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Yeah, yeah, I know teammate-ship isn't a word. But it should be, and the folks at Gibbs and Hendrick oughta learn it pronto after the dumbnitude (another non-word that ought to be one) at Daytona on Saturday night.

First, the Gibbs boy. Tony Stewart's the only guy in the garage with the chutzpah to blame a teammate for wrecking him when the teammate (in this case Denny Hamlin) is driving in front of him. Stewart's quick to blame bump drafting for problems at the plate tracks. But Stewart -- not Harvick or Johnson or Tony Raines or Crazy Joe Wreckemall -- is proving to be the biggest danger at Daytona and Dega these days. He violated the main rule - Thou Shalt Not Bump in the Corner - and punted Hamlin good. (Check out this video here - the shot from the 20 starts at about the 1:15 mark.)

Then there's the Hendrick team, which will be a three-car team by the time the Chase starts because someone will strangle Kyle Busch. (I'm betting on Casey Mears - he's not as mild-mannered as he looks. Plus he's expendable.) Busch was quick to blame his teammates for not helping him toward the end of the race. Can't say I blame him all that much - he had a wicked fast car (so did McMurray), and he figures even a little Hendrick help would be worth an extra 0.006.

At the same time, I can't blame Gordon or Johnson for hanging back. Busch was a wreck waiting to happen. And remember that Baby Busch was the one who pushed McMurray into the lead with five laps to go and hung out both Gordon and Johnson. At the very end of the race, Gordon couldn't get down to help Busch, and McMurray got a nice little push from teammate Carl Edwards.

I expect these guys to be aggressive on the track - they're race-car drivers, after all, and the good ones would run over their mamas, their dogs and their pickup trucks (in that order) for a win. But their own teammates? That just ain't right.

If Greg Biffle is going to drive this car at Watkins Glen, he should have to use this to drive it.

Someone with more time than me ought to use this handy little Flash tool to roll a Biffle. Now that would be funny.

It's only a matter of time before Sterling Marlin and Joe Nemechek hang up their steering wheels, and it looks like that time is real soon. ESPN.com and NASCAR.com both are reporting that Ginn Racing will bump Marlin out of the No. 14 for Indy (Regan Smith will take over). If Ginn doesn't find a primary sponsor for the No. 13 (Ginn Resorts don't count), Nemechek will be watching the Indy race on TV.

That Ginn Racing has struggled isn't that surprising: It's an undersponsored team with the oldest stable of drivers in the business. Marlin turned 50 in June, Nemecheck turns 44 in September and Mark Martin is 89. (He's actually only 48.)

One of the odd and maybe endearing things about NASCAR is the number of old guys involved. The ageless Mark Martin has six wins since turning 40 back in 1999. Dale Earnhardt had 28 wins and three of his championships after he turned 40 in 1991. Terry Labonte turned 40 six days after he won his second championship.

But the old timers don't win much any more. The oldest guy to win this year, Jeff Burton, turned 40 in June. (I'm 12 days older). The other gray beards, Tony Stewart and Jeff Gordon, were both born in the 1970s. Kyle Busch, Denny Hamlin and and Martin Truex Jr. each have a win this season, and all three were born in the '80s.

The last 40-something to win a Cup race was Dale Jarrett (Talladega, 2005) at age 48 and Mark Martin a week later at Kansas (at age 46).

I'm not sure why I'm getting wistful about the Cup veterans, but I'm fascinated by the prospect that Ginn might go from the oldest Cup team to the youngest. If Ginn and DEI join forces and DEI adds Kyle Busch to go with Truex and Paul Menard, you have a pretty young team with a lot of potential - a lot more than a Martin/Marlin/Nemechek lineup at Ginn, at any rate.

The Diecast Dude, meanwhile, isn't shedding tears about the impending turnout. It's just business, baby!

Wednesday update: Ginn lays out it future plans right here. The short version: Regan Smith takes over for Sterling Marlin, Aric Almirola because Mark Martin's sub, and the No. 13 (and Joe Nemechek) are done.

So Aric Almirola is finally going to be a big star. Word out this week is that Almirola is going to be Mark Martin's co-driver for the rest of this year and next. (Here's the Ginn Racing release.)

Almirola's claim to fame, other than being the second driver of Latino ancestry to drive in the Cup Series this year, is getting a Busch Series win at Milwaukee last month when he wasn't even behind the wheel. It's a weird rule, but, hey, it's NASCAR. Even weirder is that he's going to leave Joe Gibbs Racing to get his Cup ride.

The Gibbs camp says it encouraged Almirola to leave when the word started going around about a shakeup at Ginn. Might as well let the kid have a chance at a Cup ride, something that he wouldn't be getting at Gibbs in the near term.

