INDIANAPOLIS — It was the tweet that launched a thousand phone calls. Thomas Meseraull, believing he’d been unnecessarily roughed up during a USAC midget feature out on the Kansas plains, took to social media for a bit of therapeutic venting.
For the next day or two, his digital rant was the talk of Midwest open-wheel racing.
Correcting for grammar and those awful Twitter-speak abbreviations, Meseraull’s blast went as follows: “Back in my day, you had to be 18 to race a USAC midget. Nowadays you just hand $10K a night” to, presumably, a car owner. “And when they crash you … nobody does a damn thing about it.”
Why, you ask, did he not address this issue directly, by having a word with the other driver? Because, typed Meseraull, when the other driver’s team has “45 people and three trailers, you can’t even go say, ‘WTF was that?’”
I wasn’t at the race in question and never saw a replay of the incident that upset him. But it took no great mental gymnastics to understand that Meseraull was mad at a young driver from one of USAC’s superteams.
In subsequent tweets, he claimed that in four of his five previous starts he’d been “crashed … by someone 16 and under,” and opined that the midgets had degenerated to “kamikaze racing.”
This guy they call T-Mez is a polarizing figure. He puts a degree of showmanship into the game, particularly in his post-race interviews, and that rankles some people. Of course, some of those interviews take place in victory lane after Meseraull has blown away the darlings of the rankled.
Give him this: Between the green flag and the checkered, he is a proper, old-school racer, fierce but fair. Oh, he’ll occasionally bump a wheel and I’ve seen him throw an iffy slide job or two. But you could say the same about any winning driver, from take-no-prisoners chargers such as Rich Vogler and Sammy Swindell to smooth stylists like Doug Wolfgang and Dave Darland. On the loud side of the catchfence, things happen.
Meseraull’s outburst — if tapping on the screen of a cellphone can be termed an outburst — reminded me of a tale I heard about Ronnie Sanders, the Georgia late model legend who conquered every major pavement show in the Southeast, from the Snowball Derby to the World Crown 300.
As the story went, Sanders, deciding that another driver had run into him once too often, climbed from his car and marched across the pits to have a word with the offender. Then it dawned on Sanders that the other driver was all of 14 years old.
You can imagine his internal monologue: “Is this kid going to listen to a word I say? Probably not. If the discussion goes badly and tempers overheat, am I allowed to hit him? Probably not. If he hits me first, can I hit him back? Probably not. OK, so do I instead fight his father? His grandfather?”
Sanders turned on his heels and walked back to his own pit. If his anger had dissipated, it’s a good bet that his frustration had not.
We live and we race in strange times. The norms we once knew are covered in dust.
For decades, officials and rules — written and unwritten — were the cops and the law. They policed things. Starters waved black flags for what used to be called roughriding. Pit stewards gave stern lectures to overaggressive drivers. In extreme cases, a driver got suspended for a week or two.
But when none of that was enough — when the guilty party deserved a harsher sentence than officials were likely to hand out — things were sometimes settled by a crude form of frontier justice.
The driver who’d been wronged would deliver a short sermon about respect, and if the message didn’t seem to be getting across, the preaching might be punctuated by a right hook. Ideally, the punch was thrown before the officials arrived, lest they turn the provocateur into a bullied victim.
Striking another driver is never the right thing to do, but it does get the point across. To paraphrase Jack Hewitt, that Nomex-robed judge and jury: When you look in the mirror every morning and see the same black eye for a week, you remember who put it there, and why.
I can’t recall the last time I saw a driver reprimanded for a poorly planned, poorly executed and overambitious move. Which is strange because in this age of young drivers with fat wallets and thin résumés, you’ll see at least one poorly planned, poorly executed and overambitious move every time you walk through a pit gate.
If officials won’t clamp down on these kids and their bumper-car behavior, who’s going to? Their teams? Come on. In any rent-a-ride situation, the old saying about never looking a gift horse in the mouth is a car owner’s first commandment.
You can’t talk tough to an adolescent driver and you can’t kick his ass. And we wonder why veteran racers get frustrated?
If a Ronnie Sanders or a Thomas Meseraull can’t have a wise word — even an angry wise word — with a kid who might need one, where are we? And where is this all headed?