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One week from the 51st running of the Daytona 500, there's no buzz in the air. Only days away from the Twin 150s (or the Gatordade Duel, as they're now known) and there's not even any noise.

This happens from time to time, and it's almost never a good thing for NASCAR or the fans. But it just feels different this time. It feels like, well, nothing.

The season hasn't even started yet, so that explains part of it, and even though the sport is coming off an historic close to the 2008 season there seems to have been some sort of break between last year and now. And let's face it, the historic 2008 season didn't feel all that historic anyway. After watching the story develop for the past five or six years, we can honestly say that Jimmie Johnson has become a great race-car driver and an excellent home improvement supplies salesman.

Johnson will go for a fourth straight title this season. That's the only story line we have right now. Watching him run down Cale Yarborough in 2008 to become only the second driver to win three straight titles was like watching tennis. That's how boring it was. That's how predictable the sport is now. That's how corporate the last great American redneck way has become.

We no longer go to the races to see Richard Petty or David Pearson or Dale Earnhardt or Tim Richmond. We go to see Hendrick Motorsports. We no longer watch Rusty Wallace slamming into Darrell Waltrip or even Jeff Gordon or Tony Stewart or Junior. It's all decals and dollar signs now. There's no grease. No peeled paint. No fights on the backstretch.

We're 30 years removed from the big one, the fight between Cale and the Allison brothers that kicked off the 1979 season and kick-started a golden era of racing. That's the way we remember it anyway, a week that started with Kyle Petty winning the ARCA event the first time he'd ever entered a race and would include the first Busch Clash and then, of course, the great race that ended with Richard Petty winning while Cale and Bobby and Donnie fought on the backstretch, all on national TV for the first time.

We'll always compare the modern sport to those days and remember them as a time when everything was perfect. Of course, it wasn't. That wasn't even the season-opening race. The 1979 season, as many of them did in those days, began in Riverside, Calif., on a road course that Buddy Baker said he drove for five years before he even knew it was paved.

And there was a boring quality to watching Petty Enterprises win every week then, too. Or so it seemed.

In those days, the seasons seemed to morph into one long race, week after week, year after year. The racing was better then only because the drivers were better. That 1979 Daytona 500 included Petty and the Allisons and Pearson and Waltrip and Yarborough and Earnhardt and Baker and Benny Parsons and Terry Labonte and Richard Childress and Geoff Bodine and Ricky Rudd and Neil Bonnett and Harry Gant and A.J. Foyt. More than a quarter of the field would end up in stock-car racing's hall of fame.

The most important aspect of that day wasn't the fight or Petty's sixth Daytona 500 win but the television show. The first live start-to-finish broadcast was seen by millions, some of whom were snowed in from a massive storm that shut down the Northeast and left people who'd never imagined watching a stock-car race captive and at the mercy of CBS.

That's the legacy of 1979 and the reason the sport has become so stale 30 years later. The corporate world flocked to the sport, and sponsorships began to drive the financing. Drivers learned public relations, washed their hands and began making public appearances. Over time, they became slick salesmen and asked fans to buy the products they endorsed. Of course, they did.

That was the lesson NASCAR took from the greatest stroke of luck it ever had, that it could sell itself to the highest bidder, become a shill warehouse for every product under the sun and go completely corporate with the full backing of banks and companies that would never fail.

Well, guess what?

Thirty years later, with banks failing and companies laying off workers at an historic rate and the global economy wrecking before our eyes, we start another racing season with fewer teams, fewer impact drivers and fewer fans talking about going to Daytona or anywhere else.

Racing has never been about the money except the money the fans carry in their wallets when they walk into a track. It's never been about the products, though the fans lined up to buy the things the drivers told them to buy. It's always been about the drivers and the fans who relate to them. In 1979, most of the racers in the Daytona 500 arrived in cars and caravans that left out of Charlotte and Randleman and Stuart and Timmonsville and Ellerbe and Hueytown.

This week, they arrived in corporate jets and helicopters, 30 years removed from reality, trying to sell a sport that no longer makes any noise.

Contact Ed Hardin at 373-7069 or ed.hardin@news-record.com