[media-credit name=”Noel Lanier” align=”alignright” width=”225″]
[/media-credit]As Sunday’s Atlanta Insert-Sponsor-Name-Here 500 slowly dragged by, in which forty-three brightly-colored cars repetitively drove around Atlanta Motor Speedway something like 330 times, I found myself, once again, not really interested in watching the race, just like I’ve not been interested in watching every other race over the last two Sprint Cup seasons, although I regret missing Watkins Glen a couple of weeks ago.
What I have discovered is that I can take the easy way out and avoid watching the race, simply by doing something a lot more entertaining, like counting my hair, polishing pennies, watching 8-year-old wall paint continue its chemical drying process, or go into the garage and gaze longingly into the nearly-empty engine bay of my Thunderbird, having the 800th discussion with myself as to whether I should try to keep the EFI, or rip out the fuel injection wiring rat’s nest and go carbed and not actually get anything accomplished…yet again.
When I have completed any number of (perceived) useful tasks, other than actually watching the race, I can then click onto NASCAR.com and find out who won the race. Oh yeah, sit through several commercials to watch any pertinent video of crashes that might have occurred during the event.
Thus spared the grisly task of having actually sat through yet another one of the France Cartel’s poor excuses for ‘entertainment’ that disguises itself as a ‘car race’, I theoretically get more accomplished, I don’t have to sit in front of the TV set and scream at the inane, and perpetual commercial breaks. I save quite a bit a month on not having to pay for a horrible cable TV service and I find out all I really need to know in a literary equivalent of a 30-second sound bite.
The race has been ‘watched’, one of the same two or three teams has won (yet again) and nothing eventful has (yet again) happened other than chuckling about whatever pileup Danica has caused when she dropped her cell phone during a call, while out racing.
So why am I wasting time writing this clearly-aggrieved literary disaster, as an ode to the small green lump of NASCAR putty that I found in my armpit one midsummer morning?
It’s because this series has the potential to be the greatest show on earth and there are a lot of people who have staked their fortunes to this NASCAR train, which clearly jumped the tracks back in 2007, when it introduced the ill-fated ‘Car Of Some Hideous Alternate Tomorrow.’ The France Cartel’s one-size-fits-all concept was a poorly-disguised slap at the hard-core fans that bleed Chevy….whatever…., Dodge….whatever…, and Ford Blue.
If you are curious as to why I didn’t mention the faithful among Toyota, it’s because Toyota fans don’t ‘bleed’ anything, they’re too busy voting Democrat, dating their cousins, attempting to be ‘trendy’, crashing mountain bikes, holding up traffic and being generally-soulless twits.
These are the same people who saw them win on Sunday and bought on…well…Tuesday or Wednesday because they had too much of a hangover to think clearly enough to go to the dealership the day after a race. The fans didn’t go for a ‘Spec’ car, and voted with their feet, refusing to play the game any longer, a mass exodus that attempted to rival the 1975 Fall of Saigon in how quickly some of the Old Guard bailed from the NASCAR faithful.
However, in Daytona Beach’s over-extension of attempted market reach, some new fans quickly filled the void (in continuing with the ‘Fall of Saigon’ theme, think of these new fans as a sort of ‘North Vietnamese army’, but with nowhere-near the attention span, and less of an inclination to capture American military installations)…and exited just as quickly, when realization slowly and creepingly dawned that there were oftentimes thousands of monotonous race laps between those spectacular crashes that occur at either Daytona or Talladega, and are so hideously over-glorified by Fox Sports And Company, hundreds of those laps ticking by where absolutely nothing happens. That is what this invading, ADHD-addled American Viet Cong horde eventually discovered; NASCAR is nothing other than a form of horizontal tennis. Instead of one tennis ball flying back and forth, there are now forty-three of them and in the case of NASCAR, these tennis balls weigh 3500 pounds.
And with at least two of the tracks, these 3500-pound, rounded-off projectiles occasionally go vertical in addition to all directions horizontal, much to the delight of highlight-reel directors everywhere.
