NASCRAP Non-Stock Car Racertainment: All hail the “Car of Yesterday”

The HC Blogger Unloads on all things France

Okay, I’m getting’ real antsy, so it’s apparently time for me to do something I do once every 3-4 months and have done since, oh, around 1998: Declare, in some sort of public forum, my complete disillusionment and utter disdain for the absolute farce that used to be my favorite sport.

That’s right, it’s once again time for me to shout from the hilltops my complete hatred of the National Association of Stock Car Auto Racing – NASCAR.



How do I hate NASCAR? Let me count the ways.

Here is my "Top Ten" list of the things that NASCAR, as an organization, has done to kill my love for my once-favorite sport:

1. They have become a "spec" racing series, meaning that cars on the track are no longer "stock" in any way, shape, or form. Ford, Chevy, Dodge, and now Toyota all share virtually the EXACT same body shells. Only the headlight decals and the front fascia (front bumper cover) are slightly reminiscent of the production vehicle the racer is supposed to be. It astounds me that car manufacturers continue to pour money into NASCAR because of this. "Win on Sunday, Sell on Monday" just doesn't work anymore, and hasn't for years.

2. NASCAR is not at all concerned with sanctioning fair races with consistent rules. Their rules change whenever they need them to, and caution flags (for "debris on the track") are thrown at any time during a race when close racing or a close finish is threatened. It's all about the money, and a good show ensures the money will keep coming. Fairness be damned!

3. Monopolistic and non-competitive corporate behavior permeates each move NASCAR makes. International Speedway Corporation, the largest company that owns racing facilities around the country, is owned by the France family. ISC has been slowly but surely purchasing every track they feel threatened by; the logic being that a competing stock car racing organization could never get off the ground if they have no suitable tracks on which to hold races. Basically, NASCAR just wants to control the whole game board, and this is one way they're doing it.

4. NASCAR abhors technology, and this is completely contrary to one of the main purposes of motorsports. Racing is supposed to fuel innovation, so that advances in technology made in the pursuit of better finishes on the track eventually yield a better, more efficient, more durable, or safer vehicle on the street. NASCAR's insistence on 50-year-old technology (re-circulating ball steering gear boxes, push-rod V8 engines fed by carburetors, the absence of electronic engine controls for everything other than ignition, etc.) only makes the competition easier for NASCAR to regulate and police so that no team, regardless of how creative they may be or what clever things they may discover, can gain much of an advantage over their competitors for very long.

5. Corporate (and now municipal!) shakedowns are de rigueur with NASCAR. Over the past ten years, the organization's ultimate goal has been to separate every large company that has something anything to market to the general public from as much of its money as is possible. Convincing board room after board room that there is no bigger bang for the buck than advertising in NASCAR-land, a disturbing percentage of corporate America is chugging this Kool-Aid by the gallon, and paying exorbitant sums of money to do it. This latest fiasco about which city was going to land the "NASCAR Hall of Fame" all came down to which municipality offered the sweetest deal. Charlotte won (or lost, depending on how you look at it), and you had better believe they had to pony up quite a sweetheart deal for the "privilege."

6. NASCAR's sanitization of its participants flies in the face of nearly every colorful personality who built the sport of stock car racing. It was in the mid-to-late 1960's when NASCAR began to shed its backward image of moon-shiners bringing their "whiskey cars" out on Saturday night to see whose machine was the fastest. Drivers like Curtis Turner and crew chiefs like Smokey Yunick were certainly not "ready-for-prime-time," but they were completely representative of the type of people Big Bill France founded NASCAR to appeal to average, everyday, working-class people who liked to see the same Ford or Chevy they drove to work each day do battle on the race track each weekend. Could you imagine someone like Jeff Gordon, a multi-millionaire who dates a supermodel, hanging out with the average, working-class NASCAR fan who wears a number 24 cap and cheers for him each weekend? Many of the drivers and crews back in the '60's and '70's hung out and partied with their fans before and after races each weekend. Today's polished and poised drivers sit on such a pedestal that they have little in common with the average fan who supports them. Don't even mention the fines NASCAR now levies for saying the wrong thing over the in-car radio or in a victory lane interview. Much like what has happened to pop music, appearance now trumps ability in professional stock car racing.

