Bobby Labonte says the whole story about his decision to drive for Hall of Fame Racing and not Earnhardt Ganassi Racing in 2009 is not something he's ready to tell.

"I think it's a made-forsitcom TV show, horror movie and drama all in one," Labonte said Tuesday on the NASCAR Sprint Media Tour hosted by Lowe's Motor Speedway. "It was kind of wild."

Labonte

Reports had Labonte heading for the No. 8 Chevrolets, but he wound up in the No. 96 Fords for Hall of Fame as part of that team's affiliation with Yates Racing.

Labonte said Earnhardt Ganassi Racing "just didn't have a lot of the things in order to make it work for the whole season."

"There were a lot of 'ifs' in there," Labonte said.

Labonte said that once reports emerged about his potential deal for the No. 8, he didn't shoot them down because things weren't settled.

"Everybody was not 100 percent wrong. It just wasn't 100 percent right," he said.

"I mean, I figured if I stopped and said, 'Stop talking or writing,' that it would be worse than not having it out there anyway. I did learn those lessons from being in the sport this long, that if nobody is talking about you, you're nothing.

"You know the talk might not have been 100 percent accurate, but at least there was talk. Some press is better than no press."

Nationwide Insurance announced a program on Tuesday that will add $25,000 to the winner's take at four Nationwide Series races this season.

The race winners at Nashville, Kentucky, Iowa Speedway and Memphis would earn an extra $25,000 - if they are running the full series schedule. If an ineligible driver wins one of those races, the prize money would roll over to the next race.

The program also will award $50,000 at the end of the season to the eligible driver with the most points in those four races.

This is the second season Nationwide has sponsored what was previously known as the Busch Series. The winner's incentive program is called the "Nationwide Insurance Dash 4 Cash."

I never have been among those who believe that race car drivers need to have fist fights to make NASCAR popular, but then again I don't have hundreds of thousands of tickets to sell each year, either.

A group of men who do have that task gathered earlier this week at the NASCAR Sprint Media Tour hosted by Lowe's Motor Speedway to talk about the state of the racing economy, and they did have a funny exchange on that very topic.

The men are all the presidents and general managers of the respective Speedway Motorsports Inc. tracks around the country. Eddie Gossage of Texas Motor Speedway, Steve Page of Infineon Raceway, Ed Clark of Atlanta Motor Speedway, Marcus Smith of Lowe's Motor Speedway, Jerry Gappens of New Hampshire International Speedway, Chris Powell of Las Vegas Motor Speedway and Jeff Byrd of Bristol Motor Speedway joined

their boss, SMI chairman Bruton Smith, on the dais.

Gossage talked about the $20 tickets his track is selling for some of the backstretch seats for its Cup races, saying he knows it would be infinitely harder to get fans to come back once they decide they can't come any more than it would be to give them a ticket they can afford and keep them "from losing touch with the sport."

It's hard to argue that, but it's also true that the business of cutting ticket prices when sales are "soft" right before a race is a tricky proposition. If I paid $100 for my seat last year and then renewed it for this year at that same

rate, I don't want to hear that the guy sitting next to me waited until two weeks ago and got his seat for $50.

Sometimes you have to do what you have to do, of course, but that can make it harder to keep those renewal rates up in the 90 percent range that Byrd said he has with his non-corporate clients at Bristol.

Burton Smith said it's really simple to know what to do when times are tough. "I don't care what you're doing, if you're selling hot dogs on the corner. What you do is work harder," he said, "You sell, sell, sell."

All tracks are doing that, of course. Byrd and members of his staff have literally been going to Food City grocery stores in Tennessee and Virginia and selling tickets to fans in those stores - "one-at-a-timing," as they

called it in the movie "O Brother, Where Art Thou."

But that doesn't mean the tracks couldn't use a little help, and the ones the track executives said they could use some help from are the ones fans really come to see - the race car drivers.

"This idea of running and hiding and not signing autographs, I don't like that," Smith said. "I think we have to overcome that."

Byrd and Gossage said, and their colleagues nodded in assent, that drivers seem more willing to help out with the season coming up than they have been in a long time.

That's when the day's best exchange happened.

"You take Jimmie Johnson," Smith said, speaking of the three-time defending Cup champion. "He's my neighbor and he's a great guy. I like him, I like

his wife.

"But one thing that would help would be for Jimmie to get out of the race car and just go slap somebody sometime. He could slap me."

Gossage said he believes the sport is beginning to pay a price for becoming "corporatized" over the course of the past several years.

"These guys are a colorful bunch, but not publicly," Gossage said of today's drivers. "It's nothing that can't be fixed pretty quickly.

"Jimmie could punch somebody. He could hit me, but it would be better if he'd hit another driver. If he wants to hit me, he can hit me."

Smith said it was good of Gossage to volunteer. "Can I hit you?" Smith asked.

As the laughter died down, Gossage said he'd be OK with taking one from the boss.