If it ain't broke, fix it anyway: NASCAR 2017 Thread

That would be very neat.

As long as no one gets out of their car, smokes weed, grabs parts of other cars...

 

They have had a dirt track race in the Trucks series for a couple of years now. They run it on a weeknight, too. It's been insanely popular.

 

I would say NASCAR IS broke, hence their desperate move. Earnhardt's death in 2001 was bad enough and the main reason I stopped watching, but the worst part of it was the timing. A number of drivers had been killed by similar injury in the decade before, yet NASCAR buried its head in the sand each time. Even after three drivers were killed in 2000 alone (including Richard Petty's grandson, Adam). Plus eventual champ Bobby Labonte was damn lucky he wasn't killed at Darlington that year when his throttle stuck. The outcry against NASCAR grew with Earnhardt's death, on top of the fact the sport lost its top star. I saw a story recently that Terry Bradshaw and Earnhardt became fast friends at Daytona in 2001. Fox was planning to capitalize on that throughout the year, including having Earnhardt on NFL shows in the fall. That would have been a huge boost for NASCAR.
Instead, the sport tried to reach new fans with stupid ideas like The Chase, among many others. Longtime fans got pissed by the number of changes and stopped tuning in, while many of the new fans quickly got bored and stopped tuning in as well. Hence the ratings decline and now this hail mary.

 

I think a big chunk of it was a market correction. The late '90s were high times for both NASCAR and disposable income. I got in at almost the ground floor in 1995 on the Jeff Gordon phenomenon. He'd won the Coke 600 (on fuel mileage) and the Brickyard 400 (the first one) the year before, but things took off for him from there, winning seven times and taking his first championship.

The death of Dale Earnhardt probably marks the beginning of the end of that bubble, for both technical and fan reasons. From a technical standpoint, the deaths of Earnhardt, Adam Petty, Kenny Irwin, etc., (eventually) led to a desire to do SOMETHING about the car's safety from a structural standpoint, and that something ended up being the pure garbage of the Car of Tomorrow, in which all the cars looked the same and none of them could pass. From the fan side, Earnhardt's death created a critical mass of media coverage that led them to make a lot of questionable decisions, some of which are noted here. Some of the new tracks (Texas comes to mind) were good ideas. Several others (California, Las Vegas, Kansas) were not, from a financial and racing standpoint. Also, TV screwed with the start times of races on a nearly weekly basis (it's worth remembering that for a time in the 2000s, the Daytona 500 was deliberately run to start at about 4 ET and finish in prime time). Also, a lot more "monetizing" was done. Someone mentioned the names and sponsors of races getting kind of stupid -- well, it wasn't until Fox arrived in that 2001 TV contract that they demanded you pay them or else they would go out of their way to avoid saying the full name of the race on TV. Hell, Fox was even doing that with pictures of cars in that year's Daytona 500 until someone drew the line.

I think a lot of it comes down to NASCAR's innate ability to find the worst of a series of answers to difficult questions that have existed for decades. Really, it goes back to the restrictor plate, which was a necessary evil (that is now nearly 30 years old) to a technical problem they still haven't figured out (keeping cars from turning into planes on superspeedways). Rain still can ruin just about any race weekend (and does). The Chase was an attempt to address the NFL kicking their ass in the ratings when their season was supposed to be going down to the wire, but it's just totally contrived, even more so after they doubled down on it (repeatedly) and the NFL kicks their ass even more (because that's what the NFL on TV does). They had to improve safety, which they did by making a terrible template car. They used to put the clamps on roughhousing until they didn't, then were shocked to find that stupid shit was screwing up entire races and seasons (Kenseth, Keselowski, etc.)

In short, I don't think NASCAR would be dramatically better off if the seasons were just like they were in 1995. It would just be looking bad differently.

 

It may be the only race I saw flag to flag last year.

 

If they did that, Smoke might come out of retirement.

 

NASCAR needs to learn what golf once knew (and promptly forgot): No one outside the industry much cares who wins the season championship. Put the emphasis on the events themselves and give drivers the maximum incentive to go for the win. It's no fun watching someone lay up for par to preserve sixth place when they could be attacking the pins and it is no fun watching a driver hang back in a drafting pack instead of making a charge for the lead.

 

The difference between golf and NASCAR, as far as scheduling goes at least, is that racers have always had to run in every event. A golfer could retain World No. 1 status (which is still much bigger than the highly-contrived FedEx cup) by playing in about 20 events.

 

Even after R.J. Reynolds started the Modern Era in 1972, the Winston Cup championship wasn't as important as winning the big races with big purses. That was the case even until the late 1980s, with independent drivers filling out the fields at the lesser-paying events, with as few as 20 drivers completing "full time" schedules.

David Pearson won three championships in four seasons before there was RJR bonus money, so he elected to run just the races with biggest purses, and still wound up with 105 wins. It wasn't until all of the races finally wound up on network television and more sponsorships became available that NASCAR mandated that drivers had to complete the entire schedule to be eligible for the championship points fund.

Ned Jarrett and Richard Petty were two of the few drivers who attempted to run complete schedules back in the 1960s, which could be more than 50 events, sometimes three races in one weekend. My favorite Jarrett story was him buying a new car from the local Ford dealership on Friday with a $1,100 check, then needing to win two races in it over the weekend so he could get to the bank on Monday morning to keep it from bouncing.

 

A few days old, but this is interesting. Stewart-Haas filed a lawsuit against Nature's Bakery on claims the company reneged on its deal to be Danica's primary sponsor this season and next. The company terminated the contract saying she wasn't doing enough social media promotion and had endorsed a rival product.

Danica Patrick's racing team sues sponsor Nature's Bakery

 

You could fill an entire field (and then some) with the "sponsors" who flat out lied about their net worth or went bust (or disappeared) before the race teams got reimbursed. The first era of the dot.com "companies" was particularly bad for smaller teams suckered into thinking they had backing. Also, there was a run on energy drink sponsors for a time. Heck, I wouldn't be surprised if someone at Charlotte in 1949 got stiffed on their tire bill.

If you want a good example of how gullible NASCAR can be, look up "Angela Harkness" on Wikipedia. J.D. "Jim" Stacy is another winner. He had his name what seemed like half the field in the 1982 Daytona 500, claiming to be a wealthy Kentucky coalminer. Last I heard, he was high-tailing it from a bankrupt Bahamas timeshare venture.

And I see where Ford will support Danica in the car for the rest of the season. Someone joked, "They should just take 36 cars to a shredder in Dearborn and call it even."