January 24, 2010
By Kim Roberson
Kim Roberson
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If there was any question whether or not NASCAR listens to fans and drivers, they were cleared up this week during the annual NASCAR Media Tour.
With the words “Have at it boys”, NASCAR removed the majority of the constraints that many blamed for making the racing of late, “boring”, and placed the excitement level of the race back in the hands of the men behind the wheel of the cars on the track.
You want to bump draft, have at it.
Bumping at any time during a race? Just don’t kill each other.
The “ugly” wing? Gone no later than mid-season.
Fans having a reason to complain about boring racing? Well, I sincerely doubt that will ever change.
Almost since the day I became a fan, I have heard some “old timers” complain that the racing “just isn’t what it used to be” because of all the rules that NASCAR put in place after Dale Earnhardt’s death. They claimed that NASCAR took away all the hard rubbin’ and racin’ that used to make the sport so exciting, instead just letting the cars parade around in circles with fuel mileage and strategy playing more in the decision of who wins than solid battling on the track.
Now, NASCAR says they will only intervene if there is a danger to the safety of the drivers.
Will this change make the racing more exciting? Probably. At least in the beginning as the drivers get a feel for just how far they can push the envelope. But at some point someone is going to push the envelope just a little too far, and the big one will happen. The likelihood is that it will be sooner rather than later.
I have heard an over under of lap three at the Daytona 500. Not the Shootout, primarily because the drivers in the shootout this year will all be veterans with at least a few years under their belts, know how to draft.
Another thing that many people seem to have forgotten is the reason why so many of these rules came in to play in the first place: Dale Earnhardt.
Sure, in the “good old days” there was beating and banging on the track. Cars ended up in mangled heaps on a regular basis during a race. Drivers broke limbs, were hospitalized for weeks, had to end their careers because of injuries.
Drivers had died while racing since the inception of the sport, but it wasn’t until the Intimidator was killed nine years ago that the outcry was made that the racing needs to be safer.
NASCAR has followed through with mandating SAFER barriers at all NASCAR tracks, and the current car was built with the safety of the driver in mind. We have seen the end result over the last few years: Michael McDowell’s violent crash at Texas, Jeff Gordon hitting the wall at Las Vegas, Carl Edwards hitting the fence at Talladega, and Ryan Newman flipping violently five months later at the same track.
Every one of them walked away, battered and bruised, but without broken bones or missing a single race as a result.
There is nothing to say that the drivers will be any more or less safe as the result of the relaxation of the rules. We might be surprised to find the drivers can do an excellent job of self policing themselves and we will have fewer crashes and more exciting racing.
I am not holding my breath on that one.
We have seen drivers who feel wronged retaliate against the person they feel wronged them, regardless of who else might be involved in the incident. We have seen drivers get impatient with the person ahead of them putting a bumper to the slower car and turning them out of the way.
The usual end result has been you get parked for a lap or five, and penalized 25 points and $25,000. But most drivers kept their emotions in check knowing the ends didn’t equal the satisfaction of the means.
I don’t expect drivers like Mark Martin or Jimmie Johnson or Dale Junior to suddenly start beating their way to the front of the pack, but I can’t say the same for other drivers like Juan Pablo Montoya or Kyle Busch or Brad Keselowski.
However, the flip side of that might be that in giving the drivers the ability to self police, a younger more aggressive driver who hits the wrong driver one too many times might eventually find himself on the wrong end of a bumper himself in an effort to teach a lesson in respectful racing vs. beating and banging to achieve your goals.
As for the fans, there should be no more reason for them to complain about the racing. No constraints, no seemingly random penalties.
Not that I expect that this will actually prevent complaints. So long as there is a sport, and a fan of that sport, there will be someone who finds a reason to complain.
But I can hope that the complaints will at least be fewer, and some of the old fans who claimed to have given up watching the spot because it wasn’t as exciting will come back to the sport they claimed to have loved so much back in the day.
At least until such time as we have our first crash that ends with a driver on a stretcher -- or worse.
And then it will be a simple reminder of “be careful what you wish for -- you might get it.”
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