About an hour ago.

Ba-dum, ching!

We kid because we care. Seriously, folks, don’t forget to tip the waitress.

What I’ve really been doing the last few days, though, is trying to figure out who’s at fault for the abomination that was the Street Stock Nationals. Four divisions. Three hundred laps. Forty-two degrees. And, lest we forget, a jam-packed (yawn...) eight hours.

A two-day show next year? Didn’t we almost have that this time around?

When it’s that bad, though, everybody is at fault, from track management, to the guys cleaning up the wrecks, to the drivers in the seats. I swear, even the guy at the Irving station took an extra couple of minutes when he was filling up my Subaru.

What we saw Sunday can never happen again. Period. Particularly as we move forward to 2009, with Wiscasset owner Doug White proclaiming that he will have only two major events on the schedule next year. One of those two is expected to be a return engagement for the "Fall Brawl."

But who will be willing to forget the madness they had to endure last weekend? Fans, who were fleeced for two separate days worth of admissions after PASS had to lease the track for Saturday as a standalone show? Teams from other tracks, who were treated to a bona fide wreckfest? Teams from Wiscasset’s weekly ranks, many of whom have cars to fix so they can compete in two more points races this season?

No one’s going to forget last weekend anytime soon. With 2009 shaping up as a critical year for Wiscasset Raceway, the Fall Brawl will be run under an especially watchful eye. It’s going to have to be a grand slam of a program, or else it could become a thing of the past.

* IT’S NOT AS though teams showed up, bought extra sets of tires, practiced all weekend and then found out that they may not be racing for the advertised purses at the Street Stock Nationals.

All year long, the Sportsman Nationals were advertised as a $10,000-to-win race, and all year long White was adamant that the purse structure was contingent on 60 entries for the event. When the number of teams on hand fell short of that by 14, the purse was prorated, as promised.

I don’t particularly like the idea of using a number – especially a gaudy one like $10,000 – to promote a race on the internet, on the radio, on signs and banners, when that’s not necessarily going to be an accurate number. Don’t get me wrong, I think there ought to be ways for a sales staff to cover a purse of that magnitude ahead of time, particularly with nearly a full year’s worth of lead time.

Some of the people at the track on Sunday morning were vocal in their displeasure of the prorated purse, including Puncin St. Clair, son of former track owner Dave St. Clair, who thought the event had been misrepresented to teams.

But again, there was no secrecy on behalf of the track, not in the months, weeks, days or even hours leading up to the event.

Some of the onus has to fall on the racers themselves. If you wanted to race for $10,000 and thought there was a chance the car counts might fall short of the prescribed number, you needed to bear some of the responsibility. You needed to call your friends, call your buddies, call acquaintances at other tracks and get them to the race with a car of their own.

* SO NOW WE’RE getting word that the Maine Racing Tour, the brainchild of Mike Harnish and Steve Reny, isn’t going to happen after all. It looks like discussions between Unity Raceway and Wiscasset Raceway to find common ground in a rules package – and bring Super Late Model racing back to Unity after a three-year absence – was the final nail in that coffin.

I hate to say I told you so, but, well, I told you so.

The problem with the tour was never in its idea for an affordable rules package that would make for a series of Late Model/Super Late Model hybrids. The problem with the tour was its target audience.

The Maine Racing Tour wanted to target those guys out there who weren’t actively racing now, who couldn’t spend the money it costs to race with the PASS North Series but didn’t want the restrictions placed by the American-Canadian Tour. There are two problems with that, though.

The first is that anyone who wasn’t enticed to get back into racing when Wiscasset fielded a Super Late Model division for weekly racers that paid $1200 a week to win and $10,000 for a championship certainly wasn’t going to be enticed by six or seven races for virtually no purse. The second is that we’ve already seen the shortcomings of such a series when it did exist.

Some of you, surely, are familiar with the PASS Outlaw Late Model division. We’ve heard all sorts of claims that it was the body rule, that it was the spread out schedule, that PASS president Tom Mayberry didn’t care about the series – all of which are simply untrue.

The problem was that it was geared to low-buck, second-tier Super Late Model racers who either wouldn’t or didn’t have the means to support a tour.

Why would the Maine Racing Tour have been any different?

* I CAN BE blamed for rain. I’m willing to shoulder that.

But when it snows at the Long John 150, I refuse to be held accountable. OK?

* I FEEL LIKE Lorne Wallace, the aspiring young racer in the Geico commercials, the nephew of Mike Wallace.

"I’m not saying I won’t have dinner with the man," Lorne says.

Well, I did kind of say I couldn’t have breakfast with Deane Mercier, and I feel all the worse for it.

On Monday, Mercier died unexpectedly in his Norwalk, Conn., home. He was one of the track announcers at Stafford Motor Speedway and a fine motorsports journalist. He also had the ability to do something I only dream of doing on a daily basis – take potshots at The Godfather that left The Godfather absolutely speechless.

In September, while sitting in the media center at New Hampshire Motor Speedway watching it rain cats and dogs the morning of the Sylvania 300, Mercier invited a few of us to breakfast in the infield restaurant. I pretended to be busy, not feeling like a big group’s worth of company.

Mercier took great delight the rest of the day in ribbing me for blowing off the breakfast. They weren’t the last words I got from the man affectionately called "The Cowboy," though. As he always did, he wished me a safe return trip to Maine. The man had a way of blending racing with real life, something few in the sport are able to do with any kind of grace.

We say it a lot, that someone "makes you feel like they’ve known you forever." In Mercier’s case, it was absolutely true. I don’t even remember the first time I met him, just that he always talked to me like we’d grown up covering racing together.

I should have made time for breakfast, in this case, the most important meal of the day.

Hey, Deane, if you’re out there reading this somewhere, the next breakfast is on me.

* ANOTHER FIRST: Getting chased down in a race track parking lot by a bunch of women bounding around in a golf cart with its headlights flashing.

I’ve changed the names to protect the innocent.

* AND NASCAR WONDERS why fewer and fewer media outlets are interested in covering their sport.

Teams are told to get all they can get on the last lap of a restrictor plate race. Then they’re told there’s no out of bounds when racing to the flagstand. Now they’re told the yellow out-of-bounds line is absolute.

Which, of course, is more than you can say for their rules.

I’m sorry, but if it’s not Regan Smith – say it’s Dale Earnhardt Jr. or Jeff Gordon or even Tony Stewart – that makes that pass on Stewart on the apron to win the AMP Energy 500 at Talladega, NASCAR would have looked the other way.

Don’t think so? How about Earnhardt ignoring several warnings from NASCAR to win a fuel mileage race at Michigan, his only win of the season? Or, how about David Ragan driving below the yellow line – just one example – in the middle of that same AMP Energy 500 with no penalty?

For once, a young driver overcame what is routinely viewed as inferior equipment and put on a driving display worthy of merit. But Smith’s not a Chase driver – and, worse yet, he’s not a "star" that sells NASCAR shirts or tickets – so he was treated like an outcast and stripped of an apparent win.

Tsk, tsk.

Plain and simple, NASCAR will never get the mainstream attention it craves so badly until it can have black-and-white rules that are enforced uniformly. Balls and strikes are one thing, fair versus foul is another matter entirely.

* I HEARD IT took Mike Landry three days to dredge up enough gumption to even look in the direction of his car after it cut out with two laps left in what would have been the biggest win of Landry’s career on Sunday.

That’s funny.

It took most of us that long to watch those races.

Ba-dum, ching!

Hey, how ‘bout a hand for Chris Isaak. The Stereophonics are in the house! Stick around!

Posted at 8:25 p.m. by TBarrett