Chris Graythen/Getty ImagesRichard Childress, left, said grandson Austin Dillon's championship was a family affair.

HOMESTEAD, Fla. -- The Trucks series needed this. Badly.

Just when you thought NASCAR's third-tier division was fading, here's Austin Dillon to revive it, and make it what it should be: a developmental springboard for young drivers on their way up.

Dillon, 21, didn't just become the youngest driver to win the Trucks title. He's the first champion under 40 since Travis Kvapil won it at 28 in 2003.

And, because Kvapil has never quite established himself at the Cup or Nationwide levels, Dillon is the first Trucks champion who appears to be headed seriously higher since Greg Biffle in 2000.

Dillon now moves up to the Nationwide Series for 2012, and right behind him into Trucks comes his younger brother, Ty, age 19 -- who won the ARCA championship this year, and if anything might be just a tick better than Austin.

And before you start in with the complaining that the Dillons' grandfather, Richard Childress, bought them championships, consider this: The boys were doing it for "Pop Pop" at least as much as Pop Pop was doing it for the boys.

"I'm so happy for my grandfather," Austin said after winning the Trucks title Friday night despite being stuck in 10th place when rain shortened the race. He edged race winner Johnny Sauter by four points for the season title.

For Childress, who won six Cup championships with Dale Earnhardt as his driver, this has "got to be right up there at the top," Pop Pop said, because, "It's so special when you're family. Our whole family is involved."

Whatever the amounts Childress has spent on those boys, he has done NASCAR a service, because the notion of the up-and-coming young driver moving through the ranks is back.

For the previous eight years, if Trucks are analogous to Double-A baseball -- and they are -- then it was sort of like watching a bunch of players on their way down from the majors.

Now there's Austin Dillon, with Ty on the way, Sauter isn't exactly a geezer himself at 33, and James Buescher, who wound up third in Trucks points, is also 21.

That's not exactly an Over-the-Hill Gang.

My top 10 reasons why Sunday's AAA Texas 500 (3 p.m. ET, ESPN) promises to be the most spectacular event of any kind ever beheld by mankind.

10. Because Texas Motor Speedway president Eddie Gossage says so.

9. Because TMS draws 8.5 million fans in 3.4 million luxury motor coaches to every single race, and every race gets bigger. (No, Gossage doesn't disclose attendance. You have to go by his insinuations.)

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Todd Warshaw/Getty ImagesSunday may be so exciting it will set your hair -- and cars -- on fire!

8. Because prerace ceremonies will include Texas Gov. Rick Perry repeating that speech he made in New Hampshire the other night. ("Live Free or Dah" should draw thunderous cheers at home.)

7. Because the event has a triple-A rating, higher than U.S. Government bonds. (And to think, Gossage got TMS paid for going AAA -- how's that for fiscal responsibility?)

6. Because the highlight of driver introductions will be the firing of chief Chase contenders Carl Edwards and Tony Stewart from twin circus cannons into the grandstands to meet and greet the fans.

5. Because the traffic jams at Cowboy Liquors, just up the interstate from the speedway, will be worse than Woodstock.

4. Because there's this little Mexican restaurant in Lake Worth that leaves our native Texans Terry Blount and K. Lee Davis so blissful, so cheap, that they think nothing but positive thoughts for the rest of the weekend.

3. Because TMS chief publicist Mike Zizzo's late-race nacho buffet costs the track $383,421.97 per person. The tortilla chips are blessed individually atop an ancient Mayan pyramid in the Yucatan. The beans are from Fort Worth's finest Piggly Wiggly.

2. Because Texans who haven't gotten over the World Series will be roaming the parking lots looking for people with Missouri license plates to whup.

1. Because Gossage will be roaming the media center looking for journalists who don't buy his stories to whup.

LOUDON, N.H. -- R-r-r-r-race fans! Are … you … ready?

Are … you … READY?

For some coasting? Some clutching? Some knocking the cars out of gear? Some backing off the throttle waaaay early? Some rolling free through the corners?

For some more fuel-mileage racing?

