Is NASCAR in a Crisis?
Sorry for the non-specific title, I'm only writing about the entertainment value/racing quality of NASCAR the past few weeks. Everyone is in crisis in every single way, this is just a low-stakes one!
A few weeks ago, I wrote in the NASstack about races at Las Vegas and Homestead, and about the green shoots of excellent racing poking through the asphalt. It’s important to celebrate greatness - not just athletic greatness, but aesthetic greatness. We love a good game. Given that it’s hard to define a good game, my writing forces me to be a theater critic as much as a sports fan. (This is the kind of thing that happens with sports, now that the jocks got soft and let all us nerds in. Shouldn’t have done that, fellas.)
And like theater critics, I’ve got a thriving vocation and tons of material to pore over. There have been 3,078 total miles of NASCAR Cup Series racing this season, and many of those miles are not kick-ass turbo charged your-face-in-the-TV-Videodrome-style action.1 As an evangelist for the sport, I feel duty-bound to ignore the spells of mediocre racing, and pretend the downright bad racing doesn’t exist.
But the last two NASCAR races have particularly sucked. We don’t even need to really dissect the races, when there’s one stat that cuts through all the noise.