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WATKINS GLEN, N.Y. — Starting from the pole at Watkins Glen International usually is a good omen in Nextel Cup. But racing the Car of Tomorrow for the first time on the high-speed road course without much practice promised a few surprises for today’s Centurion Boats at The Glen.

Although the race winner has started from the pole eight times in the previous 21 Cup races, there’s a feeling that hardened road racers, such as Canada’s Ron Fellows and crowd favorite Boris Said, might have their best chance yet of securing that elusive victory.

“With the old cars, if you had success you could go off and build on it,” said points leader Jeff Gordon, who has four wins at Watkins Glen and a NASCAR-record nine road course triumphs in his career. “Now, it’s basically starting from scratch. Experience is not going to play as much of a role.

“I think this car really equals out the competition,” said Gordon, who was awarded the pole when qualifying was canceled Friday because of a misting rain. “In the past, we had great races with Ron Fellows and Scott Pruett and those guys. I would say our cars were probably a little better than theirs, and that’s why we were able to beat them. But in this situation, I think those guys could possibly really shine. They’ve got a lot of laps here, they’re good here.”

Fellows has won three Busch Series races at Watkins Glen and twice finished second in Cup — to Jeff Gordon in 1998 and Stewart three years ago despite starting last. Said was third two years ago, while Pruett, who is not in the race, finished second to Robby Gordon in 2003 and was fourth two years ago.

It will be an uphill battle. Fellows will start 26th in the Chevrolet normally driven by Tony Raines, and Said, who is replacing Bill Elliott in the No. 21 Wood Brothers Ford, will start from the back of the 43-car field.

“It’s going to be more difficult because I don’t believe these cars have as much downforce as the old stock car,” Fellows said. “That’s going to make it tougher, and they’ve still got tremendous horsepower, so we’re going to be going awfully fast in a straight line.”

BUSCH SERIES: Kevin Harvick had victory lane to himself Saturday, using perfect pit strategy to win the Zippo 200.

Harvick, the defending Busch Series champion, led 37 laps and beat Jeff Burton by 3.5 seconds for his second consecutive win, fifth this season and 31st of his career. That ties him with Jack Ingram for second all-time behind Mark Martin’s 47.

“We’ve won 31 of these races,” Harvick said. “But you don’t get to race against those guys. All you have is the history.”

Polesitter Kurt Busch was third, followed by Paul Menard and rookie Brad Coleman. Juan Pablo Montoya, who started on the front row and was seeking a record third NASCAR road course win of the season, ran up front much of the day but finished 33rd after being caught up in a crash with Jason Leffler on a restart with 14 laps remaining in the 82-lap race.

AFTER THE 2002 WINSTON CUP season began with two different reactions to late-race crashes–officials waved the red flag in Daytona but allowed the next week’s race, in Rockingham, to end under a yellow flag–controversy overtook safety as the series buzzword.

Controversy is nothing new in Winston Cup, but in this case it was perpetuated, if not created, by the series’ inconsistencies and willingness to bend, if not break, its laws whenever it sees fit.

To be fair, in one case the crash affected the outcome more than race officials could have known. Daytona’s late crash offered then-leader Sterling Marlin the opportunity to make a mistake–exiting and working on his car during the delay–that forced officials to banish him to the back of the pack.

Possibly because of that fallout, in Rockingham there was no red flag, and fans yawned as Matt Kenseth sailed across the finish–in front of Marlin.

Further exposing NASCAR’s ineffectiveness regarding the interpretation of the rulebook, in the season’s third race in Las Vegas, a penalty was enforced on every driver–except Marlin, who apparently had already reached his season quota of bad breaks. Unfortunately, instead of embracing consistency, NASCAR seemingly prefers leaving its drivers shrugging their shoulders and having to find consolation that these sorts of things will even themselves out over the course of the season.

After the Rockingham race, there inexplicably were calls for more racing instead of more consistency. Obscuring its own errors with potential rule changes, NASCAR officials were swayed to consider adopting some form of overtime for Winston Cup races, most likely similar to the “green-flag rule.” That rule–used, among other circuits, by NASCAR’s Craftsman Truck Series–dictates that a race must end with at least two laps of green-flag racing. This ignores that an overtime period is enacted to break deadlocks when an athletic contest has no winner. This is not the case in Winston Cup races–the outcome is not in doubt–and giving drivers the chance to make up for caution flags at the end of a race but at no other time makes little sense.

Even worse, it could prove dangerous. Purposefully causing a crash in order to buy time for a hard-charging teammate should hardly be a worry–drivers are competitive, not stupid–but bunching cars up at the end of the race with the results on the line can create some needlessly aggressive driving. NASCAR is considering trading a potentially drab finish for a potentially dangerous scrum. This does not seem smart.

Plus, drivers are making late-race decisions–most importantly, when to refuel–on the basis of running a set number of miles. The best drivers are squeezing everything they can out of their car within a set number of miles. Some elements of strategy, not to mention talent, would be threatened by running unscheduled laps.

The series can’t be accused of not giving the people what they want, but more racing would change the entire rhythm of a race–and may punish drivers more than reward fans.