Slow may be the new fast in this Chase.

Sunday's Sylvania 300 (2 p.m. ET, ESPN) at New Hampshire Motor Speedway "very easily could come down to fuel mileage," Jeff Gordon said.

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Jerry Markland/Getty Images/NASCARKevin Harvick knows how to save fuel down the stretch, but he's not about to talk about how he does it.

So here we go again, right on top of last week's fuel-mileage cliff-hanger to open the playoffs at Chicagoland Speedway, where the late dropout rate was enough to churn the playoff standings significantly.

This, right off a regular season where fuel-mileage finishes "seem to be part of the norm more than they are the exception," said Dale Earnhardt Jr., who benefited from last week's late attrition to finish third in the race and jump to fifth in the standings.

Then there was last year's Chase opener here, where Tony Stewart dominated the race until he ran out of gas on the 299th of the 300 laps and wound up 24th.

Kevin Harvick, who conserved enough fuel to finish second last week and stay atop the playoff standings, was asked here to talk about some of his techniques for saving.

"Yeah … right," Harvick said with that little smirk of his, and then sat there for several seconds of silence, until his audience figured out he wasn't going to give away anything.

Brad Keselowski stopped me in midquestion -- "No" -- about discussing his methods.

Ryan Newman, who'll start on the pole Sunday, had perhaps the best one-liner when asked what makes a driver good at conservation.

"Genetics," Newman cracked, and laughed.

Saving fuel has become so routinely crucial that teams are developing their own sets of secrets about it, a whole separate category of technology and instincts, getting as complex as, say, chassis setups to suit an individual driver.

"Each team has their own way of making it happen," said Keselowski, "just like anything else, no different than cooling off your engines for Daytona and Talladega and different things like that.

"It's just an evolution of the sport. And the thing I'll say about fuel-mileage races is that as a whole and in general, they do take talent. The driver who is able to save very well, there's some talent involved in that."

"The game certainly has changed over the last year, year and a half," said Jimmie Johnson, who admitted fuel-mileage strategy may be a weakness in his quest for a sixth straight championship. "Fuel mileage never has been a strong suit with us, and it's something that we know we need to be better with."

Stewart said his win at Chicagoland on fuel mileage last week "doesn't make up for" the one he lost here last fall, the Chase opener he dominated until he ran out of gas on the 299th of the 300 laps.

Newman did speak in the general terminology of his engineering background about conservation.

"The car balance is one thing, knowing what you have to do to conserve that energy," Newman said. "Track position is a big factor, too. There were times at Chicago that I was getting drafts off of guys on the straightaways just to try to save some fuel."

Earnhardt was a little more driver-specific.

"We all sort of study about what to do," he said, "whether it be just lifting off the gas, simply lifting and just coasting into the corner, lifting earlier than you normally would, whether you need to turn it off, clutch the motor, whatever. There are all kinds of techniques that guys have."

What has made fuel-mileage races so common? Essentially, better tires and longer runs between cautions.

Fewer cautions, Kyle Busch believes, may be due largely to the current car design.

"These cars are not easier to drive, they're just harder to spin out," Busch said. "The old cars were a lot easier to spin out sometimes, or [one driver] could get underneath the back of somebody and jack them up. With these cars, the bumpers line up."

And, Johnson said, "Tires don't fall off like they used to."

Whether you like fuel-mileage races or not, "There is nothing you can do to get rid of them," Earnhardt said.

A colleague of mine, one of the few who has been around NASCAR longer than I have, asked Gordon a rhetorical question: "This isn't NASCAR racing -- is it?"

"It depends on how exciting a finish it is," Gordon said. "I think sometimes if somebody is able to make it and others aren't, that can be pretty exciting."

Actually, I kind of like fuel-mileage finishes. They are suspenseful. When front-runners are close on gas, there's always the chance that what would otherwise be a runaway could be snuffed.

And my recollections of yore in NASCAR, say the 1970s and '80s, are that virtually every finish was suspenseful. Even if one driver was way out front, you never knew he had the race locked up until he crossed the finish line.

