Sprint Cup Headline News, Commentary and Race Coverage

Looking For Sprint Cup News?...... Visit our home page for the latest news and rumors in the Sprint Cup Series along with commentary, weekly columns and race coverage

StubHub.com





Click on button to go to
Home Page
Insider Racing News

Tickets Make Great Gifts

TickCo Premium Seating
NASCAR Race Tickets
Daytona 500 Race Tickets
SoldOutEventTickets.com
F1 Tickets
MotoGP Tickets

Insider Racing News
Copyright © 2000-2008. All Rights Reserved.

Sprint Cup® and NASCAR® are registered trademarks of the National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing, Inc. This web site is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by NASCAR®. The official NASCAR® website is "NASCAR® Online" and is located at.. www.NASCAR.com


10 Dumb Things About NASCAR

An Opinion



December 4, 2008

By Doug Demmons


Doug Demmons
In no particular order, here are 10 things about NASCAR that make you scratch your head.

1. Holding the end of the year banquet in New York. Other than the fact that a lot of sponsors are located there, there is no reason whatsoever to celebrate the season in a city where an attempt to build a track was corrupted by the Mafia. A Walmart parking lot in Charlotte would make more sense than the Waldorf Astoria and the discounts would be better.

2. Tolerating start-and-park teams in the Nationwide Series. It does not improve the show for fans by letting a team start a race, run three laps and take it to the garage with some mysterious “vibration.”

3. Empty seats during a truck race. The truck race is usually the best show of the weekend. Skipping the truck race is like leaving a baseball game in the seventh inning to avoid the traffic.

4. Blaming Tony Eury Jr. Why do fans call radio shows and heap scorn and abuse on Tony Eury Jr. whenever Dale Earnhardt Jr. doesn’t run well? Isn’t it possible that by running up top all the time Junior might scrape the wall once too often or run over some trash that accumulates up there and cause his own problems? Apparently not. Some citizens of Junior Nation believe that if Junior only had Chad Knaus as his crew chief he’d be the champion.

5. Jimmie Johnson’s persona. By all accounts, Jimmie Johnson has a great, fun-loving personality. But stick a microphone in front of him and he transforms into a politically correct corporate robot. A driver who just won his third straight title should be NASCAR’s most popular driver. He gets fans’ respect but not their love.

6. Trying to save money. If you own a race team, that’s God’s way of saying you have too much money. You are supposed to make a huge fortune selling insurance or something else and then blow it all on racing. No matter how much NASCAR tries to save money for teams with new rules and such, teams will find other ways to spend it.

7. The U.S. Navy. After announcing in April that it was forming a new Dale Earnhardt Jr. Division to lure recruits the Navy promptly dumped its sponsorship of Junior’s Nationwide team. This is the same Dale Jr. who accounts for nearly half of all NASCAR souvenir sales and racked up $417 million worth of TV exposure for his sponsors this year. Hopefully the idiots at the Navy who made this decision aren’t in charge of anything important, like aircraft carriers.

8. Carburetors. Shouldn’t a race car be at least as technologically advanced as the car in your garage? No, fuel injection is not the slippery slope to robotic cars that drive themselves.

9. Allowing lapped cars to restart in the front. The idea is to give them a chance to get back on the lead lap. But that rarely happens unless one of them gets the lucky dog. All they do is manage to get in the way of the cars that are chasing the leaders.

10. Single-file restarts. Make them all double-file except for the last 10 laps.




Doug Demmons is a writer and editor for the Birmingham News ~ he writes daily and weekly auto racing columns ranging from NASCAR to open wheel to Formula One, local tracks and more... you can read Doug's columns online at Blog of Tommorow


You can contact Doug Demmons at .... Birmingham News

You Can Read Other Articles By Doug Demmons


The thoughts and ideas expressed by this writer or any other writer on Insider Racing News, are not necessarily the views of the staff and/or management of IRN.

St. Jude Children's Research Hospital

Finding cures for children with catastrophic
illnesses
through research and treatment

return to top
Google
 
affiliate_link