7. NASCAR has a blatant disregard for safety until it threatens their revenue stream. Then they only care about the "appearance" of safety. During the ultra-competitive "tire wars" (Goodyear vs. Hoosier) of the early 1990's, NASCAR did virtually nothing as the two archrival companies produced racing tires that were closer and closer to the edge of what was wholly unsafe. But then Neil Bonnett lost his life due to this nonsense and NASCAR's hasty, simple solution was to get rid of Hoosier so that the lack of competition would ensure that Goodyear produced safer, slower tires. A few years prior to that, Richard Petty's infamous spiral along the retaining fence between the grandstands and the track at Daytona certainly wasn't the first time a car had taken to the air at 200mph, but it was the first time that fans had been so clearly threatened by such a thing. More to the point, however, was that this was the first time that video images of such a threat were broadcast around the nation. NASCAR's answer was the restrictor plate. Rather than mandating smaller engines making less power to slow the cars down, NASCAR, terrified of technology as always, just decided to simply mandate that a thin metal plate be sandwiched between the carburetor and the intake manifold, cutting the amount of air entering the engine by over one-third and bringing a field of cars who's engine outputs varied from 600 to nearly 800 horsepower, all down to about 450 horsepower each. Ever since the restrictor plate's implementation at Daytona and Talladega, a train of cars, all bunched together, mindlessly circle the track, lap after lap, until someone makes a mistake and 40% of the field is eliminated in one giant wreck. All this NASCAR does in the name of "safety."

8. From a public relations point of view, NASCAR is the racing version of Big Brother, pure and simple. If you ever read George Orwell's book 1984, you'll recall that the central character, Winston Smith, worked in the Ministry of Truth; the division of the government that went back and changed each pervious edition of the newspaper so that Big Brother (the government) would appear to have always been right about everything. When this year's television or radio announcers refer to the late Dale Earnhardt's seven championships, they don't refer to them as his seven Winston Cup championships (which they were). They instead refer to them as his seven Nextel Cup championships, as if Nextel was always the series sponsor. When NASCAR fined Dale Earnhardt, Jr. for using profanity in a victory lane celebration at the July race in Daytona last year, he was referring to his late father's record at the track. In the question, the announcer interviewing Dale, Jr. referred to Dale, Sr.'s number of wins at the track. Dale, Jr.'s profane exclamation (made out of excitement more than anything) was followed by a correction to the number of wins his father had at the track. The reason the announcer's number was wrong (too low) was because he was only counting NASCAR-sanctioned races the elder Earnhardt had won at Daytona International Speedway (something that NASCAR undoubtedly told the announcer to do). Earnhardt, Jr. was (correctly) counting all of Sr.’s wins there - NASCAR and non-NASCAR races alike. It makes you wonder what the fine was really for.

9. NASCAR's "commitment to diversity," like those of many large corporations today, is nothing more than a payoff to the likes of Jesse Jackson and his Rainbow/PUSH Coalition (who several years ago indicated that they were satisfied with NASCAR's "corrective actions" and would no longer threaten them with boycotts, etc.). Various teams in lower-echelon touring series are encouraged by NASCAR to promote minority drivers to higher-echelon series. This ends up being unwise and potentially unsafe, as drivers are given driving opportunities in faster cars in more competitive series before they're ready. If NASCAR really cared about minority participation in their sport, they would confront their ugly past with regard to Wendell Scott, the only black driver to win a NASCAR Cup-level race. Though a movie was made about it years ago, NASCAR doesn't want to talk about the fact that in the late '60's and early '70's, Scott would lose several laps during a race when he had to literally get out of his car and perform his own pit stop by himself at Talladega because no one was willing to serve on his pit crew for fear of reprisal by the angry racists that comprised the most vocal contingent of NASCAR fans in Eastern Alabama at the time. Wendell Scott was a true hero - he overcame amazing odds and with virtually no help from the NASCAR establishment, he enjoyed a moderate degree of success and set a landmark precedent with an eventual victory. Unfortunately, NASCAR doesn't like to mention his name when they talk about their current diversity initiatives. Perhaps they're a little too afraid of reminding advertisers about the "bad old days."

10. The mad desire for control over the participants in their sport borders on tyrannical. After winning races and championships in various other forms of racing throughout the '60's, '70's, and '80's, motorsports mogul Jack Roush got involved in NASCAR in 1988 with a single team backed by Ford and utilizing the talents of now-veteran driver Mark Martin. Within two years, Roush and Martin came within just a few points of winning the NASCAR Winston Cup championship. However, over the years, Jack Roush began to see a pattern that disturbed him. NASCAR began to limit the number of days each year teams could test their cars on tracks used for NASCAR races. At the same time, they also continued their annoying habit of changing rules constantly throughout the season. Frustrated but undaunted, Roush decided that he would make the most of what testing time he had, and at the same time more efficiently try out different engine and suspension combinations during actual races by fielding an eventual total of five different teams with five different drivers in every race. As soon as this strategy started bringing Roush success (back-to-back championships in 2003 & 2004), NASCAR again stepped in, floating the idea of limiting each owner to a maximum of three teams. Roush (and other large NASCAR teams) promptly threatened litigation, and while NASCAR appears to have (for once) backed down, the issue is certainly not dead. Utter paranoia often results in the desire for total control, and there is no better corporate example of this than NASCAR.