But something about that doesn't sound quite right. Obviously Tony Stewart and Denny Hamlin aren't going anywhere, and Gibbs isn't adding a fourth car. But J.J. Yeley (remember him?) was terrible last year and only average (on a good day) this year. There's no reason to think he's in the No. 18 for life, and Almirola is the logical guy to replace him after this season or next.

Then there's the fact that Gibbs has been grooming Almirola for three years. You don't throw that kind of money at someone if you're not expecting a return. Why should Ginn reap the benefit of Gibbs' coaching?

There's also this: Almirola isn't going to get much more seat time at Ginn than he'd get if he stayed at Gibbs. Ginn's in such financial straits right now that it shuttered its Busch program (which means no Busch seat time), and Almirola's only to be Martin's co-pilot (which means he gets to drive in only a handful of Cup races). Either way, he's be atop someone's RV on race days.

So if you want to believe in sinister intentions on Gibbs' part, you've got two options:

(1) Almirola ain't that good after all (and I haven't seen enough of him to know if that's true), or

(2) Almirola's blow-up after being relieved at Milwaukee rubbed a lot of folks the wrong way at JGR, and he had to get gone.

My gut tells me it's No. 2. What's your read?

Big news: DEI just bought Ginn Racing. (It's being billed as a merger. Don't believe that for a second. If Teresa Earnhardt isn't going to let Junior have a piece of the action, she's sure not sharing with a guy who owns some resort property. Or not much, anyway.)

The short version:
* DEI grows to four cars

* Mark Martin will stay in the 01 with a co-driver (Aric Almirola).

* Paul Menard and the 15 will take the owner points from the No. 14, Sterling Marlin's old ride. (That means Regan Smith's ride is in jeopardy because now he'll have to qualify on speed.)

* The No. 13 is still DOA, though it's entered at Indy, but without a driver.

* The two teams will have to decide on an engine program. Ginn gets its motors from Hendrick; DEI just went halfsies with Childress.

I'm not sure whether this is good or bad for DEI - maybe good if they can figure out how to put all of the pieces together. DEI never seemed all that organized with two teams, and I can't imagine things are much better. Expect a lot of chaos, especially if Bobby Ginn does end up with a little piece of DEI. I can't imagine him deferring every decision to Theresa Earnhardt.

It's definitely a good deal for Ginn. He was quickly proving one of the ironclad rules of racing: The best way to make a small fortune in the sport is to start out with a large fortune.

Sometimes you have to feel sorry for Junior, the son of a NASCAR legend, a success in his own right (17 Cup wins, back-to-back Busch titles in the late 90s) but nowhere near the driver his late father was. That's the hazard of following your mom or dad into the family business: You'll always be measured against them. Seventeen wins by most accounts is pretty darn good - only seven full-time active drivers have more Cup wins than Junior, but most folks (including me sometimes) consider his results to be just fair.

And then there's Kyle Petty, who will make his 800th career Cup start on Sunday. The book on Kyle is that he's his own man, which is a way of saying that he's not nearly the driver his dad was. Look at his record: Just eight career wins (none since 19-ninety-freakin'-five) and no Cup championships, compared to 200 and 7 for The King. Kyle's last top 5 finish before Charlotte on Memorial Day came in 1997. Racing took the life of his older son, and the family business is a shell of its former self, barely able to keep up with the rest of the big-spending, big-sponsored NASCAR pack.

But Kyle Petty might be the best person, the biggest mensch, not just in racing but all of sports. The charity ride. The camp for sick kids. The fact that he has begged, browbeaten or guilted just about every driver in the garage to open their wallets and do something for someone else.

Dustin Long takes a quick look back at Kyle's career on and off the track. It hardly does the man justice -- probably nothing could -- but you'll remember where he's been and where he's going. It's the best thing in today's paper, and it might be the best thing you read all week.

I don't have any good Kyle Petty stories, none of my own, anyway. Maybe you do. That's what the comments are for.

Am I the only one bored to death by the Indy race? There's no passing (except in the pits), not much wrecking, and not much chance to lap anyone because the track is 20 miles long.

Not even ESPN's 1080 coverage (that's 360 coverage spun in two more dizzying circles) has gotten me all hyped up. I might use it as an excuse to take a Sunday afternoon nap.

Seriously, what am I missing about Indy?

At the moment, it would be Dustin Long, the same guy who wrote today's story about ESPN.
He and J.J. Yeley took a few laps around Indy today. (Yeley was driving, and Dustin has the podcast to prove it.). Their best speed: 159 in the pace car on the back stretch.

It rained most of the morning at Indy, so practice has been delayed, which means the pace car, with Dustin riding shotgun, has turned the fastest lap at the Brickyard so far. Wheeeee!

I think Dustin was pretty impressed with Yeley's driving. The Corvette pace car wheel-hopped coming out of 2, and Yeley managed to keep it off the wall. I suspect that's a terrifying feeling, especially if you're not used to it.