But the case of Maurice Young exhibits just what White has done that’s been so good for the "little guys."

More than half a dozen rainouts ensure that, no matter what, White’s certain to take a financial hit when he doles out the more than $80,000 promised in total purse money to his weekly racers this offseason. But the simple fact that he’s paying that kind of money has to be applauded on some level.

Young has a 60-point lead in the Strictly Street division at the track with two points races left, and if he can simply steer clear of trouble, he will likely break the record with his seventh Wiscasset championship. To date, Young has pocketed only a couple hundred dollars – in total! – in all of those previous seasons for winning it all.

"I did it because I loved it. I didn’t care," Young said this week. "But now I kind of feel like, yeah, it would be nice to get something for it."

Wiscasset’s Strictly Street championship this season is worth $2,500. Young will finish no worse than second in this season’s final rundown, meaning that he’s already guaranteed almost 10 times as much as he’s ever collected in year-end payouts.

Take the Super Late Models off the track, and the program appears very much the same as it has in the past at Wiscasset. Car counts are on par with what they were before, having even dropped precipitously in some cases. Grandstand attendance has been lighter than expected under the new regime. Week to week, not much has changed.

At the end of it all, though, much has changed. Racers have a clear goal. A championship carries with it more than a trophy and a free pit pass for next season. They may feel forgotten every time another Super Late Model race is promoted in advertising or on the track’s Web site, but they won’t be forgotten at the awards banquet.

Rewarding the guys who support the track every week in the support divisions is a good thing, no matter how you look at it.

* MANY THANKS TO Dale Earnhardt Jr. for showing up for the Chase.

* DITTO TO JOE Gibbs Racing.

* DON’T BELIEVE EVERYTHING you read.

The PASS North Series "standings" show Johnny Clark with a five-point lead over both Ben Rowe and Travis Benjamin, who are tied for second. Not so fast.

With the "Best 12" procedure adopted by PASS for this season, teams have two finishes to throw out. One of those was determined for them when it rained at Speedway 95 back in May.

Once they throw out their worst finishes heading into this weekend’s final event, the Ray Haskell Ford 150 at Wiscasset Raceway, Rowe has a three-point lead over Clark. Benjamin drops to more than 20 points back.

Reminder: Teams get five points for winning a heat race, four for second, three for third, and so on. They also get 220 points for a win, and it drops two points for each position after that.

* GOT AN E-MAIL from Tom Curley, promoter of the American-Canadian Tour and Thunder Road Speedbowl this week.

As you can probably guess, he wasn’t necessarily thrilled with my column characterizing the Milk Bowl as a sort of local phenomenon without a true regional following. I wrote back to him saying that I hadn’t meant to criticize the Milk Bowl for what it was, only that I wanted to put into perspective just what the event represented.

The following is an excerpt from my response to Curley. I decided that maybe what I wrote in the E-mail was what I should have written for a column to begin with:

"Interesting take on the column...

I set out to do a couple of things when I wrote the column, neither of which, in the interest of full disclosure, I was very happy with in the end.

Before I went to the Milk Bowl, I was interested for myself to find out what it was all about. When I returned from covering the weekend, I was asked several times by people in the Maine racing fraternity, ‘What's it like?’ I wanted to try to put both into perspective. Fortunately and unfortunately, the Oxford 250 stands as a great measuring stick -- here, people know the race, the format, what it stands for. After that Toyota Tundra 250 at Wiscasset this year, I tried to help people make similar comparisons.

Maybe it's my own limitations as a writer that I keep referring back to that. I don't know.

When I first re-read the column, I thought it came off as ‘negative’ -- see? even I call myself ‘negative,’ too, so I guess [some of my readers] and I have that in common. Then, with a couple of tweaks, I thought it came off as too much of a suck-up job and I thought people could see right through it. Ultimately, I think it straddles the fence too much to be a good column. There's no hard stance in it on either side.

I would bet that while you disagreed with some of it that there are others out there who will criticize it for being too ‘pro-ACT.’ Funny, this racing game, no?

I left with two general impressions of the Milk Bowl.

One, all bets are off with the rain -- I left believing that I enjoyed the race, that it's made for ‘internet journalism’ with its inherent breaks and changing conditions on the fly. Great race in September that I would have on my calendar every year. I truly would. And I think, as you said, it needs to be seen a couple of times under more normal circumstances.

My other impression was that, honestly, I don't care enough about segments and scoring and whatever else. It's just not me, and I knew that going it -- if I was a paying customer and could only pick one, I'd pick the Labor Day 200 every time. Just because. But I'm completely into the fact that there are people who do love and adore the Milk Bowl format -- I think it does speak to the short track fan. Short track fans live and die with their sport in a way ‘TV’ fans never will or can. Obviously, I feel some empathy toward that, given my chosen line of work here.

Maybe a better column would have been just to post exactly what I just wrote to you. Maybe I'll do that. Who knows?"

So, I, uh, just did that.

* THE NEW TACO BELL "Big Meal." I mean, who eats that much in one sitting?

* I’VE DOUBLE-CHECKED. I’m on the list.

* QUOTE OF THE week comes from Quebec’s Patrick Laperle, who won both the Milk Bowl and the ACT championship last weekend at Thunder Road, on why the Milk Bowl’s triple-50 format appeals to him:

"I’m like a dog. I see a car in front of me, and I want to chase it. I want to pass it or hit it."

* THERE’S ABSOLUTELY NO truth to the rumor that Ben Rowe is going to leave PASS next year and run the full ACT schedule. He said he’s not interested in that.

* IF CASSIUS CLARK doesn’t win this weekend, in the last PASS North race of the season, does he let his hair grow through the winter? Or does he cut it and start over?

Or does he just go run a Legend car race somewhere and try to win that?

Posted at 10:45 p.m. by TBarrett