SAN FRANCISCO - In what sounds like a science fair project on steroids, engineers at Stanford University plan to have an unmanned robot car ready to navigate urban traffic in less than a year.

The car, a 2006 Volkswagen Passat wagon dubbed Junior, is Stanford’s newest competitor in a high-stakes road race sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the U.S. Department of Defense’s research and development arm.

The Stanford car will compete in the agency’s third and most challenging derby—the DARPA Urban Challenge, in which robotic cars will drive in a mock city environment. Cars must merge, navigate traffic, traverse busy intersections, avoid obstacles and master the most delicate of skills—determining who has the right of way.

“These cars are driven by artificial intelligence,” said Sebastian Thrun, a computer science and electrical engineering professor at Stanford, who unveiled his plans for Junior this week at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in San Francisco.

Stanford and Thrun have been down this road before. Stanford’s entry in the 2005 race, Stanley, won first place. But that race was run in the Nevada desert. “The next challenge will be to drive where we live,” said Thrun, who spoke on a panel about the future of robotics.

“This new generation of robots is making the case that they can safely navigate without any human assistance,” he said.

An array of other U.S. universities, many with corporate partners, are involved in the 2007 challenge, including Carnegie Mellon University, which finished a close second to Stanford in the 2005 race.

Thrun says the project may pave the way for a future in which self-driving cars will make transportation safer for those who, like the elderly, might rather ride than drive.

“By 2030, we should be able to deploy this technology on highways reliably,” he said.

Thrun said he expected a battlefield version of the car to be available as early as 2015.

URBAN CHALLENGE

Driving in a city environment means the robot cars must not only detect obstacles, they must make sense of them.

“To be able to understand your environment, predict what happens next and be able to react when something goes slightly wrong—that is the most challenging,” said Stanford research engineer Mike Montemerlo, who spoke at the meeting.

Junior’s steering, throttle and brakes have been modified by engineers at the Volkswagen of America Electronics Research Laboratory in Palo Alto, California.

The car sports an array of sophisticated sensors, including a range-finding laser that provides a three-dimensional, 360-degree view of its surroundings in near real-time.

Junior’s computer “brain” is about four times more powerful than Stanley’s was in 2005.

To make the car “think,” about a dozen students, faculty and researchers at Stanford worked on software to manage driving tasks like perception, mapping and planning.

The location for the November 3 race will be announced in October. For the fastest car to navigate the course, the prize is $2 million—plus bragging rights.

NASCAR HAD ITS equivalent of the Final Four on Sunday — the event leading into “the event.”

Only in this case, nobody watched. I mean, nobody.

That’s not to say nobody cared. It’s just that nobody watched.

OK, somebody watched. According to the raters, 50,849 of the approximately 7.2 million people in the Bay Area — fewer than 1 in every 100 — were tuned into Channel 11 Sunday afternoon as Jimmie Johnson zoomed closer to the Nextel Cup championship.

There’s something wrong with that.

Actually, there are many things wrong. And here’s how I’d go about correcting those errors in time for this week’s finale of the NASCAR championship series:

Schedule the finale in primetime. Sunday’s Ford 400 in Miami is scheduled to go green just after noon — at which point the Raiders faithful will be engulfed in a winnable game at Minnesota, and Niners fans will be settling in for a duel with the rival Rams. To have a chance in this market, the race must start at 5 p.m.

- Move Sunday night’s Patriots-Bills game to Saturday night. This would have two benefits: 1) It would open the primetime slot on NBC’s Sunday schedule; and
2) It would provide a heckuva lot better lead-in than a Notre Dame football game.

- Change the name of the race. I’m sorry, but “Ford 400″ just doesn’t say “Super Bowl” to me. For crying out loud, there already was a UAW-Ford 500 race six weeks ago. Want a big reason why 7.15 million people here weren’t watching this past weekend’s penultimate race? It took longer to say “Checker Auto Parts 500 presented by Pennzoil” than for the No. 48 to take the lead.

Give Johnson’s competition a chance. It sounds as if the Chase leader will have to blow a tire on the way to the track to lose his 86-point lead over Jeff Gordon. NASCAR tweaked its scoring system this year, and it needs to do it again. Only bigger. Each race should be more about winning and less about not wanting to pass your teammate for fear of sending him spinning.

Bowling on the big screen

In case you’re wondering … yes, presuming you have ESPN, you will be able to see Cal’s less-than-glamorous bowl game next month. Yep, even if just 15,000 people make the trek across the bridge to witness the seventh-place ACC team in the rain three days after Christmas.

ESPN has that game — the Emerald Bowl — and two of the other three most likely destinations for the bumbling Bears: the Las Vegas Bowl on Dec. 22 and the Armed Forces Bowl on Dec. 31.

At this point, the best the Bears can aspire to be is a Sun Bowler on Dec. 31. CBS gets that one.

Worst thing I heard all week

“It’s over.” That’s what Jeff Gordon had to say about the Nextel Cup competition on the eve of the “Junk Car Jamboree”. Gotta say: I’m even less excited about watching now that I know it’s a boat race.