Triple play

Hours before Clint Bowyer roared across the finish line with his 07 Jack Daniel's Chevrolet in the Sylvania 300, Steve LeBlanc milled around his family's comfy RV perched high on the backstretch hill at New Hampshire International Speedway and considered the myriad virtues of a NASCAR day in New England.

"Look around," he implored a visitor, finding infinite splendor in the surroundings of the 1-mile oval, a massive crowd that would top out at 101,000 infusing the forest and trackside bleachers with palpable energy. "They've got everything in this place. There's the race - and there's beer, tractors, backhoes, even dump trucks."

LeBlanc, an excavation contractor from the North Shore, is a man who can wax almost romantically about Ford trucks.

"C'mon," he said from his hillside patch of NASCAR nirvana, "Who wouldn't love this?"

Such was the mantra of those who gathered 'round the asphalt of Loudon and the emerald turf of Fenway and Foxborough Sunday, a day when New England fans drank and dined around the quintessential end-of-summer sports feast.

The air was cool, the sun warm - all in all a perfect day to burn up the track, race around the basepaths, or in the case of Patriots coach Bill Belichick, hope to see the embarrassment of a $500,000 fine fade ever so slightly in the rearview mirror.

"I'd like to see the NFL rulebook," said Chad Knaus, a crew chief for Jimmie Johnson, one of NASCAR's top drivers, as he chatted about Belichick's woes with acquaintances late Sunday morning. "I'd like to see if [what Belichick did] was cheating, or if he was just getting creative. What I get paid to do is be creative, and sometimes that's no different than coming up with a new play."

The day featured the start of NASCAR's 10-race Chase for the Nextel Cup, the continuing passion play of Red Sox-Yankees, and a renewed clash of Patriots and Chargers, old American Football League brethren from the days when Patriots founder Billy Sullivan had to scurry around town to lease gridirons by the season.

Bowyer, in the pole position, officially began it all by answering the call over the NHIS PA to "Start your engines!" at 2:10 p.m., and it came to an ominously silent ninth-inning halt at Fenway when David Ortiz popped out, 9 hours and 12 minutes after the starter's green flag waved in Loudon.

The Sox were losers (4-3), Bowyer and the Patriots (38-14) winners, and a total of 206,289 paying customers made their way through the turnstiles at the three venues. For scale's sake, 206,289 is on a par with the populations of Reno, Nev., and Durham, N.C.

Some picked-up pieces and observations of one man's visit to all three venues Sunday:

Ray Grentzel, 25, and fiancée Nora Grace, 18, sat on a shiny piece of Kubota farm equipment, one of the countless commercial vendors with displays at Loudon. The two were covered nearly head to toe in racing logos, although, said Grace, her NASCAR infatuation is fairly nascent.

"I'm just getting into it," she said, turning toward Grentzel. "He's the one who got me into it."

A store manager, Grentzel said he was bitten by the NASCAR bug only after he was given free tickets. Now he looks forward to the two major Loudon dates each summer. He has a particular fascination with the technical aspects of racing, including "setting up the car the right way," along with an appreciation for each driver's skills.

"I'm sure, for a lot of people, the fascination is with the chance of a crash out there," he said. "And I won't deny that I like to see a crash - I'd be lying to say otherwise. And as long as it's [Jeff] Gordon, hey, then I really don't mind."

Grentzel has trouble with Gordon's overall style, pegging him "the first pretty boy" of the sport.

"You know," said Grentzel, "he doesn't fit the redneck stereotype."

"That's right," added Grace, a freshman at Colby Sawyer College. "He enunciates."

Change of pace

The driver, hands steady on the pace car's steering wheel, retired from racing in 2003.

"After I guess what you could call a career-ending accident in Michigan," said Brett Bodine, who had 480 starts, one of them a victory, on the race circuit. "Yeah, a pretty major accident . . . some injuries . . . and it just came time in my career to retire." The accident four years ago came during a practice run and left him with a fractured collarbone and broken teeth.

Originally from Chemung, N.Y., Bodine grew up in a racing family. For 30 years, he said, his parents owned and operated Chemung Speedway. Older brother Geoff won the Daytona 500 and was an IROC champ. Younger brother Todd still grips a wheel to make a living.

Brett, 48, works in a number of capacities for NASCAR, including that of director of cost and research. On Sunday, he also handled the pace car for the start of the Sylvania 300. A few hours before the start, he gave a couple of journalists a one-lap high-speed tour of the track.

"If you can only follow people, there is no good in that," said the affable Bodine, after pressing the pace car to 105 miles an hour on the straightaway - only about two-thirds of the preferred race speed down the wings. "And as a driver, you're only as good as the car you're sitting in."

