Oilpressure

Sunday was a beautiful day in Nashville. The sky was clear and the temperature was in the sixties. That morning I went for a long walk, which is about the only exercise I get, while listening to a random podcast of Donald Davidson’s The Talk of Gasoline Alley. It put me in the mood for racing. I finished my walk just in time to tune in to FOX’s coverage of the Daytona 500. That’s where my day took a downward turn.

The coverage apparently started at noon, so I was counting on a 1:00 green flag. I was incorrect. It started somewhere past 2:00. The two-hour pre-race show was filled with enough hype to make Super Bowl promoters take note. In that time, we got to see and hear Rascal Flatts perform on a concert stage. I actually like Rascal Flatts, but I like them when I’m in music mode – not race mode. I don’t like mixing the two. I have never understood the need to provide a concert alongside something that is already a big event.

I usually like Chris Myers as a broadcaster. I remember when he was with the mothership of ESPN and was confined to the SportsCenter desk. When he made the move to FOX, he was a central figure in their NASCAR broadcasts and a sideline reporter for NFL games. I also admired the way he handled himself after the death of his nineteen year-old son in a car accident. God forbid that should ever happen to me, but if it did – I hope I can handle myself the way Myers did under the most tragic of circumstances.

That’s why I was so embarrassed for him on Sunday’s broadcast. Every time the broadcast was thrown his way, he would wish everyone Happy Daytona Day! I am hoping that Myers was doing that under duress due to an overzealous director making him say it. I will give him the benefit of the doubt that that was the circumstance and he would never utter those irritating words on his own.

The Daytona Day promotion FOX has used for the last few years is even more lame than the infamous I am Indy that, for years, was the gold-standard for lameness. I found Daytona Day irritating when I first heard it, but they really stepped it up for this year.

I’m not sure which is worse – irritating or annoying; but I’ll go with annoying. If Daytona Day was irritating, the presence of Michael Waltrip on the FOX broadcast was downright annoying. His brother Darrell is bad enough, but Michael is like Darrell on steroids. Pick any trait of Michael Waltrip – the voice, the goofiness, the unfunny jokes – any one trait by themselves is enough to make you want to change the channel; but to combine all of them into one annoying package is just way too awful to even comprehend.

Then there is Darrell Waltrip – Mr. Boogity-Boogity himself. His act was wearing thin a decade ago. To say he is a NASCAR shill is the understatement of a lifetime. Ol’ DW is the one who credits NASCAR with inventing everything from the SAFER barrier, the HANS device all the way to helmets, racing and the vaccine for smallpox. If it has helped mankind, Darrell Waltrip will say that NASCAR invented it.

When Danica Patrick was interviewed by Jamie Little, I told Susan that there will be no mention of her ending her career at the Indianapolis 500. Sure enough; uninformed viewers would’ve come away from that interview thinking that Sunday’s race was Danica’s last race ever. It wasn’t until after she crashed that Danica let it slip that she still has one more. It was only then that the announcers mentioned that she would be driving for Ed Carpenter in the Indianapolis 500 in May. Even ol’ DW acknowledged that Ed would be giving her a fast car.

Even Jeff Gordon joined the hype brigade when he said “No race is as patriotic as the Daytona 500”. I guess he didn’t turn around to see all of those Memorial Day related festivities going on behind him, when Gordon drove the Pace Car in the 2015 Indianapolis 500.

But I will give credit when due. I think Mike Joy is one of the best sportscasters around – in any sport. He is knowledgeable, smooth, relaxed, has a spontaneous wit about him and doesn’t take himself too seriously. He seems to be one of the few FOX NASCAR personalities that understands that fans tune in to watch the racing, not the so-called stars in the booth.

Speaking of the racing, it finally got underway after the lengthy and exhausting two-hour (plus) pre-race show. Peyton Manning drove the Pace Car – a good choice – but while he was driving it, it dawned on me that I had been reminded about three-hundred times that the Daytona 500 was The Great American Race. I thought it ironic that the Great American Race was being paced by a Toyota Camry. Before the NASCAR apologists come after me, I’m well aware that the Camry is built in Kentucky. But it is worth noting that the Indianapolis 500 has never been paced by a foreign manufacturer. Will it be someday? Probably. But it doesn’t bill itself as The Great American Race, either.

Once the green flag was waved by Charlize Theron – another good choice for very obvious reasons – it didn’t take long for the carnage to begin – only eight laps. One of the dumbest inventions that NASCAR actually is credited for, reared its ugly head – the stage racing. As Stage One neared it’s completion after the first sixty laps, drivers started jockeying for position and blocking on Lap 59. The result was a senseless crash that left four cars out of the race, including Jimmie Johnson.

Stage Racing is NASCAR’s latest desperate attempt to stem the tide of falling ratings. The Chase was bad enough. Changing the name from Chase to The Playoffs was even worse. Green-white-checkered (GWC) finishes just became another in a long list of gimmicks to provide contrived, made-for-TV racing. But Stage Racing is the worst of all. Artificially creating a race within a race is pointless.

