[mitchntx]

After watching a some of the coverage of the Daytona 500 this weekend and hearing a lot of discussion about the costs associated with feilding a competitive team and hearing the gnashing of teeth surrounding the dwindling sponsorships and hearing the concerns about enough cars to field a full grid and seeing Waltrip's wild tumble and seeing that tumble re-played on network after network after network ....

I began to wonder ....

Because it's all about the number of minutes a specific sponsor get's it's name on TV, when will a driver, who is an "also ran", purposely wreck his car, just get gleen a few extra minutes of sponsor coverage?

Is it cost effective to spend a $100,000 race car in order to keep a $10 million sponsor?

NAPA received tons of exposure from networks to local TV stations replaying his wreck. I would hate to see that happen on purpose, but ... it has to be there in someone's mind ...

[lateapex]

Tony Stewart had never road raced until he came to Nascar.  He sat on the pole his first time and has now won a couple of Nascar road races with some big name road racers in the field. 

Tony Stewart may have had more road race experience than you account. He won National championships in both the International Karting Federation and the World Karting Association. In America, much karting is on ovals, but both the “laydown” karts and the “sprint” type carts compete at some famous road courses. Currently, between the 2 sanctioning bodies, they are using: Portland International Raceway, Sears Point, Laguna Seca Raceway, Willow Springs Raceway, Seattle International Raceway, Carolina Motorsports Park, Mid Ohio Sports Car Course, VIRginia Intl Raceway, Summit Point Raceway, Putnam Park Road Course, Grattan Raceway, Road Atlanta, and other less well known tracks.

Most all European auto racers begin in karting, and that means on road courses. In Europe, most all auto and cycle racing is on road courses. The big new Eurospeedway oval track in Laustiz, Germany went bankrupt in 2002 and CART had to cancel the race that year. Europe’s ASCAR series, their version of NASCAR, is pretty much chuckled at by the racing-fan public. The opening event in England had 12,000 in attendance. The 24 hours of LeMans I attended had over 250,000 in attendance, and it was estimated that about 100,000 of them were British (they had to cross the channel to get there).

I am not saying that one form of racing is right or wrong, or that having a majority of fans means a series is more sophisticated. But … the closer a series comes to “spec racing” the less interested I become. I think that spec racing is appropriate for children learning to race. It keeps expenses down and gives you a better idea of who the more talented drivers are. As an adult watching adult drivers, I find it interesting to see creativity and invention in the development of the cars. I think there should be broad rules which everyone has to obey in a certain class, but still allow for much variety and ingenuity within those rules. I have enough problems with IMSA/ACO and their ever tightening rules. But NASCAR/GrandAm is a joke to me. It is approaching IROC. I’ve lost interest in the Speed World Challenge since I witnessed them penalizing the previous race winner with ballast. You spend money getting down to the minimum weight without compromising strength or safety, then they punish you for winning. I think it is un-sportsmanlike to “pre-engineer” the winner of a race. Let the best driver in the best car win. It forces the others to improve. It raises the level of competition. If “fans” will only watch a race when the top 10 finishers cross the finish line within 4 seconds of each other, then they aren’t autosports fans. Yea, throw a yellow 3 laps before the end to “bunch the cars up”. They are the kind of people who only watch a movie to see the accidents and explosions. There CAN be an intellectual component to watching car racing. Maybe NASCAR could control the cars remotely and we could have 6 abreast racing.

That said, I would watch NASCAR any weekend they ran on dirt, just like I still watch them when they run on road courses.