Bodine dropped the speed to about 65 miles an hour in the turns. The two journalists, newbies to the race game, were surprised at the G-force generated during the rapid acceleration to nearly 105 m.p.h., and the car's Velcro-like hold on the 12-degree corner embankment.

"If you miss your line just a little bit, the next thing you know, you're in the fence," said Bodine.

In the fence. Good to know, figured one of the two passengers, who made a silent promise to himself not to stay in the far right lane on the 90-minute ride to Fenway.

Cooking secrets

Maggie Wallace has been serving up sausages at Fenway for six years. The gates not open yet Sunday, she toiled away at her field-level grille, under the stands and past first base of the near-century-old park. The tantalizing smell wafted through the air, carried by intermittent clouds of smoke from the sausages, onions, and peppers.

As the sun sank, the temperature would be challenged to hang near 50. Good for the sausage-selling business. Not like those sweltering days of midsummer.

"Oh yeah, tell me about it," said Wallace, swatting away the smoke without annoyance. "Hot days, they don't buy much."

Business is better, too, said Wallace, when the Red Sox are winning. Originally from Georgia, she can't claim to be a Red Sox fan.

"No, my favorite team's the Yankees," she said. "But I don't tell anybody that. They'd get mad at me."

Domain of the powerful

Majority Red Sox owner John Henry had a very busy day, often spotted around the garage and track area in Loudon alongside Jack Roush and Geoff Smith, president of Roush Fenway Racing.

Henry wore his 2004 World Series ring, which glistened when he lifted his right hand to shield the sun at trackside. Prior to the start of the race, he employed silicone ear plugs to thwart the ragged growl of the cars. Later, via e-mail, he explained that he opts for a headset during the race.

"To listen to the drivers, spotters, and crew chiefs for Roush Fenway," he explained.

A common lament for those who travel to NHIS is the traffic, which can bottle up for hours. Henry, however, made things considerably easier by commuting via helicopter.

Asked how much he was able to see of both events, he reported, "Not all of the race, but all of the game. Arrived Fenway by 6."

Another very familiar face was that of presidential hopeful Rudy Giuliani, who made his way behind the row of pit boxes as race time approached. The would-be leader of the No. 1 world power shared a few words with the man who heads up Red Sox Nation.

"We did talk," said Henry, "mostly about the Red Sox and the Yankees."

There would be something else?

Behind enemy lines

Section 4, last row, right-field grandstand. Brothers Tony and Willie Rodriguez, who live in Worcester, chatted quietly to each other about an hour before game time, the stands filling up rapidly.

They weren't hiding those matching NY's stitched to the front of their ballcaps, but their discussion almost concealed their pinstriped devotion.

Almost.

"I try to laugh it off," said Willie, asking how he handles the taunts that a Yankee fan must endure in Red Sox country. "Right now, I'm saying, 'Hey, there's always next year.' "

Tony, willing to concede the Yanks will finish runner-up to the Sox in the East, keeps taunters mindful that the Yanks spirited Johnny Damon away from the Back Bay.

"We got him after he said he wouldn't go," he said. "So, there you go - money talks."

A chilly wind whipped through the back of Section 4 as game time approached. Tony buttoned his jacket up tight, and revealed that he was clutching a second ballcap, one with a Nike swoosh.

"I've got this," he said, "in case I have to change."

Focused in Foxborough

Fenway's left field scoreboard, as a bow to Patriots fans, included a posting for "NE" and "SD" under the American League scores. Nice gesture. Instead of starting pitchers, it posted "12" (Tom Brady) and "17" (Philip Rivers) as the hurlers in Foxborough.

But 30 miles to the southwest, where the football game started some 20 minutes after Curt Schilling's first pitch, it was far more difficult to learn of the goings-on at Fenway. Were the Sox really playing? In the press box, a small TV near the elevator carried the ESPN feed from the Back Bay, where the game wrapped up some four minutes after the Patriots dispensed with the Chargers.

Fourth-year defensive lineman Vince Wilfork, asked if he or his teammates had a sense of NASCAR and Sox-Yankees adding to the day's bigger picture in New England sports, said, "Sure, we know about the Red Sox and Yankees, but honestly, that's got nothing to do with us. We had a Chargers football team trying to beat our heads in. We had bigger problems - like going out there and trying to stop LT [LaDainian Tomlinson] and his posse."

"I know how big every sports team is to people in this area, and I appreciate that, I really do," added veteran linebacker Tedy Bruschi. "It's a big part of their lives. But what I can do to contribute to their appreciation is not to worry about whether the Red Sox win, or who's winning at NASCAR. I focus on trying to keep the Patriots winning, and that's what I think [the fans] will appreciate most."