Bodine To Miss Coca-Cola

Geoff Bodine was released from a Concord, N.C., hospital Thursday after spending the night following a crash during practice at the Charlotte Motor Speedway.

Bodine was knocked unconscious Wednesday and taken to NorthEast Medical Center for a CAT scan and X-rays.

Bodine will skip Sunday’s Coca-Cola 600 to recuperate. Bodine has started 180 consecutive Winston Cup races - 11th-best on the circuit.

Not fast enough

Johnny Benson led the nine drivers who took part in second-round qualifying for the Coca-Cola 600, but none was fast enough to make the 42-car field on speed.

Benson will start 39th with one of the four provisionals awarded after Thursday night’s second day of time trials. The other three provisionals went to Ward Burton, Todd Bodine and Hut Stricklin.

Failing to make the field were Ed Berrier, Bobby Hillin, Spokane’s Chad Little, David Marcis and Mike Wallace.

Who’s the best?

Paul Tracy goes for his third straight CART victory on Saturday, and there are no regrets the attempt is not coming Sunday at Indianapolis in the Indy 500.

Tracy is where the real action is, at the new Gateway International Raceway just outside St. Louis. The Motorola 300, set for Saturday, has almost all of the best drivers, all of the best teams, most of the money.

Everything, it seems, but the tradition.

“They’re changing the thing as it goes along,” he said of Indy. “It’s just ruining the whole thing. It’s turned into kind of a joke.”

In the second year of the CART-Indy Racing League impasse, Indianapolis has Arie Luyendyk and a supporting cast of unknowns that Tracy likens to Triple-A baseball. The Motorola race has the Penske team of Tracy and Al Unser Jr., Michael Andretti, Jimmy Vasser, Scott Pruett, Bobby Rahal, Alex Zanardi and more.

But in the meantime, until the impasse is settled, CART and Indy will continue to go head to head, this year with Saturday’s Motorola 300 and Sunday’s Indy 500.

Indy drivers take it easy

The final practice before Sunday’s Indy race was an exercise in caution.

With lots of questions remaining about the reliability of the Oldsmobile Aurora and Nissan Infiniti engines that the Indy Racing League introduced this year, nobody wanted to push too hard.

Thirty-two of the 35 starters made it onto the 2-1/2-mile Indianapolis Motor Speedway oval on Thursday, with Tony Stewart, last year’s pole-starter, leading the way with a lap of 215.502 mph.

“Everybody was just trying to get their work done and not do anything stupid,” said Luyendyk, whose four-lap average of 218.263 won the pole on May 10. “Today isn’t the day to go for it. That’s Sunday.”

Not much experience

The 35 drivers in Sunday’s race have a total of 70 years of Indianapolis 500 experience, the fewest in modern speedway history.

In contrast, the record for driver-starts is 260, set first in 1987 and matched in 1992.

This year’s lineup has only eight drivers with more than two previous starts.