by Darrell Waltrip

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First of all, it's not a 36-race schedule anymore. With the Chase for the Nextel Cup, it's now a 26-race season. It puts pressure on teams and drivers to get the job done in fewer races. Sponsors are spending incredible amounts of money, and they want their teams to be competitive and run up front. If they aren't competitive, they want to know why, and they want to know if the owner is going to make some changes.

Then, there's the competition. All of the cars are all so equal. I hate parity. It's the worst thing that ever happened to sports. You can say it worked in the NFL with the salary cap, but parity controls competition. When you give everybody the same car, gear and engine, a driver's only option to get by somebody is to run over them.

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That's why we see more and more drivers being more and more aggressive. And more and more drivers are angry with each other because the only opportunity that they have to get around a guy is to just knock them out of the way and continue.

There's probably a little of that "who does he think he is" attitude among the veterans toward the younger drivers because drivers that are new to NASCAR haven't paid their dues. But that's kind of old school and a thing of the past.

From one week to the next, you don't know which one of these young guys is going to step up and win. They all have talent, and they're all in good cars. That's another perfect example of the parity. You can take almost any driver and put him in one of these good race cars, and he's going to be competitive.

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When you're young, what you don't know, you don't know. When you go off in the corner under a guy, you've got to get in there before he does. The next thing you know, he says, "Gosh, I had no idea that thing would get loose like that."

The young drivers don't make any more mistakes than the old drivers do. It's pretty much 50/50, but the old guys seem to complain about it the more. The young drivers respect what the older drivers say, but they don't have a whole lot of respect for what they might do.

For example, there was a guy from Tennessee who came into the sport with an attitude. Another guy from Kannapolis came in and ticked off a lot of people. Then there was a guy from St. Louis that ticked off a lot of people, too. Then, there was some guy from Dawsonville...