2020 NASCAR Thread

The accessibility has changed so much since I remember being a fan.

You'd see race cars on flatbeds being hauled to tracks on Fridays and Saturdays and wish you were going, too. There's a smell and sound to a short-track bullring, the fans cheering for the hometown guys, cars that are immaculate, cars that are beat to hell. You choose your favorite by the number or color or make and model.

The drivers were mechanics during the week. Or roofers, like David Pearson. Or guys you knew around town. And maybe one or two of those guys gets to Daytona or Indy and you can say, "Hey, I saw him race!" Even then, you could go down after the race and see the cars and maybe chat with the drivers or the crews.

That all changed in the 1980s, to be honest. As soon as all the races were on TV, the money poured in. Teams got fancy haulers, even down to the Late Model level. Drivers got motorhomes and PR people and flew their own planes and sponsors determined where and when they'd appear. And fans got farther and farther away from the action, even though they built more and more grandstands to hold them.

Now, most of these kids start in go-karts before they reach kindergarten, running 1/8th mile tracks, and are in a touring series by the time they're 14. They're already fluent in corporate speak and all look and act the same. A faster, louder version of the PGA Tour, to be honest. Today, a brash, drive-anything-with-wheels guy like Tony Stewart would be an oddity, much like soft-spoken, not-from-the-south Pete Hamilton was in 1970.

It's just ... different.

 

Sorry, I'm kind of late to the whole "future of NASCAR" party, but as a somewhat lapsed fan, though mostly due to Jeff Gordon's retirement more than anything, a few thoughts:

I think we're overestimating the ability to which NASCAR can "fix" the cars. After all the impetus for the infamous Car of Tomorrow (which is now 13 years old!?!) was not standardization, rules enforcement and cost control, it was that NASCAR needed to build a car that wasn't going to kill their next Dale Earnhardt. Furthermore, I think the farther you go toward stock on the continuum of stock ----> kit, the more costs will skyrocket as teams attempt to out-innovate the other. Furthermore, the more differences you have between the cars, the more likely you're going to go back to the days where guys lapped the field.

I don't blame the folks in the 90s for trying to invest in a sport that was clearly on the rise and going into the 'non-traditional' markets. (Remember when they raced at Suzuka?) Yeah, there were bombs in that bunch (Chicagoland), but there are a lot of places from that surge (Texas, Homestead, Vegas, Phoenix) where the sport needed to build or expand on its profile and a lot of it stuck.

So, the tl;dr, I think NASCAR definitely has issues, but a lot of them (the invincibility of the NFL, economic problems, the natural deflation of a bubble) would have taken place regardless of its management or specific decisions.

 

Terry Labonte, Bristol 1984. You see that cap he is wearing? That cap is actually upstairs in my house right now. Dale Inman gave it to me. We were in the infield after the race. I saw the cap on the dash of the car as they were hauling it out of victory lane and asked if I could have it. He reached in and handed it to me.

 

My dad was a Terry Labonte fan, though I don't know if he did that for any reason other than to serve as a foil for my Rainbow Warrior era.

 

I went to the first NASCAR race in New Hampshire in the early '90s (Rusty Wallace won). It was an event like Woodstock. It took me 3 and 1/2 hours to go the 90 miles from my house to the track (I left at 6 a.m.) and five hours to get back). Pre-Covid it was still big but not like that. I loved covering it as long as it was once a year. But I can see why the sport is withering as we watch. Car racing is about going fast. NASCAR is now about setting up a weird obstacle course (competition cautions!) were the idea is to have a close finish. Hell, have a random group of Abe Simpson older folks get in the cars and run around Talladega and I guarantee a close finish. Winning speed 58 MPH.

 

That’s a cool story, Driftwood. I do think for the most part now you have white-collar kids driving these race cars. It’s not new. I think Tim Richmond’s dad funded a lot of his early racing career and yet lots of the good ol’ boys loved him. But it’s hard for some kid from a SoCal subdivision to relate to fans who grew up out in the sticks near Mobile.

 

Petty was known to take kids - and their parents - for tours around their shop and place. It wasn't planned or scheduled, which made it all the more cool.

Bobby Allison had a decency to him, and it looked like he passed it on to Davey ... which made his helicopter crash all the more tragic.

Thought highly of Harry Gant ... did an appearance at my hometown's mall once. I'm not exactly from a raving metropolis, and he had a quiet, decent sort of vibe about him.

Tim Richmond was cool because he gave off a much different vibe than the other drivers on the circuit. No doubting the talent, though, regardless.

Cannot claim to be a fan of Dale Earnhardt. Worked with a bunch of his fans at one place who were somewhere between hostile and flat-out nasty to those who didn't also worship him. Kinda like Orangeface's following now.

I didn't care for Earnhardt's driving style and his being a blatant hammer (yet, of course, whining and griping when Ricky Rudd did to him what he did to others for years). But there are all sorts of stories where he was a jokester and was pretty good at being everyman away from the track.

 

Last time I saw Harvick punt someone at Martinsville, he was put in time out for the Cup race the next day.

I have never been able to warm up to Logano, but I’d be thrilled with any of the other three winning next week.

 

Prediction: The Dawsonville Pool Room will burn down the siren next week.

 

I was thinking about this just now. The fact that Bill Elliott won only one title amazes me. It shows you how stacked the field was. You had Hall of Fame-caliber drivers in every other row.

 

That and he was terrible on short tracks for a long, long time.