That was because engine reliability was poorer, and fuel calculations were far less precise. So there was always a chance a dominant car would blow an engine or run out of gas.

Now, as then, the most boring element in any race is predictability.

"When it goes all the way to the finish [under green], and it's somewhat predictable, then it's not very exciting," Gordon said.

On Sunday, for the second straight Chase race, fuel mileage may leave the finish entirely unpredictable. And that's not such a bad thing.

ATLANTA -- I'm giving you an honest dateline. I won't try to imply that I went down to Hampton, Ga., where Atlanta Motor Speedway is, today. NASCAR, of course, isn't there, either.

Anyway, we might consider what the drivers and crews will have to deal with when they come back, on Tuesday. NASCAR has scheduled an 11 a.m. ET start on ESPN.

Yeah, right. The way tropical depression Lee is lingering, I'll be thrilled if they're finished by 11 p.m., and content if they even start by then. Forecasts don't promise clear skies over Hampton before about 9 p.m.

So chances are, the setups the teams left in the cars, back when they held a shred of hope of running Sunday night, will be about right -- or as near right as you can guess for this racetrack.

But let's say, optimistically, they start at noon Tuesday. Let's say some fluke of nature clears out the clouds and the sun blisters the track, so that cars that were set up for a cool track with lots of grip will slip and slide on the hot pavement.

That would be little different than just a couple of years ago, when cars had to qualify at night for a scheduled day race at AMS. That was by design, trying to draw a crowd for qualifying in a metropolitan area that is a tough sell for NASCAR.

Historically, regardless of weather or the time of day or night they practice and qualify, few if any teams get their setups right for AMS until at least the first pit stop. You simply have to have a shakedown run, just to begin figuring it out.

That goes back far past the reconfiguration of the track in 1997, all the way to its beginnings in 1960. Until '97, the track was known as the only one in NASCAR whose 1.5-mile circumference was taken up more with turns than with straightaways. It remains pretty close to that.

Obviously it's harder to set up for cornering that for straightaways, and so "It's more aggravatin' than anything else," Richard Petty used to say, back when he, David Pearson and Cale Yarborough were struggling until their first pit stops to get some sort of handle on the handling.

So whatever time they drop the green Tuesday, the real race is unlikely to start until after those first pit stops, as crews begin to sort out what kind of racing conditions they're left with. Tropical storm or not, that's pretty much standard procedure at AMS.

Getty ImagesA cowboy hat and cars that ran fast were Smokey Yunick trademarks in auto racing.

The "Best Damn Garage in Town" -- or maybe anywhere, ever -- burned down Monday night.

In it, in his time, Henry "Smokey" Yunick worked wizardry unprecedented in NASCAR, or Indy cars, or the entire realms of physics and mechanics, for that matter.

From it, he ran everything from mining exploration along the Amazon River to winning cars in the Daytona 500 (Marvin Panch in 1961, Fireball Roberts in '62) to stock-block engines in the Indianapolis 500.

Outside it, in the community of Holly Hill, Fla., part of metropolitan Daytona Beach, the sign stood for decades, bearing Smokey's proclamation: "Best Damn Garage in Town."

Profanity came as naturally as breathing to the self-educated genius: "Now one of us is f----- up," was the second thing he ever said to me, as he prepared to go to Indy in 1975 and was trying to explain the difference between turbocharged and normally aspirated engines. I had misinterpreted what he'd said first.

The building was sold in 2004, after Smokey's death of leukemia in 2001 at age 77.

"Hell, I might already be dead," he told our longtime mutual friend, Ken Willis of the Daytona Beach News-Journal, who visited him often in his final months. "I've never been dead before, so I don't know what it's like."

He'd worked on national-level energy projects, along the way meeting a young Navy nuclear officer named Jimmy Carter, and high-level design projects for Chevrolet -- frustrated, in the early 1960s, with "a little a------ by the name of Ralph Nader," he would grumble in recollection.

