Running 2023 Motorsports thread

NASCAR Hall of Fame induction is today, and they've only got three drivers: Matt Kenseth, Hershel McGriff, and Kirk Shelmerdine.
Has it gotten to be a Hall of Pretty Good?
I realize it's a museum with no checklist for induction, and if you don't induct somebody, it withers, but still.
When it first started, Larry Woody would argue to put everyone in all at once, but then in about five years it would be where it is now.

 

With all due respect to the people and their families in your post, Driftwood, it has been at that point for years.
Make no mistake ... it's a nice building, the building is fun, interactive and well worth it. At least one person there is among the best guys on Earth. But the caliber of candidates has dropped off a cliff in recent years.

 

Every driver eligible with at least 30 Cup Series victories has been inducted. Carl Edwards and Jim Paschal are the only eligibles with at least 25 wins not in.

The only eligible driver who has won a Cup championship and is not in is Bill Rexford

 

Kirk Shelmerdine ain't going in as a driver. He's going in because Dale Earnhardt won 46 races (with 142 top fives and 246 top 10s) and four Winston Cup championships with Shermerdine as crew chief. Youngest crew chief to win a race, and also the youngest crew chief to win the Winston Cup.

 

OBTW, when they tell you that NASCAR is struggling ...

https://www.news-journalonline.com/...mpsites-remain-for-nascar-opener/69810131007/

 

I don't think any of it is anyone's fault. It's just the nature of the sport. NASCAR isn't like MLB and NFL where you have hundreds of players that rotate in and out every few years. The same 30-40 drivers are going to compete for a decade or more, meaning the pool of potential "hall of famers" isn't that deep.

 

Dale Earnhardt Jr. is not a Hall of Famer (as a driver).

I feel like six drivers from the past 30 years should be in: Dale Sr., Rusty, Elliott, Gordon, JJ and Smoke. And Kyle Busch when he retires. Harvick is borderline in my mind, but given who else is in he gets in.

Mark Martin is the Fred McGriff of the NASCAR Hall of Fame. Very damn good, sometimes great, but not extraordinary.

If Kirby Puckett is in the baseball hall, Tim Richmond should be in the NASCAR hall.

 

What do Daytona tickets typically run?

I haven't been to a NASCAR race in years and thought it'd be fun to take my boys to the All-Star race at North Wilkesboro. When I saw the tickets starting at $300, I gave up on that plan. Not worth $1,200+ for me to take my family. I recognize that is perhaps a unique situation with the return to North Wilkesboro after nearly 30 years, and it being a small track, but still.

 

Fan Zone starts at $118 each on the resale market.

 

General admission for the Twins (Duels) on Thursday night or the Truck race on Friday night (which includes Xfinity and Cup practice) is $49. That's pretty much any seat on the first level.

On StubHub, pairs of 500 grandstand seats are running somewhere around $180 each and above. That's relatively reasonable for the Super Bowl of Stock Car Racing. I know for my frst 500 in 1978, I bought $15 general admission seats in the Keech Annex (the last grandstand way down past pit exit and almost to Turn 1) a couple of weeks before the race and I don't think the place sat 50,000 then.

As to the seating question, ISC has always been vague until recently about exactly how many seats the place used to have. A conservative guess would be between 100,000-140,000 at its peak -- when the backstretch grandstands were still a hot item -- with NASCAR conveniently announcing "a sellout" during SpeedWeeks every year because the media wouldn't dare contradict Little Bill.

Goodyear and/or the NASCAR PR folks estimated "around 200,000" in attendance for many years but I doubt there has ever been an extra 50,000 people in the infield. And the guy who handled the printed race stats for NASCAR when I first was hired would walk outside the media center, smoke his pipe for a bit and then come back in, look up the attendance from the previous year's race and add 1,000.

The worst was when he listed something like 75,000 for Martinsville, which had 44,000 permanent seats and no fans allowed in the infield. I guess he was counting parking lot attendants, concession stand workers and everybody in Henry County who could hear the engines.

 

Even during the nadir of NASCAR in the 2010s, I don't think Daytona has ever been the problem. It's the Californias and Atlantas and such of the world.