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NASCAR, the Monkey, and The Football
(The Tale of the Auto Club 500)
2/26/08: SOZ Studios, MI - By Dennis Michelsen "DMIC" (RaceTalkRadio.com)
How could everything go so wrong just one week after everything went so right? You can't blame NASCAR for the weather but just about everything else that happened on Sunday was a direct fault of a total lack of common sense! What was NASCAR thinking when they started the race on Sunday with the track weeping? Were they afraid to inconvenience the 47 fans that showed up for the race by continuing to hold out hope against hope that they could get the track dry? Is NASCAR's new theme song for the Auto Club 500 "The Never Ending Story?" A huge portion of sport's radio talk show hosts look at our sport and laugh! Sunday's race at California Speedway added NASCAR to the tale about the monkey and the football!
Daytona High Turns Low
Last week at this time I was riding high on my NASCAR buzz coming off of that fantastic Daytona 500! Twenty-five green flag passes for the lead not counting the changes for pit stops! Forty-two lead changes overall among sixteen different drivers! (That's a new record for most different leaders in the Daytona 500) NASCAR set a record for the most cars to ever finish on the lead lap in a five hundred mile race in NASCAR history without frequent cautions in the early stages to close everybody back up! Some fans didn't find the race that thrilling but the entire Speedweeks started my season on a wonderful NASCAR high!
California Crying
NASCAR says the drivers had no complaints about the track condition at the start of the race. Who were they asking, Morgan Shepherd on his roller skates? I was flipping around the channels on the scanner and heard Dale Earnhardt Jr and Tony Stewart saying the track was still weeping! After his crash on lap fifteen, Denny Hamlin made no bones about the fact that he hit a wet spot but the racing continued! It took a fiery crash and a lot of drivers complaining to halt the race after just twenty-one laps for repairs! On Friday NASCAR played it safe and didn't have any on-track activity because of the same issue with a weeping track. If you can't stop the weepers during the daylight, what makes you think you will stop the weepers after dark? Robin Pemberton says it takes an hour and a half to dry a track and that is why NASCAR waited so long and tried so hard to get the race in Sunday night. Maybe NASCAR needs to hire Mr. Science to teach them the basics!
Embarrassment to the Sport
California Speedway has been given exactly the dates they thought they could sell and still there are empty seats remaining! Perhaps it is time for International Speedway Corporation to put someone in charge that understands racing! Or even better move the race to a track that knows how to host one. The choice of Grand Marshall for this race was an embarrassment. Brad Garrett had the wrong Busch brother and joking about a missing kid is never funny anyway! ZZ Top is way past their prime and put on a show that had no spunk to it. Maybe this continues in the NASCAR tradition of usually using musical guests that are ten years or more out of date. Fox Sports compounded this embarrassment with their rain delay theatre where the big question was, "What should we name the Gopher Cam?" Asking it once or twice was funny. But one race into the season isn't there other things to talk about? The only person they didn't ask was presidential candidate Mike Huckabee and he would have been able to tell you the proper way to fry a gopher for a tasty late night snack! Chris Myers suggests that the "Santa Ana Wind" will help dry the track. Hey Chris, the wind was from the west not the east and therefore doesn't count as a "Santa Ana Wind" even if they are close to the Santa Ana Mountains!
California Fans Will Travel
The fans that do show up to California Speedway races WILL travel to other races! Some will say it is more convenient to grab a flight out of town than to battle freeway traffic to make the drive to Fontana anyway! NASCAR says it needs these races so they can be strong in the Southern California market. How has that strategy worked? Look at the television ratings and NASCAR races are just a minor blip in Los Angeles and would not suffer if NASCAR only raced once at this speedway. The NASCAR fans that live in Southern California might even enjoy the racing better out of town! I got very excited when I saw that workman with a pavement saw Sunday evening. I thought they were tearing the entire track up and letting everyone go home to never come back!
Auto Club 251 was Their Goal
Unless NASCAR has the worse weather support in the civilized world they had to know this race would not get to its conclusion Sunday evening. If it takes two hours to dry a track in the daylight then it takes an eternity to dry one after dark when the track was already susceptible to weepers in the turns! Sure starting the race and taking a chance to get it in was the right move. But once the track wouldn't stop weeping and then when the rain started again give up! It sure looks like NASCAR's intent on waiting so long to call the race was to get in the Auto Club 251 and not the Auto Club 500! This is not the kind of move that is likely to sell more tickets at a facility that is already a tough sell. It is the way to alienate some of the loyal fans that did show up! Maybe this is just more of an illustration why the slogan for this track is…good seats are still available!
Conclusion
Perhaps the Auto Club Speedway of Southern California should change its name to Magic Waters Speedway! I didn't think when NASCAR marketing compared their races to reading Moby Dick that they meant their rain delays! The track is an embarrassment to the NASCAR schedule with so many empty seats. At least the racing at Rockingham Speedway was great even when the weather report featured a wind chill factor report many years! After so many wonderful things happening during Speedweeks had me psyched for a great season. Even when they tried to race Sunday the racing was a joke with seven cautions in eighty-seven laps. (Many under caution) Since this is a family friendly site I won't connect all of the dots for you race fans, but I was left thinking that NASCAR can be added to the story about the monkey and the football.
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