For the '75 Indy 500, his car, driven by Jerry Karl, had only one sponsor, the Jose Johnson Hotel, the two "Js' in the logo formed by snakes. It was Smokey's own hotel, a shack along the Amazon he and some fellow prospectors had found and turned into a base camp. He'd painted its roof orange, thrown in some hammocks, and at Indy he issued a plug during an interview: "If you're ever up along that part of the Amazon, be sure to stay at the Jose Johnson. We don't have air conditioning, but we do have mosquito nets."

Smokey claimed to be working on an engine that would run on water, and another that burned paper (hopefully to be developed into one that ran on garbage).

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Getty ImagesOne of the things about Smokey Yunick is he knew what was in the rulebook and what wasn't. It was what wasn't that counted in his book.

From used bookstores, he earned de facto Ph.Ds in physics, chemistry, mechanical engineering -- "Some of the best books in the world can be bought for a quarter," he once said, shaking a tattered volume on petrochemistry at me.

After the deaths of crewmen led NASCAR to mandate pit road speed limits circa 1990, Smokey lobbied for the replacement of humans in danger by mechanical means. Rather than jack men, for example, Indy cars were using pneumatic jacks.

Would it work for heavier stock cars?

"A fellow I know took a Pontiac to Darlington in 1960, with pneumatic jacks," he said. "NASCAR told him never to bring it back, and to forget it."

He puffed on his pipe.

"I've still got those pieces of aluminum tubing lying around here somewhere."

What made him bail out of NASCAR by the 1970s was his disgust with Bill France Sr.'s insistence on policing -- stifling, in Smokey's view -- technology.

Had Smokey run automobile racing, he would have had only one rule: "All right you sonsabitches, let's have a race."

Nobody hated concrete retaining walls more than Smokey, who developed one of the first "soft wall" systems, using stacks of used racing tires bolted together through the centers, and covered with canvas.

Once, when invited to inspect newly reinforced concrete walls at Indianapolis Motor Speedway -- a considerable improvement in fan safety -- Smokey was wary.

"What about the drivers?" he asked. "All you're gonna do now is kill the poor bastards deader, quicker."

Something he said to me circa 1990 got him in big trouble with his old friends in the Chevy hierarchy and would keep him there for the rest of his life.

At the time, the "Chevy Indy V8" engine was dominating Indy car racing.

At Charlotte, word leaked out that NASCAR was considering dropping engine displacement from 351 to 250 cubic inches. I found Smokey underneath his trademark cowboy hat.

"If they go to 250, what's to keep the Germans and Japanese from running with them?" Smokey mused about the smaller-block, higher-tech imports.

But what about the NASCAR rule mandating "any American car"?

"Is a Toyota built in Ohio an American car? I don't know," Smokey said.

Then came the bombshell.

"Now you take that Chevy Indy V8. The people at Chevrolet would have the American public believe that's an American engine. All I know is, the Queen of England just knighted the two engineers who developed it."

Indeed, the engine was built at Ilmor Engineering Ltd., run by engineers Mario Ilion and Paul Morgan.

"Now somebody's lying," Smokey said, "and it's either the Queen of England or the PR guys from Chevrolet."

The rebuttal from the PR guys from Chevrolet? Chevy had developed the electronics for the engine. That was about it.

The most famous story about Smokey wasn't true, according to the always-candid David Pearson.

The story was that NASCAR officials were questioning the size of the fuel cell in Smokey's car at Daytona. To show them there was nothing illegal about the fuel cell, Smokey supposedly cranked the car and drove all the way back to the Best Damn Garage in Town -- with the fuel cell out of the car, lying on the ground in the Daytona garage! The implication was that the fuel was hidden in the roll cage.

Not true, Pearson once told me, and, "Hell, I was standing right there." Smokey drove away, but the fuel cell was in the car.

Doesn't matter. There was more than enough that was true about Smokey.

Henry Yunick, World War II bomber pilot, had flown over Daytona Beach on training runs, and thought the seaside town below looked pleasant enough. After the war he settled there and opened the Best Damn Garage in Town.

He took to NASCAR right away, but found it too limiting. Same with Indy cars. At the national level, his radical ideas both amazed and frightened the U.S. government.