This is why road courses are soooo important. The monotony is broken up by the simple fact that on a road course, the cars, for the most part…. can occasionally disappear out of view. If one cares to attach a tennis analogy to this aspect of NASCAR, think of it as one of the competitors catching the tennis ball, shoving it into their shorts or sports skirt, running out of the arena, stopping in the dressing room, making a phone call, checking their hair, run away, run back to check their hair again, leave the dressing room for good this time, run around the back side of the arena, enter the arena on the competitor’s side, take the tennis ball out of their shorts or sports skirt, spiking the ball into the air, running back to their side of the tennis court, and then resuming the match.
If you’re watching a road course event at the track, you’d like to think that when the cars disappear out of view, they’re continuing to run flat out, with them eventually reappearing into view later on in the lap…but the exciting thing is that it might be possible that the race cars could theoretically fly into an underground chamber, the drivers quickly exit their vehicles, they put on laser-tag gear, fight a valiant battle against a dastardly foe, win, quickly shed their gear, re-enter the car, and then shoot back up onto the track, 31 seconds later…and the fans would have no idea of the struggle that goes on behind the scenes…or in this case, under them.
This theoretical observation obviously doesn’t occur, but if we can’t see what happens to the cars after they leave our view, how are we to say that race organizers don’t have a moving band of plastic horn blowers who make “vroom!” engine sounds on the other side of the track, just to lull the race fans into a false sense of race-watching security?
“Martha, are the cars actually racing all the way around the track, or do you think it’s just a bunch of guys with plastic soccer horns making ‘vroom’ noises on the other side of the track, with the cars just short-cutting through the infield here at The Glen?”
“No, Earl, that would be silly! Drink your beer and watch the race!”
“(grumble, grumble)…don’t have to worry about this at Bristol…(grumble, grumble)”
Hey, it could happen.
All seriousness aside, I have been attempting to watch races for the last two-plus seasons. The only racing I’ve been able to stomach is Australian V8 Supercar….which is supposedly on its way over here in 2013, provided the all-new Austin Formula 1 track doesn’t explode into a ball of flames before then. The V8 Supercar series (which has been around for a few decades, by the way) is what NASCAR should have been all along, and I believe it’s why it’s almost impossible to watch Supercar races here in the states….often times almost a month after the event in question. It is in the France Cartel’s best interests to cover up any possible mention of any other series; not that I’m a conspiracy theorist, but I find it odd that the best racing on the Speed channel usually airs when most Americans are supposed to be sleeping…
If V8 Supercar ever catches on here….unless that series implodes as well, as they have just unveiled their own ‘car of the future’/’car of tomorrow’, and taken a FRONT-WHEEL-DRIVE entry from Nissan (the new FWD Altima)….which doesn’t produce any RWD, V8-powered cars, unlike Holden/GM and Ford of Australia…anyway, if Supercar manages to iron out the kinks, and gets some more exposure here in the states, NASCAR is dead in its tracks.
Even if V8 Supercar didn’t exist, NASCAR faces a problem. Too many fans are staying home from races (shockingly empty stands at several of this year’s events, the July Daytona race revealed entire seating sections…empty and dark), and it’s too easy to resist taking the route I am, by either following the race-tracking program on NASCAR.com or FoxSports, or skipping the race entirely, by checking out the results, and Danica sightings, (and crashes) online, after the race.
I applaud Daytona Beach’s attempts to bring NASCAR into the 21st century…12 years too late, with their campaign to listen to the fan’s needs, and give them a ‘recognizable’ car to cheer and root for, even though fans have been pissed off about the COSHAT since it was released to the public in 2007, so I’m a bit curious as to why they didn’t arrive at this conclusion until…2012.
I’m also glad that the France Cartel finally thought it might be a jolly good idea to at least leak out the perception that it somewhat-cares about what the racing fans might think…although their insistence on avoiding as many road courses as possible tells me that the Brian Trust still thinks all of us are idiots and that he knows what’s best for us wayward children.
Or maybe, just maybe, to paraphrase Dale Jr., who was recently asked about whether or not NASCAR would reduce their schedule:
”It’s all about the money.”
I hope it’s all about something, because if nobody is watching, there’s certainly going to be a lot less money floating around, especially when other sponsors follow Office Depot’s lead, discovering that life can go on without NASCAR.
