SPARTA, Ky. -- These are difficult times for sportswriters. Ours used to be a baseball-basketball-football gig, maybe some hockey if you drifted north, some more football if you went the other way, with a crash course required every four years in the Wide World of Sports sports.

But now there's this race car thing, which just last week was confined to Carolina dirt tracks and all of a sudden is bigger than Tiger Woods off the tee. This is disconcerting because, trust me, sportswriters aren't car guys. There's no reasonable explanation for this phenomenon, but it's a pitiful, incontrovertible truth.

What sportswriters do is marry women who can change the oil and keep track of that rotating-the-tires thing. Honey, what's that clunking sound?

The expertise of most sportswriters is limited to whatever they could be manager for in high school. Where did this auto racing come from? Is Cincinnati Elder going to have a team next year? Are suburban parents going to organize little auto-racing leagues for their kids? Instead of playing catch after dinner, do fathers now take their sons out to the driveway for a little tire management?

Tire management; that's an important item in auto racing. Learned it last year by hanging around Kentucky Speedway.

If you're to understand anything about auto racing, tire management is the place to start. And since I typically depend on women for most of my automotive information, it was fortunate that one, Lisa Smokstad, was at the speedway this weekend as the tire person for Hendrick Motorsports in general and Jack Sprague in particular.

As you might suspect, Smokstad didn't grow up with visions of making it big in tire management. Her thing was gymnastics, but it happened that one of her gymnastics pals got her a job in the concession stand at this little racetrack in Shakopee, Minn.

Like most people in the world and Minnesota, I've never been to Shakopee, but I can imagine what it was like because, as a working teenager, I spent some down-home Friday nights chronicling the goings-on at the dirt track situated on the Northeast Missouri Fairgrounds, where a local mechanic named Peevine Pipes had his way. It wasn't unpleasant.

Anyway, it's a good thing Peevine didn't stray as far north as Shakopee, because he might have wandered by Lisa's concession stand before Craig Smokstad did, and who knows how her head would have turned. As it happened, Craig was the one who turned it, she said to her friend that she would marry him one day, and she did.

Craig was there to work on his brother's car, and it turned out that Lisa was a big help with that. She didn't know anything about horsepower, but when they called out the numbers for tread depths and tire circumferences, Lisa could keep real good track of them in her head. She was a psychology major with a gift for math, which somehow prepared her perfectly for tire management.

What she had was "an obsession to be right." About what, you ask? Well, as Smokstad explained, "That's the science of it."

The science is how to pressurize the left tires a little different than the right. It's easier now that she's working with radial instead of bias-ply tires -- there's not as much margin for error -- but the calculations are no less vital because, as everybody around here knows, it's all about tire management. You don't go into the wall by blowing an intake manifold.

For Saturday's Kroger 225 NASCAR Craftsman Truck race, Smokstad had an inch and 5/16 difference between Sprague's right and left tires. The inflation is achieved with nitrogen, not air -- nitrogen contains less moisture -- and that was Friday's task.

Consequently, she spent much of the day with her Goodyear friends, who mounted the tires before she let the air out and put the nitrogen in, took the tread depths, and measured all 16 for their stagger and spring rates, terms which are thrown in here to give the column a real auto-racing feel.

A team has four sets of tires to work with in a racing weekend, but one will be already spent after the practice hour. Drivers are required to start the race on the tires they qualify with, which leaves two fresh sets for 225 miles.

The short life of the starting tires is actually a useful thing, because when they come off, Smokstad will measure them every which way for pertinent information. "You can tell what the truck is doing by what the tire looks like," said for erstwhile gymnast, who does the same hocus-pocus for Ricky Hendrick in the Busch series and Ken Schrader in the Winston Cup.

This is such a lively challenge that Smokstad thinks little of being the only female in her end of the business. It helps that Craig works for the same team, which owns both the Sprague and Hendrick trucks.

Before Saturday's third-place finish, Craig Smokstad got Hendrick's vehicle ready for the race, then hustled over to Sprague's pit, threw on the 24 uniform, and changed the tires that his wife has pressurized and measured.

He remains the mechanic of the two. "I still don't change the oil in my car," confessed Lisa, who, despite her solid grasp of tire management, obviously wouldn't do as a sportswriter's wife.

Lonnie Wheeler writes for the Cincinnati Post.