In his final years he settled into his garage, specializing in diesel mechanics, common-sense science and … philosophy.

Now even his classroom, where a lot of us learned a helluva lot, is gone. Burned to the ground.

TALLADEGA, Ala. -- The odds against a repeat of last fall's photo finish here -- so close it had to be confirmed by computers -- might seem long.

Not necessarily.

Teammates Clint Bowyer and Kevin Harvick could fight it out again within Richard Childress Racing in Sunday's Aaron's 499.

"It definitely could happen again," said Harvick, who led at the white flag last Halloween day but wound up second to Bowyer by the blink of an eye when a caution froze the field just into the final lap.

Power plants from the Earnhardt-Childress Racing engine cooperative have won the last three races at Talladega Superspeedway. Jamie McMurray won for Earnhardt Ganassi Racing in the fall of 2009 and Harvick last spring. Bowyer was pushed past Harvick to the win last fall by Earnhardt-Ganassi's Juan Pablo Montoya.

And, "the boys down at ECR work hard to keep it that way," Bowyer said, pointing out that "it was pretty well a photo finish with my teammate Jeff Burton in one of the Duel races at Daytona [this past February, with Burton winning], and that's one thing about having an engine like that under the hood.

"You share that common ground with your teammates, so it's not a surprise that they're the ones you're racing for a win."

"We all work well together, and we do all the things that we need to do to run up front, and they bring the cars to run up front," Harvick said. "It's just a matter of surviving until the end. That's the main goal."

Bowyer figures that now, with the two-car drafting, they'll have more control over whether they're around at the end.

"I think with this new 'pairing,' so to speak, the two-car breakaways, it enables you to kind of control your own destiny a little bit more," Bowyer said. "You're not bunched up doing four-wide. You can get out, you can stay out front, stay out of trouble and if you don't like your situation you can radio to your teammate or your [drafting] partner and say, 'Let's get the hell out of here. They're fixin' to wreck.'

"That's the neat part of it," Bowyer continued. "You try to be aware of your situation, and put yourself in the right situation not to be in the wreck [the 'big one' drivers have come to consider almost inevitable here] and then in the right situation to, hopefully, have a win."

"At this place, you go through spells of having good days and bad days," Harvick said, "but our cars will be fast again, and you've just got to have the luck to go along with it."

So as for the odds of a repeat computer-blink finish, "who knows?" Harvick said.

"I hope," Bowyer said, "they're really, really, really, really, really good."

Movie producers and race promoters have long told me the product they sell is adrenaline rush. But they can't manufacture the kind I just felt Monday afternoon.

Jasper and Elli just stopped by my house again, presumably to see my wife. She's out of town. So they looked at me from 20 feet below my front porch, turned their noses up to sniff the wind and lumbered on over the mountain. Neither made a sound.

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George Rose/Getty ImagesWhat would you do if you spotted one of these lumbering in your backyard?

What a rush. Elli could kill a man with one swipe of a paw. But the look on her face said I was, if anything to her, boring.

We have returned to our beloved North Georgia mountains, up where Lloyd Seay and Roy Hall used to run moonshine before they went racing, up where Bill Elliott and his brothers used to run their hotrods, up where Bill's son, Chase, is in the bud of his NASCAR career this spring.

Gordon Pirkle, the local racing and moonshine historian, tells me there used to be "a lot of stills -- one on every creek up there," up here where our house is, in the mountains northwest of Dawsonville.

I think I understand the reason the revenuers never climbed up here ... and the reason the moonshiners finally got out ...

Too many bears.

Jasper is a black bear cub, an adolescent, maybe 170 pounds. Elli is his mother, about 300 pounds. My wife named them for the two little towns nearest to us -- but not very -- Jasper and Ellijay.

They are by no means the only family of bears to visit our property, just the most frequent. Wildlife biologists have counted about 120 bears living in our little community alone -- three times the bear population of Mammoth Lakes, Calif., home of "The Bear Whisperer" TV show on Animal Planet.

