Who still watches NASCAR?

The Game Room
1

So, more to clear the disgusting stench of the NFL out of my mouth than anything, I decided to record the Daytona 500 and watch as much as I could.

Here’s what I recall:

  • An extremely crowded and busy pit row.
  • Some prerace interviews.
  • An ungodly amount of airtime given to the orange POS-in-Chief.
  • A level of armed forces worship that Robert McNamara would’ve found excessive. (I think this was when they played the National Human Rain Delay; I wasn’t paying attention.)
  • Some talk about setups.
  • A whole bunch of parade laps featuring even more freakishly long face time given to our national disgrace.
  • The start of the race, featuring big single file line of cars going in circles tri ovals! Tri ovals!
  • A stoppage for some reason after 30 minutes (I didn’t see a red flag) due to…rain, I guess?..which, of course, is always the cue for the announcers to blah bleh blah bleh blah bleh blah, and that’s when I had enough and deleted the recording.

I dunno…I remember this sport being more fun in the past, even if the tracks weren’t any more exciting than they are now. I don’t like that any bit of rain brings the action to a dead halt. In F1 they just switch to the bad weather tires and play on. If you haven’t noticed, global climate change is making things really dicey, and you can’t count on a full day of sunshine whenever you want it. More than that, though, I miss the presence of a big superstar who really raises the bar and makes a run at the record books. I’ve made it no secret that it was none other than Bill Elliott who got me into the sport in the first place, and I’ve never been a bigger fan than during the heyday of Jeff Gordon. Yeah yeah, dues, hot wife, ego, blargle blargle, but admit it, even for hardcore fans it was fun having a villain to root against.

Now it’s looks like a morass, with the Chase and playoffs and segmented races and confetti flags and overtimes, either solutions to nonexistent problems or doomed attempts to appeal to fans who’ll never give this the time of day. Meanwhile the bizarre morality about when it is/isn’t okay to wreck another driver grows ever more byzantine, invariably leading to ugly clashes. Even ESPN doesn’t seem to care much anymore.

Anyone here know anyone who still follows this league?

2

Aside from the endless shots of You Know Who’s plane and limo, they now have preplanned cautions, which really rubs me the wrong way. I used to be big into it 20 years ago, but just have zero interest now. The big stars of yesteryear have mostly retired now yes, and I have little feel for who is out there now. [the previous generation before that, such as Petty and Yarborough and the Allisons, would typically drive until they literally pried their arthritic hands from the wheel]

Technical note: while they have experimented with rain tires for ovals, there are some difficult to overcome issues there: most ovals will “leak” when wet and even as they dry (they call such spots “weepers”), and the continual shear forces on the treads of the rain tires in the one direction will quickly shred them even if there is a thin film of water between them and the track. They do have them for the few road courses they run.

3

I stopped paying attention when the “S” became permanently irrelevant. Just a bunch of fiberglass which resemble stock these days.

4

Been watching NASCAR since the late 70’s / early 80’s. Haven’t missed a race for the last 25 years or so. My wife and I were in Daytona for the 500 in 1994 and this pass summer, my daughter and I were in Loudon, New Hampshire (about the closest race venue accessible to us from Eastern Ontario, Canada) for that race.
Of course, especially in the summer, I PVR the races so I can watch them later in the evening.

5

I used to. I started in the 80s as soon as I got ESPN. I would plan my vacations around staying in a hotel to watch the races.

Things changed. Slowly, but steadily.

The old points system, which survived like 30 years with some changes, rewarded consistency above all, You could theoretically never win a single race all year, and still be champion. One memorable season the champion won by leading exactly one more lap than second place. That was exciting!

The Chase is bad, and it affects everything. NHRA drag racing has a “chase”, too. Apparently it is so underwhelming in some way that this year they are starting the “season championship”; that is the leader before the Chase is…another season champion? I don’t get it.

Anyway, what got me away from following NASCAR started with the emphasis on personalities, rivalries, yelling at each other as part of racing, deliberately running people into the wall, and DW going “boogity-boogity”. Now mind you, these all used to be there, heck the first nationally televised Daytona 500 ended with a fist fight in the infield. But it wasn’t the focus, it wasn’t emphasized. It was incidental to the race, not the main event. It used to be about the racing. I’ve watched speedway races where there were no cautions! That’s exiting. The strategy! Somewhere along the way, people going to the races got…dumber? I dunno. It used to be a joke people only watched for the crashes. I don’t think it is a joke anymore.

Anyway, the other things that have changed is breaking the race into segments, which, again, seems like dumbing down the event and increasing viewer “participation”. Why do we care who wins each segment? because the announcers want us to. (and the sports betting aps, no doubt!)

The cars, as noted, haven’t been stock since about 1965, but when they stopped being “stock” about 1997, and for sure when the Car Of Tomorrow (which became the Car of Yesterday in about two years!) was introduced. Today’s cars aren’t what I would even call NASCAR anymore. They’re more like 80s IMSA racers. They’re Camaros and Mustangs. It doesn’t help that the industry doesn’t make full size cars anymore, but still!

It;s not just me: tracks used to keep building grandstands for the crowds. You could see the evolution on the shorter tracks that started with a grandstand and eventually ringed the entire track with stands. Those are gone, long gone. Attendance must be way down.

Another thing is crashes. You can’t go ten minutes on a super speedway without a multi-car pileup. Even though I think NASCAR actually likes that, I believe it is really the result of an unintended consequence of safety improvements. The drivers are so packed in there they can’t see shit. In Ye Olde Days the driver would actually look around. Some drivers didn’t wear full face helmets. Dale Earnhart noted he could tell where the other cars were in relation to his by the feel of the air pressure changes on his face. But then he died in a relatively simple crash, and that started the changing.

I miss what NASCAR was, even when it really wasn’t what it pretended to be. The confederate flags and the racism was always there, but they kept it hidden. NHRA has Black and women season champions, and does NASCAR have more than one Black driver, or any women drivers? Probably not. At least I have old NASCAR races on VHS. :slight_smile:

As for the OP, NASCAR isn’t formula One. Rain tires don’t work at 200 mph. I think they use them on the road courses, though.

Reagan was the first president to visit Daytona in 1984, though that was the July 400. And yet, it wasn’t the North Korea-level Dear Leader ego-fest shitshow that this last Sunday was.