I don’t get it. It’s not like I’m living under a rock. When did NASCAR suddenly become so popular?
I’m honestly not a fan of any “sport” in which machines do the bulk of the competing. Sure, there’s some skill involved in the actual driving and maneuvering, but isn’t 90% of it how good your racing team (and hence, your car) happens to be?
Somebody explain to me why I should be watching this.
I can’t understand it either.
I’ve heard (from a fan of NASCAR) that NASCAR is the 2nd most popular sport in the world behind Soccer(another sport I refuse to watch).
I wonder how they judge popularity. Attendance?TV viewers?
Because I know tons of people that like Baseball, Football, and Basketball. But only a few NASCAR fans.
NASCAR just isn’t fun to watch. My Dad always used to tell people that if wanted to watch cars make left turns all day long he would go stand on the street corner.
Too much time during the race there is no action.
-Shaggarito
I’ve lived in the South for over 40 years and I still don’t get it.
I must admit, however, that, like many, many others, I will watch the highlights on the news especially if there’s been an accident.
I don’t want to see people get hurt or killed, min you, it’s just that I like to watch 4000lb cars flying through the air and being smashed into thousands of pieces.
a lot of the initial appeal of NASCAR came from the fact that the cars are, for the most part(and I can say that with a straight face, truly I can) stock. You are watching someone race the same car that you are driving right now. This has a great appeal to the male hindbrain.
“Yep. I’m drivin’ the exact same car that Jeff Gordon drives!” <spit>
Those who don’t watch it because a machine does most of the work must not watch horseracing, sailing, acrobatics, etc.
It’s not my favorite sport, but I can see the appeal. Of course, I am of Southern stock, so it may be genetic. But soccer…c’mon. NOBODY watches soccer! It’s too…European! 
Up to a point in the late 70’s or early 80’s, the cars were mostly stock. I’ve seen films of races from the early 70’s and the drivers merely ripped out the unneeded seats and welded in a roll cage and off they went.
I recall seeing a race that featured about 6-7 different makes as opposed to the 3 or 4 you see now.
It’s not my favorite sport either, but my husband is a HUGE fan, and watching it has helped me build up an appreciation for it (helped by the fact that we went to the Kansas City race last year and had a BLAST). Its appeal is multi-faceted:
It is a sport. There is absolutely athleticism involved in sitting in a rigid position for more than three hours in 100+ degree heat. Add to that the demand for absolute concentration and precision in every single move that driver makes, and that the drivers use incredible arm strengh to get the cars through each turn and to compensate for draft, debris, airflow, getting bumped, scraping the wall, or out-and-out crashing. The crew must also be physically fit to handle the pit stops in a decent amount of time, which is typically less than 20 seconds for the entire stop.
The drivers and crew are a hoot. There are many fiery personalities in the sport, as well as calmer veterans and a whole host of characters that make for interesting television. Once you have a favorite driver or two, watching their careers and how they handle individual races is a lot of fun, because the coverage of the sport allows you to feel like you know them. When Bill Elliott’s tire blew in the second to last lap of his final race as a full-time driver, it was heartbreaking. The reporters asking him what he was thinking when he looked at his car after it was over, and his answer was, “Wish I had a match.” Which brings me to…
The coverage. The announcers are great, both on FOX (first half of the season) and NBC (second half). Darrell Waltrip and Benny Parsons have that good ol’ boy charm to them that makes them hard not to like, and their excitement about what’s going on is genuine hard to resist.
It’s one of those things that is opaque and boring if you don’t know how to watch it, but can be fascinating if you know what to watch for. There are as many strategies for winning as there are drivers, and watching how they execute those plans is pretty cool. That includes when they choose to make a pass, how they handle aggression, whether or not they have a vendetta against another driver, how risky they are willing to be, how their pit crews adjust the cars throughout the race, etc. I didn’t get it for a long time and was bored stiff every weekend whiole my husband babbled excitedly about what was happening. Now I get almost as excited.
So that’s why I hate horseracing, sailing and acrobatics. I always wondered.
However, I’d argue the point on a couple of those.
I have yet to see a mechanical, nitro-burning funny foal down at the horsetrack. I think the reason why horseracing works is still because there’s a physical nature of competition. It’s rider against rider, and it’s horse against horse. If you think the jockey’s not doing any work, sorry. You’re wrong.
I find sailing as boring as a dog’s ass, so maybe you’re on to something there.