And no, we don't feed them. People around here don't even have bird feeders -- known locally as "bear feeders" -- or barbecue grills.

Jasper was the first to visit us, thumping onto our back deck, sniffing around, while my wife was here alone. She clapped her hands and he took off, crossing the stream where big Elli was waiting for him. They rambled on, unperturbed.

They were back a few days later, so we had a bear gate built. Handymen in these parts know exactly what you mean when you ask about a bear gate.

Then our wildlife service found another family, two cubs and an enormous female, biggest they'd ever seen, perhaps 400 pounds, sleeping under our deck. They seem to have left for parts unknown.

Yet another bear couple spotted by my wife was estimated by the service to be about a 200-pound female and about a 500-pound male.

What to do?

"Bears are not included," the service rep said of our commercial wildlife management contract, which deals mainly with flying squirrels and other critters who try to set up housekeeping in the attic.

Experts here, and up in western North Carolina, say the bear population is burgeoning toward a level not seen since the southern Appalachians were settled 300 years ago. What's more, mating season is imminent, so the big boys -- maybe Jasper's dad and friends -- should soon be out rambling.

State wildlife officials don't even like to relocate bears unless they're threatening people or destroying property.

Up here, if you've got bears, you're pretty much on your own. We've got bears.

And you know what? I like it that way -- knowing you'd better be alert any time you walk outside, day or night.

And to see them, 20 feet from you, in the wild, is surreal -- their rich fur ruffling in the wind, their great bulk moving silently, gracefully.

And they just look at you. They're not going to bother you unless you bother them. (Unlike the 300-pounders in the infield at Talladega, these guys don't drink.)

Still there's an adrenaline rush, a whiff of danger, without the ear-splitting roar of a race.

This is the cradle of stock car racing pioneers. Before them came the moonshiners. Before them the Scots-Irish settlers. Before them the Native American Cherokee and Creeks.

None of it has fazed the bears.

When weekly racing papers were fans' main source of news, a veteran driver once said he could read any one of them cover to cover in 15 minutes, "except Speed Sport. I can spend two hours with it, and still not read everything that's interesting."

There was that much substantive content in the National Speed Sport News. Hardly did a wheel turn on any North American track, or in any major event worldwide, without at least a few paragraphs of coverage in Speed Sport.

Today is Wednesday, an important day of the week for many race fans, going back nearly 77 years. The latest edition of Speed Sport is out.

It is the last.

Speed Sport will be printed no more. It died today, with the edition dated March 23, 2011, after a lengthy battle with changing times.

Born during the Great Depression, it survived myriad wars and recessions, but could not survive this economy and this slow death knell of newspapers in general.

In its prime it wasn't fancy, just authoritative. From Indy to Le Mans to Monaco to Daytona to every Podunk track in America, from the dirt modifieds of Upstate New York to the sprint cars of Southern California, you knew where you could find coverage.

If the Sporting News was "Baseball's Bible," then Speed Sport was auto racing's Bible, Koran, Torah, Wall Street Journal and New York Times.

It was Speed Sport that scooped the nation on a young bull Texan named A.J. Foyt, splashing him on its cover in 1956, two years before he arrived at Indy.

Editor Chris Economaki's column was a one-stop briefing on everything from tidbits of racers' personal lives to imminent business ventures in the sport. "From the Editor's Notebook" alone attracted its own audience, for Economaki was far and away the best known -- and simply the best -- auto-racing journalist in the world.

He had spanned the globe with ABC's "Wide World of Sports," asking the tough questions, nose to nose, of Phil Hill, Graham Hill, Jim Clark, the Unsers, the Andrettis, Fred Lorenzen, Junior Johnson, Richard Petty. Then he'd gone to CBS Sports for the early years of live, flag-to-flag coverage of the Daytona 500.

In the 1970s, to a 20-something daily newspaper writer wandering wide-eyed through the garages of Daytona, Sebring and Indy, Economaki was a walking titan, a legendary sight to behold.

