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PAGE 20 11 WEDNESDAY. OCTOBER 26, 2011
SPORTS
the pendulum
SFons
Talladega just another racetrack
ELON ATHLETICS ROUNDUP
RESULTS
Football
Oct. 22
Chattanooga 42
Elon 18
Men's Soccer
Oct. 21
Georgia Southern 4
Elon 2
Oct. 18
Elon 2
Wake Forest 0
Women's Soccer
Oct. 20
Elon 1
Appalachian State 0
Oct. 23
Elon 2
Western Carolina 1 (2 OT)
Volleyball
Oct. 18
Elon 3
NC A&T 0
Oct. 21
Elon 3
Wofford 0
Oct. 22
Furman 3
Elon 0
LOOKING AHEAD
Wednesday
Women's soccer @ UNCG — 7 p.m.
Saturday
Cross country @ SoCon Championships — All day
Football @ Wofford — 1:30 p.m.
Volleyball @ Western Carolina - 3 p.m.
Men's soccer vs. UNCG — 7 p.m.
Sunday
Women's soccer @ first round of SoCon Tournament — TBA
Volleyball @ Appalachian State — 2 p.m.
Tuesday
Men's soccer @ Duke — 7 p.m.
SPORTS BRIEFS
There was a point in time, not all that
long ago, when any race at Talladega
Superspeedway was among the most
anticipated
cars, all running
Steven Taranto two, three.
Columnist and even four
wide around
the 2.66 mile
oval at speeds approaching 200 mph. It
was always unpredictable, and always
extremely exciting to watch.
As the superspeedway portion of the
NASCAR Sprint Cup, Nationwide and
Camping World Truck Series schedules
comes to a close, though, it would
seem that those days are now a distant
memory.
A new form of plate racing, the two-
Car draft, has completed a successful
coup of the traditional style of
superspeedway racing, breaking up the
big packs and creating a much maligned
form of racing that seems almost
unrecognizable.
While a form of the technique traces
its roots back to the introduction of the
Sprint Cup "Car of Tomorrow,” the two-
car draft formally established itself at
Daytona testing in January.
There, teams discovered that two
cars hooked together can not only be
faster than a pack of cars by up to
10 mph. This connection can also be
sustained by keeping the front bumper
of the rear car out to the right of the
lead car, allowing air to flow through.
This keeps two cars from having to
constantly swap positions in order to
keep the rear car from overheating and
losing an engine.
The result has been a cancer to
superspeedway racing, resulting in a
form of racing characterized by spaced
out strings of cars, team politics and
a comical amount of radio interaction
between drivers, which has turned
racing at Daytona and Talladega from
a spectacle of tight quarters at high
speeds into a farce of the movie Top
Gun.
Despite the frequency of two-car
draft races with close finishes and large
amounts of lead changes, the form of
racing is almost universally reviled
as boring by fans and frustrating by
drivers, who complain that they have no
control over their own destiny in a two-
car draft.
As Dale Earnhardt Jr. put it quite
bluntly, "This is a bunch of crap.”
There was a glimmer of hope going
into this past weekend’s Good Sam
Club 500 that the two-car drafts would
be broken up per rule changes that
NASCAR had made to make the racing
prohibitive. Restrictor plates were
increased by l/64th of an inch, pressure
valves were recalibrated by 8 pounds per
square inch and teams were prohibited
from putting grease and lubricants
on the bumpers of the cars. However,
NASCAR failed to account for cooler fall
temperatures, which allowed drivers
to continue running in two-car drafts,
rendering NASCAR’s changes null and
void.
Watching a race at Talladega has
ultimately become just like watching a
race at Michigan, Chicago or any other
track on the circuit. There’s nothing
special about it - and that’s a tragedy.
Harris named SoCon Freshman of
the Week
Elon University volleyball's middle
blocker Kris Harris won the Southern
Conference Freshman of the Week
award for the week of Oct. 24. Harris
recorded 24 kills and four blocks In
three games.
Cross country to compete in SoCon
championships
The Elon Univeristy men and
women's cross country teams will
participate in the Southern Conference
Championship in Charleston, B.C., on
Oct. 29. Last year, the women finished
fifth and the men finished sixth in
Boone.
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End of season draws near
FILE PHOTO BY MOLLY CAREY
Elon University's junior midfielder Jaclyn Wood scored the first goal for
the team against Western Carolina University on Oct. 23. The Phoenix
defeated the Catamounts in a 2-1 double-overtime match. Sophomore
midfielder Simi Dhaliwal scored the game-winning shot with nine seconds
left in the double overtime period. This brings the team to 7-7-4 overall
and 5-3-3 in the Southern Conference, tied for fifth in the conference with
Furman University.
The team has one more match beore the SoCon tournament, a 7 p.m.
contest Wednesday against Furman University at home that will decide who
will be the fifth seed in the tournament, which begins Sunday.