Hey guess what, this guy is getting EXACTLY what he wanted and his newspaper wanted, hits to their website, and you people sending hate mail because that shows him and his bosses that people are reading what he wrote which in turn will prompt him to write more articles like this one. All you all are doing is throwing gasoline onto a wildfire here and helping it spread.
This debate has been going on for years now, and some of you have even stated it yourselves on here that these guys are turning more into entertainers who drive race cars for 4 hours for the good of the show and the puppetmaster (Brian France). This guy decided to write that same thing and go onto the only 24 hr NASCAR related channel to get you all fired up even more promoting the very article he wrote thus producing more webhits in a week than this guy has probably ever had in a year.
Besides if you read the article with an open mind it did have some interesting points to it. Yes the Waffle House reference was a bit extreme but take that part out it wasn't that bad of an article. Yes I do consider these guys athletes but I just thought it was an article to get a ruse out of people to get hits on a website and guess what, you provided it, by sending the link for the article around the web and in e-mails to most of your friends who are also NASCAR fans in turn who spread them too.
Don't flame me here just wanted to provide a different perspective.