Yet quickly he befriended me, showed me the ropes, became a mentor. His judgments were not always flattering, but were always educational. Most of all, he epitomized objectivity.

For all his decades of motorsports TV stardom, Economaki wanted to be introduced first and foremost as "the editor of the National Speed Sport News." It was his proudest achievement.

Growing up, he had lived within earshot of a racetrack in New Jersey, and "the sound of the racing cars was a siren song to a boy," he once told me.

Naturally, when some entrepreneurs turned what had been a weekly racing section in the Bergen (N.J.) Herald into a separate publication called the National Auto Racing News, the 14-year-old Economaki jumped at the chance to hawk the paper at Ho-Ho-Kus Speedway in New Jersey.

That was in August of 1934 and the kid netted a $2 profit from his sales. Ahh, his life was set: There was big money to be made off his passion for auto racing.

In 1936 he was given his own column, and he wrote it for three-quarters of a century.  In 1943, in the midst of World War II, the publication's name was changed to the National Speed Sport News. In 1950, Economaki was made editor.

He issued a statement Tuesday calling this "one of the saddest days of my life." At 90, he doesn't get out to the races anymore and isn't up to doing interviews, even with the journalists who are so grateful for his mentoring -- there are so many of us that there aren't enough hours in this awful day for him to talk to all of us on the phone.

While other racing papers were being bought up by the big publishing corporations, Economaki and then his daughter, Corinne Economaki, published Speed Sport independently.

In his statement he cited the "sluggish economy," but the public abandonment of printed paper, held in the hands, is what has led advertisers away from newspapers in general.

He concluded that "no matter how I try to make the numbers work -- and believe me I have tried -- it is just not feasible to keep the business going."

If Speed Sport couldn't make it, then the death knell of all newspapers everywhere grows louder, deafening. For decades Economaki's paper was as cost-effective as they come. He got the news in from correspondents who worked for little money and a lot of love. So frugal were his payouts that some photographers dubbed him "Chris Economical."

But that's how he was able to get all the news out and keep his paper afloat.

The publication's online version, NationalSpeedSportNews.com, will continue. But its long-term future appears uncertain.

The heartrending thing is, the printed copy all of us could buy and hold in our hands, at every Podunk track in America and at Indianapolis Motor Speedway, and educate ourselves about racing from childhood on, is no more.

BRISTOL, Tenn. -- You can call him Dinger. In fact, please do. It's something of a symbol of his acceptance in NASCAR, by both competitors and fans.

Besides, "I like it because I can't pronounce my own last name," AJ Allmendinger said Friday, during media availability for the top 12 in Cup points. That's right: Although it's early, Allmendinger is ninth in the standings, ahead of Jimmie Johnson (12th), Kyle Busch (14th), Matt Kenseth (16th), Jeff Gordon (19th) and Kevin Harvick (20th).

Chris Trotman/Getty ImagesAJ Allmendinger says he'll take his nickname over his father's -- ScreamingDinger -- any day.

"So if they make it shorter, I'm happy …

"I like it," he said. "It's easier. … I just did a production shoot for Charter Cable, and I had to say my name like 1,000 times, and I was sick of it by the end of it, so if I can just say Dinger, I'm happy."

Plus, "It's better than my dad's nickname, which is ScreamingDinger, so at least I don't have that going for me, I guess.

"I laugh because Robbie Loomis [vice president of race operations for Allmendinger's team, Richard Petty Motorsports] used to ask my mom, 'Why is he so fiery? Why is he just so on it?'

"She was like, 'His dad's nickname is ScreamingDinger, so there's something that comes from that when he raced.'"

"Dinger" is painted above the driver's side window of his cars, just as "Smoke" is in that spot on Tony Stewart's cars.

It's something of a badge of honor for a driver who had a rocky start in NASCAR, moving over from the troubled Champ Car series where he'd starred, winning five races in 2006 before Champ Car folded into IndyCar.

He was brought into NASCAR by Red Bull in '07, but struggled so badly he was let go by that team in '08.

