But as is common in racing there is a confluence of different yet at times related issues worth a look.
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The race that stood out aside from the Daytona 500 - competitive but poorly driven amid multiple crashes and a strikingly low number of finishers - was Las Vegas, where the full draft duct package kicked off after a promising January test. The result was not what anyone expected - there was no two-abreast battle of drafting packs and the draft appeared schizophrenic.
There was though a striking battle for the lead - scoring indicated there were some 47 lead changes, official and otherwise, by any measure an eye-popping number and an indication the draft duct package is indeed working.
The race looked at in some circles as a big test was Fontana, and it proved less than expected. Kyle Busch won it after a late yellow and subsequent showdown with Atlanta 500 winner Brad Keselowski and Vegas champ Joey Logano, but the general consensus was it wasn't a particularly competitive race despite a few spots of intense dicing.
Pieces quickly came out critical of the draft duct package from Jeff Gluck and Matt Weaver - Weaver as has been his wont oozed condescension in criticizing the draft duct package and shoehorning advocacy of more short tracks even though short tracks are inferior competition models for major league racing.
Both completely ignore the worn out asphalt at Fontana (and also Atlanta and Chicagoland) and how teams were chasing the racetrack, trying to manage tires - do everything except go for the lead. What would Fontana have looked like had it been repaved by now? Like this.
....and also like this.
A sharp observation from one social media observer is that Fontana needs to be repaved.....but also rebanked, higher, up to 28 degrees. In the past I was not an advocate of rebanking tracks because the racecars were the issue, but with successful up-bankings at some tracks over the last two decades I'm not necessarily opposed to the practice. If anything Fontana, Pocono, Michigan, and perhaps Chicagoland and Kentucky can benefit from some up-banking (as well as where needed new pavement). The shuttered Nashville Superspeedway would benefit greatly from up-banking and also conversion to asphalt.
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There is clearly a divide in motorsports in fans, sanctioning bodies, etc. As one social media observer has noted, a lot of fans want pack racing and NASCAR has been listening to them. Of course given the superior level of competition fans should want pack-type racing. The core criticism I hear of pack-type racing is that somehow "anyone can do it." Following the Vegas race Kyle Busch - now of 200 wins between Winston Cup, Busch-Xfinity, and the Truck Series - mouthed off as he'd done in the January test that the package has taken "skill" out of the drivers' hands. Ryan Newman - another who has spoken out of turn over and over - claimed fans in the grandstands can now drive these cars with this package.
It brought a needed rebuke from MRN's Dave Moody. It's worth reminder of talented drivers who never won or haven't to date won a draft-pack aka restrictor plate race -
Rusty Wallace
Ricky Rudd
Geoff Bodine
Martin Truex
Kyle Larson
Carl Edwards
Kasey Kahne
Alan Kulwicki
Juan Montoya
Marcus Ambrose
Kyle Petty
Ricky Craven
Steve Park
Jerry Nadeau
Johnny Benson
Jeremy Mayfield
Joe Nemechek
AJ Allmeindinger
Lake Speed
Elliott Sadler
The claim "anyone can run these races" simply isn't true. NOT anyone can do what they're doing out on these racetracks. And it absolutely takes legitimate skill to compete in draft pack racing. Moody for one notes the drivers "have traditionally been poor spokespersons for their sport."
It shows again when the issue of "putting on a show" comes up. Pete Pistone of MRN has had conversation to this effect recently. The opinion has circulated from the driver fraternity that "their focus is on succeeding and dominating, not on creating a good 'show' or an entertaining race." Which is true, but misses the point. The sanctioning body is supposed to set the competition parameter and the drivers compete within it. When the parameter is set where drivers are slicing and dicing for the front on a regular basis then it is "putting on a show" because it is competition in its purest form - combat for the win.
And while drivers seek to dominate, objective reality is the accomplishment is inherently diminished when it is domination. Kyle Busch's much-celebrated 200 wins across the Winston Cup, Busch-Xfinity, and Truck Series saw a disproportionate percentage of uncompetitive affairs, and even his Fontana win wasn't the accomplishment a hard-fought affair would have been.
