Full Throttle

What’s the definition of impatience? Or restlessness, intolerance and hastiness for that matter? Impatience is an interesting word; Its positive pole is audacity; its negative pole is intolerance. It is a fear of missing out.

The fear of missing out, one can assume, played a part at Talladega and featured a five wide sprint down the backstretch. That obvious display of impatience (there’s that word again) created a lap 9 crash (out of 188!) that collected a third of the field with 15 cars showing at least slight damage.

Included in the wad of steam and shredded steetmetal was the #6 AAA Ford Fusion of Mark Martin, who was as vociferous as ever in describing the action on the 2.66 mile oval.

“It’s ridiculous, it’s way beyond angry - it’s stupid,” Mark Martin fumed. “It would be ignorant for me to be mad about it. It was one of the most fun places I ever came, in 1982 it was just a blast to race here. But in today’s day and age, it’s hard to have fun when you know that the pin is out of the grenade.

“It’s just a matter of time before it goes off.”

Explode it did, and in the process impacted the race results for all of the following to some degree: Ken Schrader, Kyle Busch, Ryan Newman, Kasey Kahne, David Stremme, Sterling Marlin, Hermie Sadler, Kevin Harvick, Bobby Labonte, Hermie Sadler, Michael Waltrip, Carl Edwards, Brian Vickers, Martin Truex Jr, (take deep breath here) and the aforementioned Mark Martin.

Kasey Kahne apparently took the hardest hit with Hermie Sadler replacing Kahne once his team got his #9 Dodge back on track, though the return was short lived. NASCAR officials say Kahne will have to get medical clearance before he’s allowed to test Tuesday at Lowe’s Motor Speedway.

Michael Waltrip recovered from this m