Acrobatics, I don’t understand why you’re including. If you’re talking about the pommel horse or the rings as “mechanical objects doing all the work,” I’d encourage you to climb on sometime. Make no mistake, it’s a physical sport.
Maybe I’m reading your comments wrong. Can you elaborate?
I didn’t say it wasn’t difficult, but people do a lot of difficult things that aren’t sports. I’m just trying to understand how NASCAR’s a sport, and…say, getting kicked in the nuts isn’t.
But I get the fact that personalities sell the genre. In fact, that’s probably the reason that NASCAR’s as successful as it is.
I don’t know if it’s possible to explain the draw of a sport. I mean, can you explain the draw of football? I don’t understand THAT at all. I watch racing because I like it! I like the competition, I like the sound the engines make, I like the teamwork and ingenuity shown by the pit crews and the guys in the shop, I like the interaction of personalities between the rival drivers, and I like the atmosphere in the stands.
Sloppy typing on my part. I meant acrobatic flying…you know, with airplanes.
The beauty of the human condition is that we have such differing ways of seeing things. I love to sail, and watch sailing. Horseracing is a waste of glue and catfood.
And NASCAR isn’t drag-racing. You aren’t going to find any “Nitro-burning funny cars” on a NASCAR track.
Whoosh.
I used to think the same thing about football, a long time ago. What helped me was, ironically, playing Madden '97. Once I learned the various strategies, how a game could hang on a WR running exactly the right route and arriving in exactly the same place as the ball the QB threw when he had no IDEA the WR would actually make it there, how offense and defense could work together to make a battle for field position, how a “battle for field position” wasn’t just a boring punt-off…
Basically, once I understood the game and it wasn’t just a bunch of guys running around on the field, I liked it a lot more.
I’m not a huge NASCAR fan, but I’m not going to pretend it’s not athletic (or, at least, demanding). You’re driving at 200 miles an hour, inches away from 50 other guys doing the same, where one wrong move can get you and several of your colleagues injured or killed for three hours.
Though the deification of Dale Earnhardt is kinda baffling, I just view it as one of our charming Southern quirks.
Just for three hours? I might have to look into this.
You ain’t seen my evening commute. 
I like auto racing games, but I don’t see the appeal of NASCAR either, unless you’re actually going to let me drive in one…
Ah, springtime and the inevitable “Why should anyone watch NASCAR?” thread. Well, the short answer is, you shouldn’t, if you don’t like it. A lot of people don’t see much past the sponsor logos plastering everything and the notion that the racing consists of nothing more than turning left. Fair enough.
For me, I find the driver’s personalities highly engaging, there is a high degree of strategy involved, and many of the races come down to two or three cars side by side as they cross the finish line. All this after hundreds of miles of racing. Hell, just last week in Texas, Elliot Sadler, who had not won in 107 attempts, just squeaked in by less than half a car length ahead of rookie Casey Kahne, who has had possibly the most successful season for a first-year contender in, like, forever (corrections welcome if I’m off the mark there). And while all but two of the tracks are ovals, they are very different from one other. I ‘drive’ the courses via my old copy of NASCAR Heat before each race, and the techniques needed to get around Bristol efficiently compared to, say, Daytona are considerably different, to say the least.
Admittedly, the cars are pretty much Stone Age in their technology, and despite this the costs to field a team have gotten so high that for the first time in a number of years NASCAR is having trouble getting a full field of 43 cars for some of the events, but I still think the concept is sound: cars that are more or less equivalent, with full fenders so that close racing does not risk launching one into the stands, and with the emphasis on strategy by driver and pit crew as a means to win races.
Oh, yeah, and the wrecks can be pretty sporty too hangs head in shame. I note that Fox has worked a clip of Ryan Newman’s spectacular rollover from last year into every NASCAR promo they’ve run.
There are a lot of things I love about the sport:
(1) The almost circus-y nature of it. It’s an unusual sport: All the same drivers travel around every week, doing the same thing in different places. It’s like a travelling sideshow or something. It’s not as if there are different teams and you ask, “Who are we playing this week?” Personally, I think that’s pretty cool; it draws out the dramas to season-length, which is great if you’re a fan and keep up with it, but can understandably turn people off if they get there late. It’s a bit like me having trouble getting into “The Sopranos,” which I just started watching this season; I don’t know all the backstory and can’t keep the characters straight.
The fans get really, really into the personalities and temperaments of the drivers as well; it’s a bit like a soap opera, or like the WWE, except nothing’s scripted or planned. NASCAR drivers have real fistfights.