To put Busch and Newman's opinion on its head - anyone can outrun the field; it takes a true racer to outright it
*****
Also getting a lot of ink has been Tony Stewart's interview with the Virginian Pilot, his now-famous "rich kids" interview. First he pushes that NASCAR needs more drivers with "personality," though what this actually looks like remains nebulous, and if anything the sport has choked on personality the last two decades.
He espouses one of the hoarist gripes in motorsports - one Richard Petty made in his 1986 biography with William Neely - the claim "kids with rich fathers and deep pockets that put them in racecars.....because they're eighteen years old, they think they deserve to be in a Cup car. I have a hard time with that."
Stewart of course doesn't name names, even though his argument would be more credible if he did - name who should be removed from Winston Cup rides and which of these "hundreds of thousands of racecar drivers across the country that have clawed and scratched their way at Saturday night short tracks and worked on their cars all their life to get where they are" should take those rides over.
Should NASCAR remove Austin Dillon and Paul Menard from their rides? How about your own driver Daniel Suarez, Tony? Suarez is a Drive For Diversity poster boy - diversity initiatives are another form of favoritism - who has had quality rides with JGR and now Stewart-Haas, and even won three Busch-Xfinity races and won at Phoenix in the Truck series - all in 2016 - and who since then has just ten top-five finishes in a combined 93 Winston Cup/Busch-Xfinity races - and just 87 career to date laps led in Winston Cup. Less with more. He would seem the kind of driver who should be yanked from his ride and replaced.
And the bigger question - is it possible the reason these hundreds of thousands of short trackers don't get Winston Cup rides because their fundamental skill set isn't compatible with Cup anymore? This is in essence why open wheel short trackers stopped getting Indycar rides even when the IRL went out of its way to put sprint car and midget car drivers into Indycars, only to find in test after test what National Speed Sport News quoted one team owner saying in 2002 - "We could never get them to stop lifting for the corners."
Stewart's general sentiment is sympathetic, but practicality and sympathy aren't the same thing.
Stewart also renews his idiotic advocacy for dirt tracks for Winston Cup. It bears reminder that the reason he wants Winston Cup at Eldora - despite the weak competition level there and inability to hold more than 13,000, never mind no particular evidence of sponsor interest for major league racing there - is TV money; the Trucks get nothing for TV money.
It's the same for the Busch-Xfinity Series and the other tours of NASCAR - and the real answer goes ignored. NASCAR needs to completely revamp its TV deal and get more networks involved into more series. CBS, TNT, TBS, and MAVTV - and even ABC despite the gross qualitative regression of ESPN - need to be involved with FOX and NBC to provide more TV money at lest cost to each network, with genuine TV money going to the other tours of NASCAR. Make the Truck Race at Eldora worth the financial while of the track so it doesn't need Cup. Get more TV money so Iowa, a track not capable of a Cup date despite sanctioning body ownership, is worth its while not having a Cup date.
*****
There's a Darrell Waltrip-ism that fits with this scenario - coop-etition, a mixture of cooperation between sides that aids their own competition endeavors. It's a term he coined to describe push-drafting by rival cars at Daytona and Talladega; cooperation that directly benefitted the competitive effort of the two cars involved.
Coop-etition fits to try and turn around the disaster that is Chevrolet's Winston Cup effort. It is known, as Andy Petree stated in 2018, that there is no inter-team cooperation within Chevrolet's Winston Cup program, and the signs point to that Chevy seriously cut its NASCAR budget. So the lack of inter-team engineering exchanges is baffling and harmful to the effort. If Hendrick, RCR, Ganassi, Petty, and the Brad Daugherty team opened up their engineering information to each other - a la the old Childress-Earnhardt-Petree alliance and the pioneering Pontiac inter-team alliance involving Petty, Sabates' team pre-Ganassi involvement, Joe Gibbs Racing when it ran Pontiacs, Bill Davis Racing, and Chuck Rider's team - they would far more effectively find and solve engineering, setup etc. issues with their cars - and be able to fight the Fords and Toyotas for wins.
Coop-etition.
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