Banquet better, not ideal

NASCAR deserves credit for finally figuring out a way to cut the Nextel Cup awards banquet to less than a four-hour marathon.

Last Friday night’s event crowning Jimmie Johnson as the sport’s 2006 champion moved with decided dispatch. The goal was to be done by 10:15 p.m. and, by golly, that’s almost exactly when the confetti cannon fired to mark the ceremony’s end.

Shorter was absolutely better. But still, you wonder about some of the choices that were made in the streamlining process.

Chad Knaus, the driving force behind the No. 48 team that carried Johnson to the sport’s pinnacle, sat at the head table on stage in the Waldorf-Astoria’s Grand Ballroom. But he never got to leave his seat during the ceremony. The crew chief’s award, and the speech that follows its presentation, was among the things moved from banquet night back to Thursday’s luncheon as part of the revamped format.

It’s odd, though, that NASCAR could find no time for its championship crew chief in Friday’s ceremony but still carved out 20 minutes for a monologue by comedian Jay Mohr and another 20 minutes or so for him to banter with the drivers who accepted their awards before Johnson.

Mohr had his moments. He riffed on the “NASCAR haircut,” a look sported by several drivers that Mohr said resembled a female gym teacher’s do. He said Matt Kenseth is so dull he makes Al Gore look like Little Richard. Mohr’s filmed parody of Allstate commercials featuring Kasey Kahne, while perhaps a bit homoerotic for a NASCAR crowd, was clever.

Still, a little less Mohr could have meant a couple of minutes for Knaus to be acknowledged alongside his driver on the sport’s big night in the big city.

The rigid limits NASCAR puts on the drivers’ speeches have sucked the emotion out of this event. This isn’t a celebration of a racing season. It’s cotillion, where the point is dressing up in fancy clothes and figuring out what fork to use with which dinner course.

When was the last memorable champion’s speech? Jeff Gordon still gets grief for crying at his first acceptance, but at least that showed his passion for what he’d accomplished. There was no passion in the Grand Ballroom on Friday. NASCAR made people check it at the door.

The members of the championship team are stuck up in the second balcony and ordered to behave themselves like ladies and gentlemen. Nobody dared to hoot or to holler. Mark Martin couldn’t even get one lousy standing ovation from the crowd despite the fact he’s stepping away from full-time Cup competition after a brilliant career.

The banquet got shorter this year not because NASCAR thought fans were weary of how long it had become, but because the corporate swells on the guest list starting making excuses not to attend because the blasted thing was too long for them, too.

The real way to fix the banquet is the same as it has always been.

Bring fans in. Let the championship team sit down front and encourage them to show their emotions.

Let the champion pick his favorite musical act and have NASCAR pay to have that group come in and play for an hour.

In other words, take off the monkey suits and let loose a little.

But it’ll never happen. Shorter, therefore, was better. It wasn’t better than just plain better would be, but it was better. And for that, at least, we are grateful.