(2) The intensity of it. These guys are driving 200 mph! Six inches apart! In cars! Cars that, while they’re obviously not like the cars you and I drive, are similar enough in design and appearance that we can imagine what it’s like in there.
(3) I’m not going to pretend I watch it specifically because of the athleticism, but I have great admiration for these guys. Have you ever felt really worn out after a day of driving? Driving at reasonable speed, in well-regulated traffic, without having to dodge any accidents as they’re happening? Imagine how these guys feel after covering 500 miles in something under three hours, with people cutting them off by inches, slipstreaming behind them, crashing into each other directly in front of them, etc., with no air conditioning, no bathroom or leg-stretching breaks, no playing their Air Supply tapes in the car.
(4) The competition itself is amazing.
To some extent, yes, it’s a team sport. But there are so many rules and regulations regarding what can and can’t be done to these cars that the drivers are basically all driving the same car. (Oh man, I hope no Ford or Chevy fans come and flame me for that.) That’s the point of the rules: to eliminate, as much as possible, the differences between the car models, so that there’s not just “some skill involved,” but once you’re on the track there’s nothing but skill involved. Obviously, that’s a pipe dream; there are many other factors involved, but that’s the ideal that’s striven for.
(5) Finally, my mom has the same name, first and last, as one of the really famous drivers who’s been around forever. So I root for him, though he’s not doing so hot lately. It’s like cheering for my mom.
Anyway, that’s a short defense of NASCAR. I first got into the sport because my brother is a HUGE fan, and while I’m not as crazy about it as he is, I do plan to go visit him and attend a race in Atlanta sometime this year.
I don’t regularly watch NASCAR but have a bunch of friends who do. Some thoughts they’ve shared.
[ul]
[li]NASCAR originally started off as stock production cars as someone previously mentioned, for history see the 1960’s-early 1970’s muscle car wars. You could literally buy the car that Kyle Petty drove in Daytona… woo-hoo…[/li][li]It’s one massive party during race week. A lot of these people have the same devotion and travelling jones as Grateful Dead fans.[/li][li]The drivers. You name a type of personality and you’ll find your favorite driver. Plus, these guys are really into the fan appreciation thing. You can walk into the garage area (during certain hours of course) and get autographs, chew the fat, etc., just like walking next door to your neighbor’s house (whom I’m sure is adjusting the valves on his '69 Cuda…).[/li][li]Most race tracks accommodate over 100K fans during race day, not to mention all the other fans during race week.[/li][/ul]
Okay, GMRyujin,
So if I knuckle down to learn NASCAR THUNDER on my PS2, are my chances for getting to like Nascar racing enhanced - even a little bit? (I’m sorta serious.)
I personally could go along with the idea that NASCAR is not a sport and there is nothing to it.
Fact is that it appeals to those that do not like football, baseball, basketball or any of those sports played by colleges or professional sport teams. It is a class thing*****, which of course is a taboo subject. The reason that I know this is that I have a couple of children that have married, etc. those that don’t relate to college rivalries, etc. If we get together for say Thanksgiving, I want to watch the football game of the day and they sit there bored as hell, so we switch to NASCAR and I sit there wondering how they keep track of who is who and what lap who is on and are they just hoping for a wreck.
As a counter argument, when my wife and I were young we lived in an apartment in Cincinnati. An older couple took us under their wing and invited us to go to Indianapolis to watch the “time trials”. The morning of the trials the older women said they’d seen it and were going shopping. My wife wanted to go with them. I said “no, this is something everyone’s heard of and you need to go”. Arrangements we made for her to meet them after she’d seen some of the trials. That evening at 5:00, she was still at the trials and having a ball. She kept asking if we could get tickets to the race itself.
It all comes down to different strokes for different folks.
***** Which is a general statement subject to numerous exceptions.
The real appeal is to see a race live. The smells, the crowd (next week watch 105,000 folks cram into Martinsville Speedway, a half mile paper clip racetrack), the general excitment of a race. Visit a local short track and see a potential star in the making. This site has some basic info about NASCAR. A visit to NASCAR.com to see what the current news or look at Jayski for the latest in news and rumors from all over the net. Of course, I am extremely biased towards auto racing in general, it has been a part of my life since I was born. My father drove racecars back in the 50’s and I drove for many years. In the same respect, I have no idea why anyone would want to watch hockey or tennis. To me it just a bunch of goons fighting on skates and or rich people batting around a fuzzy ball. You either get it or your don’t, there is no shame in deciding you don’t like it.