"It was definitely a struggle mentally," he said of the time before he was picked up by Petty for the '09 season. "It was a tough time. I always felt I could do this, I just felt like I needed the right chance …

"Fortunately enough, I was able to kind of scratch and claw and hang on just enough to get some opportunities to get better and show what I could really do.

"In the end, it comes down to two options at that point: You could quit or you could stick to it and try to be better, and I'm not gonna quit."

So now to open this season, he led four laps at Daytona before finishing 11th, and posted finishes of ninth at Phoenix and 19th at Las Vegas.

He'll start 28th in Sunday's Jeff Byrd 500 at Bristol Motor Speedway, and with the way the big guns have been having bad days and sometimes collecting only one, two or three points under the new system, he has a chance to hang in the top 10 in points.

So call him Dinger. Please.

DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. -- NASCAR technology moved well into the 20th century Friday.

I know, I know. We're in the 21st century. But with NASCAR engine technology, you take whatever progress you can get.

The current formula is, after all, in its 38th year. Soon after it was introduced in 1974, its obsolescence began. By the mid '70s, fuel injection rapidly began replacing carburetors in production cars. By the '80s, injection was dominant.

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Todd Warshaw/Getty Images for NASCARPeter van Manen of McLaren Electronic Systems says the fuel injection units on Sprint Cup cars will be tamper-proof.

So Friday, only a quarter-century or so late, NASCAR announced that in 2012, Cup cars will use fuel injection in place of carburetors, and introduced the suppliers.

Britain's McLaren Electronic Systems will supply the hardware, and Freescale Semiconductor of Austin, Texas, will provide the control-unit technology.

NASCAR's resistance over the decades to injection was largely because it feared cheating, difficult to police, with sophisticated electronics.

Now, "We are confident, with McLaren and Freescale, that these systems will be bulletproof," said Robin Pemberton, NASCAR's vice president of competition. "They'll be cheat-proof."

How so?

"The units just won't run unless they have authorized NASCAR code," said Peter van Manen, managing director of McLaren Electronic Systems. "They would just sit there. So it is impossible to tamper with these units without opening the lock. And as soon as you open the lock, it is completely visible."

That old bugaboo resolved, there was still some disappointment Friday. Seems we'll all be stuck with restrictor plates at Daytona and Talladega for the foreseeable future.

How can that be, with fuel injection? Because this won't be the ultra-modern direct fuel injection, in which the injectors squirt the fuel directly into the combustion chambers.

This is age-proven "port" fuel injection, in which the injectors spray the fuel into the intake manifold. There's still a throttle body that controls air flow, so there's still a place for a plate.

"The plates are the easiest and most economical way [to reduce power on the big tracks] because you govern the airflow," Pemberton said. "So the part that the air flows through will be basically the same."

Elimination of the plates, although still a ways off, is likely in the long run. Pemberton acknowledged the weariness of teams and fans alike with the simple aluminum plates: "We know. We understand that.

"But right now, there's 32 other races that we run that are unrestricted, and it's very important for us to concentrate on that and get these things right," Pemberton continued.

"It's important not to try to do everything all at the beginning of one season," said van Mannen, whose boss, McLaren chieftain Ron Dennis, had made elimination of restrictor plates a major selling point on a trip to the United States last summer.

Teams will begin testing with fuel injection this season, but there'll be no races with the system until it is required for the full 2012 season. The Nationwide and Truck series will still use carburetors for the foreseeable future.

In the Cup series, there'll be little discernible difference to fans, Pemberton promised. The competition will be "greater than or equal to" the current racing, he said.

The only thing fans are likely to notice is the reduction of billowing fire from tailpipes as cars enter the corners of some tracks. The fire is a burnoff of wasted fuel with the carburetion system, and that will be greatly reduced with fuel injection.

The best part is that, at long last, NASCAR's "stock" cars will be catching up to real stock cars -- production passenger cars -- in fueling technology.

As Lou Lutostanski, Freescale's vice president of sales and marketing, put it, "For NASCAR fans, what gets them there [to the tracks] is going to be running there."

That'll be so for the first time in a quarter-century-plus. It's about time.