Those who know me will confirm that I am an avid fan of auto racing, and indulge in it locally myself whenever I can. NASCAR is, of course, the preeminent stock car racing series in the country, and I have followed series that for a long, long time. That said, I have to wonder, just what it is that NASCAR has against racing itself?
I pose the question based solely on what I see of how NASCAR conducts its events. There are a number of things they have done in recent memory that have actually *reduced* the amount of racing happening during these events, compounding that by frequently shortening the event itself.
Some examples:
Stage racing/caution laps – NASCAR ostensibly introduced stage racing to make for more interesting races, likely to appease the dwindling attention span of the American public. However, the period between stages and every caution period inevitably consists of the following: a lap or two to slow the cars down behind the pace car: a lap before opening the pits to the lead lap cars: opening the pits to lead lap cars: opening the pits to non-lead lap cars: rearranging everybody on the track: giving the one-lap-to-go sign to the field: then restarting the field. This dance occupies 7 or 8 laps, all of which are counted toward the total laps of the events. And all of which are non-racing laps, which leads to less racing.
Reduced practice/competition cautions- NASCAR has reduced practice at its events, allegedly to ‘save the teams money’ but this writer suspects it is to free up the drivers for other, lucrative appearance events. Regardless, they counter this by announcing ‘competition cautions’, actual planned caution periods so teams can adjust their cars and the like. These cautions, of course, come with the lap-wasting series of events detailed in the prior paragraph, and result in, you guessed it, less actual racing. As an added bonus, on the increased use of road courses, which are ridiculously long, these at-a-crawl laps are even longer.
Street sweepers (!) – In the last few years, every caution period has seen the deployment of street sweeper trucks around the track, and they spend several laps, well, sweeping up stuff. While we have all heard of ‘the marbles’ (the zillion or so bits of rubber that litter the upper reaches of the race track), constantly removing these during the race is a recent change. Even we local racers have to contend with a zillion marbles on the track, and these NASCAR drivers are supposed to represent the best in the country so they should have the needed skills to navigate them too. Since it is always the same street sweeping company at every track and event, I’m gonna guess that said company (for which I will not provide free exposure by naming) is paying NASCAR for being the official-crap-picker-upper or such thing, and is guaranteed a certain number of laps of exposure in each event. Again, less actual racing.
I could go on, and most readers have already moved on, but you still here get the idea. So what gives, NASCAR – what do you have against actual racing?
Carter
In no particular order 