re saying the same thing about Hendrick. It’s way too early to reach that conclusion. The implication in Junior’s move is that he’s a better driver than his record indicates. He’s not saying that, but it’s the implication in the decision he made, and the limiting factor has been DEI (Dale Earnhardt, Inc.). Now, he will be with the team that, at the moment, has the best equipment in the sport. If we see a significant up-tick in Junior’s numbers, the pace at which he wins races, and the fact of an eventual championship, then yeah, you’ve got three guys on one team that will at that point all have been champions. That’s pretty stout, and I’m not sure we’ve seen that before. In a sport that can see such dramatic change, from a Roush dynasty to a Hendrick dynasty in two and a half years, I don’t think that probably ranks as an earth-shaking development. I mean, by the time Junior reaches his full potential, will Jeff Gordon be ready to give it up? They may not be that far apart in age, but they are way far apart in experience and achievement, so I think it’s unrealistic to think they’ll both be racing together in 10 or 15 years. SPEED: Does Formula One miss Michael Schumacher? Despain: It does depend on if you’re a Michael Schumacher fan, doesn’t it? There was a love-hate relationship as far as the fans were concerned with Michael. He was an easy guy to love for his obvious abilities and achievement; but he was also an easy guy to hate for different reasons. I’m only being a little bit flippant about that. I think those that loved him, miss him terribly and those that hated him are glad he’s gone. I wouldn’t want to try and put a number on either side of that equation because I don’t know. Anytime you have a dominant figure in the sport that leaves, there is a huge potential for things to be better because suddenly you have competition. You have a battle for who’s going to be the next Michael. Is there going to be a next Michael? Never mind that, who’s going to win the next race because Michael’s not there as the weekly favorite? The timing is spectacular for Lewis Hamilton to emerge, just as Michael Schumacher exits the stage. Not that I think Lewis is the next Michael, but he’s certainly arrived as a powerful personality, who takes the edge off Michael’s loss because all of a sudden you love him, or hate him. You love McLaren or hate McLaren, whatever. There’s also a fascinating dynamic involved in the whole Hamilton, (Fernando) Alonso, (Kimi) Raikkonen, (Felipe) Massa fight which has the potential to be one of the best in Formula One for a long time. I don’t think there’s a whole lot to choose among those guys when it comes to superiority. They all have an awful lot of talent, but it’s conceivable that Hamilton might be a whole lot better than any of them over the long haul, but we’re not there yet. Right now, I think this is a pretty interesting Formula One season and it’s a whole heck of a lot more interesting without Michael. SPEED: What’s the future of Formula One in the United States, especially on the heels of Indianapolis pulling out of the 2008 U.S. Grand Prix? Despain: I think Formula One is difficult for the American race fan because it’s very different from most of what we have in American racing. If you just look at the ratings, they are a statistical minority. I draw the analogy to motorcycling it’s huge in the the rest of the world, but not in America. Motorcyclist take perverse pride in that because its, ‘We get it and most of America doesn’t.’ Soccer is the same way, and I think Formula One is like that too. The American fans who get it take pride in that fact, but most American fans don’t get it. They watch these races where the lead never or rarely changes hands on track, and don’t get what all the excitement is about. They apparently don’t have the appreciation for the technology like the Formula One purist does, and I don’t see that changing dramatically any more than I see soccer becoming a mainstream American spectator sport. It’s had, however, many years to do that, and I don’t remember when Pele was introduced to the New York media as the guy who was going to put soccer on the American sports map, but I’m pretty sure that didn’t happen. I think Formula One is probably going to be the same thing. You might see incremental increases in the audience as SPEED continues to do a spectacular job of covering the sport, and as the American presence in the sport we’ve had a grand prix now for the past seven years or so and we have an American driver in the series, albeit not for long if some of the rumors are true. I think those things will contribute in small ways to the popularity. I don’t look for some type of breakthrough that makes Formula One a mainstream sport in American racing. SPEED: On the grand scale of racing, is Nicky Hayden the greatest American driver in the world today? Despain: He’s a world champion and you can’t take that away from him. But on the other hand, a world championship is a snapshot in time. Is Nicky week in and week out better than Valentino Rossi? No. If you look at their records over the time Nicky has been there, and the time they have been racing head to head, Rossi is better. But Rossi was not better last year. These kinds of comparisons are so hard to make, but is he the best American yeah. There’s nobody else in any other international series that’s done anything close to that lately. Clearly he’s the best American and had a much better record than Scott Speed. You could argue that Formula One is tougher than MotoGP, but I don’t know that that’s true. It’s a hard question to answer. SPEED is the nation’s first and foremost cable television network dedicated to motor sports and the passion for everything automotive. 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