I may have gotten carried away, here, but I just watched this year’s Daytona 500 crash fest. I don’t watch much NASCAR at all, thinking, as I do, that it is not far removed from motorized wresting, or maybe cage fighting. This year’s “race” did little to change that view for me.
To begin with, racing on ovals? Really? What have ovals to do with the real world? This is a throwback to racing’s earliest days, when racing was done on horse tracks at fairgrounds and such. Racing on public roads, where there were actual, like, you know, corners that went left and right, was banned early on for reasons of safety.
But much safer closed-track road racing, as it’s called, has been with us now for, what, 80 years? In a road race, you accelerate, slow down, turn left, turn right. Accelerate again, turn again. And so on. In NASCAR, at least at Daytona, you hold the throttle pedal to the floor. All the time.
Then there are the cars, so-called stock cars. What about them, exactly, is stock? Right, nothing. And the weight of those cars? It’s 3,200 pounds. Why so heavy? They don’t have to be that heavy.
But they are that heavy. They race at 200 mph, two and three wide, and when someone makes the smallest mistake, there are enormous multi-car crashes fueled by speed and inertia, wrecks that ruin equipment worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. Three wrecks like that today cut the field by more than half. It’s never IF these wrecks will happen. It’s when. How does that make any sense?
Then there are the engines and transmissions. Big honkin’ V-8s bolted up to obsolete four speed manual transmissions. Those engines gulp fuel and belch pollution. Why? Because the American male loves the sound of a V-8 engine? Too much Bruce Springsteen!
They run these races in “stages,” borrowing a term from rallying. Except these aren’t stages at all. They are cool-down periods, like standing your kid in a corner to keep mayhem from developing. It's phony. It's fake. It's false. It is not racing.
Much of this, I think, has to do with tradition. NASCAR’s fan base loves this shit. Its members would howl if the specifications were changed to reflect contemporary realities. And make no mistake, they come to see the wrecks, the sparks, the fire, the carnage. Think the Roman Coliseum.
All of this is why I think NASCAR is analogous to the current form of the Republican Party: beer-swilling, gun-owning white people, many of them from the South, who eschew logic and education, and who still think they are part of the Confederacy – or at least wish they were.
As far as I can tell, they want nothing to do with change, nothing to do with modern race cars – unless maybe those cars race once a year at Indianapolis, another oval – and to hell with liberals and other sensible people who know that oval fans are chasing a dream of yesteryear, a dream that already has disappeared, except for a few vestiges like these anachronistic races, like these anachronistic “race” cars.
What does it all mean? I have no idea. I just hope that soon it all will go away.
But that’s just me. Watching stupid shit on TV always makes me cranky.
-JFT