A Grand Unifying Theory of Auto Racing

Races at Las Vegas and Homestead have given us our first glimpses this year of what makes NASCAR great.

I would need to talk to a foreign-born Formula 1 fan to confirm this, but I have a very strange and visionary theory about American racing. It occurred to me while I was watching a particular half lap of racing. Click this and watch for exactly 20 seconds:

Watching that gave me roughly the same effect as I got eating Alaskan king crab legs for the first time. I loved it so much I wanted to bring it up at random times and shoehorn it into pieces of writing that weren’t about crabs at all. But there’s a particular quality of that racing which, to me, makes it more exciting than other forms of racing at other styles of track, and I think it cuts to the core of my American brain: [It’s not the paywall, don’t say it’s the paywall]