NASCAR Needs to Embrace that Sports can be Boring and that is OK

 

Should NASCAR race in Indianapolis? Yes! Should NASCAR race at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway? That is a much bigger question to answer. The first thing we have to think about is is NASCAR the sanctioning body of the sport of professional stock car racing in the United States? Or is it a body that does sports entertainment? 

Sports entertainment is a term coined by WWE owner Vincent Kennedy McMahon, the WWE is extremely athletic and can cause real injuries, but all of the results are predetermined and it is put on as a show where the fans use a suspension of disbelief to enjoy it. That is not the only way to do sports entertainment. You can do this without needing to predetermine results, just simply manipulate events to provide more entertainment to your fans. Tony Stewart was once fined for comparing NASCAR to the WWE because of a debris caution he did not believe needed to exist. 

Of course all sports have to entertain otherwise they would not have audiences, in the United States most people do not watch soccer because they don’t find it entertaining. Which to be fair to the USA makes sense because most people here are conditioned that action means things like scoring goals, or touchdowns. The reason the NBA is more popular than the NHL despite being a slower paced game is that in basketball scoring is easy, in hockey scoring is not easy there is a play on the other team whose only job is to stop scoring by guarding the goal. 

Motorsports is very entertaining as a sport because there is always something happening, whether it be on track battles, strategy, cars failing, drivers making a mistake, or crashes. Every minute of a motor race something happens even in the endurance races there is always something happening. The level of action fluctuates over the course of the event. NASCAR has decided to artificially change the way these periods happen by introducing stage racing. Races are split into thirds, but not equal thirds and there is a caution at the end of each stage. Caution periods end with a double file restart in NASCAR, and with cars being so close together and often on different strategies these stage cautions can lead to other cautions happening and a car that was fast enough to win could end up on the back of a tow truck because of a caution that had no natural reason to occur. 

Most of the stock car races at Indianapolis on the oval were memorable, but not because of on track excitement. Or if it was from on track action it was because of terrible things happening such as the 2008 tire debacle. As races the oval events were amazing, as events meant to entertain for the duration they did pretty poorly. 

The road course did a good job as a race for the first bit of the race and was certainly entertaining and novel. The last ten laps of the race were certainly entertaining but they failed at being a race. AJ Almendinger was nowhere near the front until the final restart, promoted to third by everyone crashing and then promoted to the lead when Chase Briscoe forgot that violating track limits and gaining an unfair advantage always results in a penalty, and when you have a penalty spinning the leader out for the win is a bad idea. 

I was entertained for the entire length of the road course race, but it certainly failed in its first job of being a race and turned into a joke by the end of it. 

If I were in charge of NASCAR I would not go back to the large speedway in Speedway, Indiana, I would continue to have races in the market, but they would utilize the Indianapolis Raceway Park short track. This would allow the sanctioning body to serve a large motorsport area and ensure that the race was both entertaining and a legitimate sporting event. In order to increase ratings NASCAR must do two things, have better promotion of their non crown jewel and non playoff events and put an emphasis on being a sporting event before entertainment. 

There was a 6-6 tie on Sunday night football a couple of years ago, it was not entertaining, but I was glued to the television until the final whistle because in sports anything can happen and sometimes those things are boring.