Change is usually painful. When an institution (to some) like NASCAR (National Association of Stock Car Auto Racing) makes a big change after more than 50 years of doing things pretty much the same, it can really hurt for lots of people. A few years ago, they started working on, what they called at that time, the Car Of Tomorrow. It was done for several reasons: to standardize body templates across the different makes of autos represented by the racing cars (they had not really been “stock” cars since the 60s), to increase driver safety, to make the cars more aerodynamically stable at high speeds, and to try to make cars more affordable to small teams in the sport. Teams didn’t like it, because they had to scrap existing cars and start over with the new design. Fans didn’t like it because the cars looked less like the stock cars they represented and more like “matchbox” cars. But the ruling body did just that; they made the rules.
So, after tweaking stuff for a couple of years and working with some of the bigger teams to get cars built and tested, NASCAR made the new design mandatory last year and all the cars were the new design. I, for one was not happy and even stopped watching most of the races. Besides this change, I had found that watching all the races in a season was taking over my life, so I had decided this was a good reason to cut back.
This year, we were spending February in Florida so I decided it was my chance to finally experience the Daytona 500. I thought I should do it once and we were going to be staying at a campground within 45 minutes of the track. It was worth it. I loved the race, it was very close. No “big one” occurred, and the only real problem was that they had a problem with a section of the track, probably due to heavy rains this winter, which caused two lengthy red-flag periods and made the race go into the night time. It was still a lot of fun and I saw some awesome racing.
During the red-flag periods, they interviewed some of the drivers, as they also did right after the few wrecks which occurred. After having seen those interviews and been able to mull it over a bit, it suddenly occurred to me that there was something profoundly different about the tones of these interviews. There was something missing. The missing part was that none of the drivers complained about how bad it was to drive in a restrictor plate race. It used to be that they were down on how it was so hard to pass and it was just lap after lap of your foot to the floor and cars bouncing all over and everyone just waiting for the “big one” to happen. Jeff Gordon even went so far as to say he thought the racing was exciting, that you were able to pass and really jockey for position, and that the shock packages that NASCAR was making everyone use was part of the reason.
I also noticed that there were a lot of people running up front who normally would not be even close, and the winner was a driver who had not been competitive in a while and who was new to the team he was driving for. And he didn’t win on fuel strategy of the luck of staying out and then hitting a rain storm. He one it by racing hard, persistence, and being competitive at the end of the race. By golly, I think the changes that NASCAR made to the cars has actually helped the sport be more fun to watch. Wow, that is great.
