by waaytoomuchintothis » Mon Jul 03, 2017 9:25 pm
We're kinda coming close to what I wanted to know, here. So many of us remember what was the "golden years" of NASCAR, touching on all the key points... an actual stock car, reasonable weight-saving and tuning efforts, steel gonads in the driver's seat, and a helluva lot less rule-making by people who aren't drivers. Then there are the ridiculous exclusions of viewers that crooked cable and network TV people have instituted. There are other things, but the high points are on the list, I think.
But what we face now, and have made expensive, pointless efforts to overcome for decades, is that there aren't many actual candidates for stock cars today, and their engines, being dependent on computers, could never hold up for 500 miles at speed. So, what is the way forward? Do we re-name NASCAR to reflect what it really is? Or do we hold races that are so much less strenuous that today's "stock" cars could survive? Or both? When the Indy/Formula 1 split happened, and the LeMans cars in the US became a whole assortment of cars (some of which just dropped out of sight), and the development of the Daytona Prototype (which was never a prototype, never intended to advance anything, just another falsely equalized set of cars people would pay to see), the European folks have done great things with their racing venues and classes.
They were brave enough to try, why are we still referring to cars by class names that make no sense, and trying to make a 230mph car go slower to save lives, and simultaneously shaping a computer modeled plastic and aluminum body in computer aeronautic precision? It is an overstatement of the facts, certainly, but couldn't we all have better access to racing fun with a new set of North American racing classes, perhaps mirroring the European setup? American Touring Cars? Minivans? SUVs? How about subcompact cars on a grass oval or road course- wouldn't you love to see old Chevettes, Vegas, Pintos, Dodge Colts, the GM H body cars, tearing up the landscape on some pasture? (and a farmer counting cash in the background, not a corporation) Beer sponsors would fall all over themselves to host it. At least we could bring variety to play and bring ordinary people back to the races. What's more fun- a dozen crazy car guys, sliding all over the place in cars that aren't worth $500 (but you know everything about) for 2 hours for which you pay $30 for a ticket, or paying hundreds to sit in the blazing sun, surrounded by concrete for four hours, so far away from the track you need a handheld video receiver to watch it on TV to keep up?
The crooked TV outfits would have to deal with it. As it stands now, you can only see very few races of any kind in the US without paying insane amounts to cable outfits, even when you have a Roku type device to avoid the cable monopolies. You pay to have the channel with the races on your Roku, and you can't use it because the cable outfits have a crooked contract that excludes you. This garbage will never stand in court, but imagine how much racing we can see when this obvious collusion is banned by the courts! The way to make it happen is lots of variety in racing, so much so that the cable jerks must cave in.