Why NASCAR is not a sport

Why NASCAR is not a sport

I promised I'd deliberately piss people off in my next post: Lord, I loathe NASCAR.

This one has been simmering for years but I am so tuned out of motor "sports" that I keep missing the beginning of the season.

Last week we had the biggest sports event of the year, played at the end of the NFL season. We're coming up on college basketball's March Madness, the championship tournament at the END of the season. Baseball climaxes with the World Series - at the END of the season. Opening day is nice but it's a relatively minor celebration.

But in NASCAR Opening Day - the Daytona 500 - is the biggest event of the year. How can you love a "sport" where it's all downhill after opening day? (You can make your own skiing joke here if you wish.)

And, face it, the biggest event in NASCAR history was when Dale Earnhardt was killed at the Daytona 500. Blood sport has always had a grim fascination. I don't know how much of this is about the crashes, but I suspect it's a lot more than fans will consciously acknowledge.

I know there are a lot of gearheads out there, I'm the same way only with computers. And I can see where driving a car really really fast would be fun. But I don't get the excitement of watching someone else drive a car really really fast. Maybe a Cannonball Run sort of thing would be interesting - shut down an Interstate and race cross-country. Like the Tour de France does with bikes only waaaay faster. But the round and round and round format is lost on me. There's no visual cue as to which lap someone is on, so for the uninitiated it's impossible to tell who's ahead. (Granted, the Tour de France has some of the same issues in its multi-leg format...)

All these are quibbles of the ignorant. But here's my case, which even the aficionado must acknowledge:

The reason NASCAR is not a sport is because the equipment is all-important.

Equipment matters in most competitive endeavors. There's a range from crappy dime store toy equipment to amateur equipment to world class equipment. I just got a new bike. It's a decent bike. But it's not as good a bike as Lance Armstrong's bike.

Yet if you were to put me on Lance's bike, and Lance gets this:



who would win? Lance, of course, because he's a better athlete.

After that disaster, I meet Tiger Woods for a round of golf. I swap Tiger and get to use his Special Super Swoosh clubs with the shafts made of Ultimate Golf Atoms. (I really don't know shit about the technical specs of golf clubs but that's not the point.) Tiger gets a rental bag from the caddy shack with a bent putter. Do I win because of the better clubs? Noooo! Tiger whoops my ass because of his skills.

vs.

Now. Let's go to Daytona. I get Jeff Gordon's race car. (I can name exactly two NASCAR drivers: Jeff Gordon because I saw him on some ads, and Dale Earnhardt Jr. because his dad went wham into the wall.) He gets my four cylinder Suzuki.

Who wins THAT one?

Sure there's some skill involved and I'm likely to smack into the first turn, but I suspect an average driver with a super powered car could beat a professional driver in a crappy street vehicle. The decisive factor is the car, not the driver. So the superstars should be the engineers and the pit crew, the way the stars of horse racing are the horses rather then the secondary factor the jockeys.

So enjoy it if you will. I wish it wasn't inflicted on the rest of us as much as it is - there's only so much room for sports coverage and a lot of more interesting things are happening. But it doesn't offend me so I can easily ignore it from now until whenever the hell it is the season ends.