Points so close you don't know what you'll get
I WAS SO certain I was going to catch Leighton Minnell this time. The expat Whanganui racer, a former world champion and two-time national title holder in jetsprint superboats, is well known for his colourful quotations.
He'll tell you the competition is "tighter than my underpants on the hook", and that he guarantees to have racing sponsors running across his new Waitara track in nothing but their grundies for the "Undie 500".
So, when I called him up to discuss tomorrow's white hot final round of the PSP NZ Jetsprint Championship in Featherston, I hoped to catch him out by saying I thought the points battle in his division between the leading five drivers was so close, "you could throw a handkerchief over it".
Foolish of me. You just can't one-up the King of the Cliches.
"It's going to be a box of chocolates - you don't know what you're going to get. A TAB's best friend," Minnell enthused.
It really is an extraordinary circumstance in motor racing to be heading into the final round of a major championship and have so many drivers who have a mathematical chance of claiming the title.
It has been years in the New Zealand Superboat class of the jetsprints since this has occurred, as the season is as much about mechanical attrition as it is about speed.
Last year, Whanganui's Pat Dillon was able to take advantage of some leading drivers having spinouts or faults in their engines to win two of the opening three rounds.
Despite the dominant Cantabrian Peter Caughey, basically the Godfather of the sport in this country, eventually getting his boat back up to scratch, Dillon had done the math.
He drove swiftly, but safely, to finish third at each of the remaining three rounds and clean up the championship by an eight-point margin.
That's usually the way of it in the national series.
Entering the final round, the leading driver normally has the crown all sewed up if he just gets through to the top five or top eight eliminators - no need to do anything drastic.
Formula one can have a similar deal - many a time drivers have not even needed to enter the final few races due to their unassailable advantage.
But boy, when the fates align because different drivers have had success and failure all season and that happenstance creates an even points table, it makes the final shootout a magic day.
One of Nascar's most famous races was the 1992 Hooters 500 at Atlanta Motor Speedway, where because of unique circumstances, there were six drivers who had the chance to win the season title - the most ever in the history of American stockcar racing.
The points leader, second-generation racer Davey Allison, had a year where, in the words of his crew chief Larry McReynolds: "We'd win one week, wreck the next".
That brought Alan Kulwicki, a throwback racer who owned his own race team, and ex champion Bill Elliott back into contention, with only a 40-point spread between them, which was just the difference between three to four placings in a field of over 41 cars.
With Kulwicki and Elliott running at the front of the race all day, Allison overcame engine issue after issue to keep battling back into the top 10 and leave the statisticians in a sweat as they constantly recalculated the possible final placings.
Sitting exactly where he needed to be in sixth spot, Allison got caught up with another car crashing and saw the title slip away, with all eyes now looking at Elliott and Kulwicki.
For the Nascar races, there were bonus points for whichever driver led the most laps, so many a trembling hand hovered over calculators as it was clear the championship would go to the wire. In the end, Elliott won the battle but lost the war.
He claimed the checkered flag with Kulwicki in second, yet the plucky underdog owner had led two more laps than Elliott over the nearly four-hour event - giving him the title by a mere 10 points.
Nascar ultimately tried to manufacture the magic of that historic afternoon by introducing the "Chase for the Sprint Cup" in 2004 , where the final 20 races of the season work as a playoffs format, so, come the last race, there are still four drivers who can win the title.
The concept has had middling results - many contenders dropping out over the course of "Chase" under controversial circumstances, despite having been the most consistent drivers through the year and obvious title winners under the old points accumulation format.
I would rather say that consistency wins the day in motor racing, it's only fair for a full season's hard work by man and machine.
But there's no denying when the fates dictate it all comes down to the wire on that final afternoon of the season, the racing truly is more special.