Well while I admit Robbies not a stick get a good look at the muscles in his upper arms. This guy appears to have rather massive upper body strength.
Fish so how far can we carry your analogy before it breaks apart?
Since a sprinter goes faster with cleats then he would in tennis shoes, he is not an athlete?
Tennis players use rackets so they are not athletes?
Hell if you want to go down this road, every sport that uses anything in the way of equipment does not have athletes. I guess that just leaves swimmers as the only athletes (and then only if they swim nude)
A big part of the skill of a good driver is being able to communicate with the crew about how the car is handling, so that adjustments can be made. Very similar to how a coach in football takes with the quarterback and they adjust the plays as the game goes on.
But he explained in quite some detail exactly why they are athletes. I don’t think that a summary dismissal without even acknowledging what he said constitutes much of a rebuttal.
Don’t be so sure. Top race cars are pretty sensitive pieces of equipment. Without any training, you could very easily crash into the wall the first time you tried to take a turn at speed.
It’s been years since I followed auto racing. (I didn’t drop off because of anything that was happening in the sport, I just no longer live in a town with a major race, don’t have any local friends that are into it, and I got into other hobbies that took up too much of my time). However, when I was into it years ago, NASCAR seemed the best at trying to keep vehicle technology even among teams. That made it more of a driver competition and less of a vehicle competition. F1 was the worst back then. I don’t know if it’s still that way.
I have to reiterate what others have said: go to a race and you’ll appreciate it in a whole new way. There is a lot of strategy involved. You can see drivers making a move, trying to eek out that last bit of fuel in hopes of a yellow, and just plain out driving each other. The best way to attend a race is with people who know the sport. They can help you understand what’s going on. You can get a pretty good understanding in your first race. But it’s something that you’ll continue to learn more about as you get more into it. If you attend with some real gear heads, they may have scanners so you can get the broadcast commentary (or comments from spotters and others on the team) and stop watches so you can track who’s increasing/decreasing speed on every lap.
It’s easier for a newbie to watch and understand a NASCAR race than an open wheel race on an oval. I think it’s because the cars are easier to tell apart (more surface area and more distinctive paint jobs), they don’t get lapped as quickly, the speeds are a bit slower, and the field bunches up more. Many of my friends who went to see an Indy car race with me spent most of the race trying to figure out which red and white car was which and what lap it was on–kind of hard to do when they blow by you so quickly.
You’re not using anything to carry that analogy. Considering how far away you carried it, I’d consider that pretty athletic.
If an NFL sprinter can do the 40 in 4.3 seconds with cleats and in 4.6 seconds without cleats he’s still pretty damned athletic. Overall effect of the cleats: minimum.
If a NASCAR driver can go from 0-60 in his own car in 4.3 seconds, and he can do it in 20 seconds in my junker car, I don’t care how damn athletic the driver is.
I’m not saying at all that NASCAR drivers aren’t, can’t be, or shouldn’t be considered athletic. They’re just not engaged in an athletic competition, where their athleticism is the hinging point of the race (in my view). The quality of the equipment is much, much more essential to victory in NASCAR than any other sport that leaps to mind.
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What part of my post said “I’ll drive his car and he’ll drive mine and we’ll race each other?” I said he couldn’t beat other NASCAR drivers in my car. The equipment used is critical, much more so in NASCAR than other sports. This is why I say it is not an athletic competition.
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What part of my post said “I’d drive his car and still win?” I said I’d lose.
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Why do I bother? Maybe I’ll start a thread on a reading comprehension competition.
Excluding porn stars of course. 
Easy there! This is just a NASCAR discussion.
You wrote:
I took “swap cars” to mean you would drive the race car and the other guy would drive your car. I took your parenthetical statement to mean you would lose to other NASCAR drivers in their race cars. Okay, I read you wrong (but I think my mistake was understandable).
Yes, the car is an important part of a winning combination. So are other pieces of equipment in more mainstream sports. Do you think an offensive lineman in that crazy leather gear from the turn of the century would do well against others in their helmets and shoulder pads? (I think he’d get clobbered.)
Okay, that example is a bit extreme (though no more so than putting an '86 Tercel into Daytona), and I don’t think anyone is going to argue that the car isn’t important (except in those series where they put drivers in identical cars). However, equipment is only part of the combination. The drivers are still important. I tend to think of it like my computer: is it the hardware or software that makes it run better? It’s really difficult to say which contributes more to performance. You have to have both.
Yes, it can go too far and the skill of the driver does become secondary to the machine. That’s one of the reasons I could never really get into F1 back in the day. Although I loved road courses, the series (at the time I watched) was too much about who had the best car vs. which drivers had the most skill. Even then, however, I don’t think the skill of the driver was irrelevant, just not important enough to get me into that series. But NASCAR wasn’t like that.
I was just pointing out that there are races out there that accept stock '86 Tercels.
And by the way? Him in your Tercel, you in his car? You’d lose. You’d stall for at least a minute straight, and then possibly wreck it in the first turn.
And… Is Lance Armstrong no athlete? Put him on a BMX single-geared bike… he could not compete in the Tour.