Then there were the endless parades of boring green flag racing between the Big Ones. Watching a driver lose the draft, drop like a stone, then finding a drafting partner to work their way back to the front and repeating the entire cycle makes for some awfully good sleeping; but it is not my idea of entertaining racing.

Then of course, there was the finish. Is it just me, or is there something fundamentally wrong about winning a race by ramming the car in front of you on the last lap, and sending him into the wall as you drive around to take the checkered flag? If that’s what NASCAR rules allow, so be it. But it strikes me as going against the nature of motorsports, unless we’re talking Demolition Derby.

All of this might explain why the overnight ratings for the Daytona 500 were the lowest ever recorded. Of course, that statement sounds more dramatic than it really is because overnights were not immediately available prior to 2009. Still, the 5.1 rating was a 22% drop compared to last year’s 6.5. For comparison’s sake, the 2013 Daytona 500 had a 10.0 rating. Some are blaming the Olympics on NBC for the ratings drop. There’s no question that the Olympics were a factor, but there’s also no question that NASCAR’s popularity is in a free-fall.

Contrary to popular belief, it gives me no joy to say that. The perception in the US is that the only racing is NASCAR. Logic would say if NASCAR is down, they must all be down. That perception bleeds over to potential and current sponsors. It takes a savvy marketing person to realize that IndyCar racing is not following NASCAR’s trend. In fact, IndyCar is bucking the trend. It is one if the few sports with rising TV ratings and attendance. As far as auto racing is concerned, the Verizon IndyCar Series is one of the few form of motorsports with a rise in car-count.

Here are some ideas if NASCAR really wants to improve their product and reverse the ratings and attendance tailspin they are currently in. First, they need to ditch the gimmicks. They are too complicated for the casual fan to follow. I had someone at work Tuesday ask me what those stages were all about. He said he didn’t know that was done in racing. I assured him that it was not done in IndyCar.

Also make it about racing, and not crashing. Crashes may make SportsCenter highlights, but true racing fans don’t want to see them. The GWC doesn’t ensure that fans get to see a race to the finish – it only ensures more crashing. The finish in Sunday’s race should have been at the end of Lap 200. Instead, they called it overtime as the laps mounted up under yellow after Lap 198. Altogether, the field completed 207 laps – seventeen and a half more miles past the scheduled distance. It would be a shame to lose a race by running out of fuel on Lap 203, after budgeting for running two-hundred.

And another thing – present your product with some credibility, and not as a clown show. The Brothers Waltrip need to go. They add nothing to the telecast and take a lot away from it.

Overall, the time that I spent watching NASCAR on that beautiful Sunday afternoon was about five and a half hours of my life I’ll never get back. Yes, there are a few IndyCar races in the past that have elicited that same comment, but less painfully. I get it that not every race is a clinic. There will always be some duds thrown in there – regardless of the series. That’s just the nature of the sport. I also get it that it’s an announcer’s job to keep viewers interested in what they’re covering. The worst thing they can have is to have viewers turning off before the end. If a football team is down, it’s the announcer’s job to keep pointing out how the other team can come back, even if they know they’re covering a blowout.

But what I don’t get is how an announcing crew can hawk a sport or event all day, then when they are in the midst of a lull – they tell you how exciting this is. We aren’t stupid. We know the difference.

By the time my NASCAR marathon was over on Sunday, it made me that much more thankful to be an IndyCar fan. Does IndyCar have the perfect product? No. Do they have problems? Yes.

But IndyCar as an organization also acknowledges the problems head-on. As of late, they have not been taking the approach of sugar-coating their problems. NASCAR addresses their problems by cranking up the hype and telling their fans how wonderful things are. The recent approach to solving problems by IndyCar has been taking a methodical, well thought-out approach – not by throwing the latest gimmicky idea at it. The windscreen is a good example. They listened to fans and acknowledged that something needed to be done in the name of safety. But they did not panic and bow to pressure by throwing canopies on the cars.

With Jay Frye in one of the top spots making key decisions, I now have confidence that the series will make the right decisions more times than not. That has not always been the case, but the last few years it has been. Can NASCAR fans say that? No.

Among the current two IndyCar TV partners, neither of them try to hijack the coverage and make it about their on-air personalities. Comparing the IndyCar TV coverage to what I saw Sunday, it’s like comparing PBS to the Cartoon Network.

But in my opinion, the biggest gap between IndyCar and NASCAR is the on-track racing. We haven’t seen racing like we saw Sunday since the days of Paul Tracy and the chrome horn – and I say that as a good thing. Look, I like hard racing and minimal contact. But to boot someone out of the way and into the wall, like I saw at least twice on Sunday, can have fatal consequences in IndyCar. There is just no place for it. It doesn’t take any talent or bravery to stuff someone into the fence. It just takes some luck to survive it.

So after surviving another day of the Waltrip brothers, the incessant over-hyping of NASCAR into trying to make the general public believe that this is the only form of racing; my biggest takeaway was…Thank God I’m an IndyCar fan!

George Phillips

This entry was posted on February 21, 2018 at 4:03 am and is filed under IndyCar. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.