Dr. Claire Lewicki: Tell me what you love so much about racing.
Cole Trickle: Speed. To be able to control it. To know that I can control something that’s out of control.
Days of Thunder (1990)
The blistering sun hangs high over the hot asphalt track, the stink of the free Marlboro cigarettes and Coors Light permeates the open air like Pigpen’s dust cloud. The stands are filled to the brim, a crowd of nearly 100,000 in some far off bible belt town.
For NASCAR every weekend is considered to be as important as Superbowl Sunday, but still fall far short of a Larry the Cable Guy comedy show. And yes, I have a dirty secret… I do love me some NASCAR. And yes, I have heard all the silly arguments against it.
“They’re just driving in circles.”
“It’s just for rednecks.”
“You’re only waiting for an accident.”
One time when I was eating dinner in the now defunct Hooligan‘s Sports Bar on US1, a group of guys at the end of the bar were getting all excited because NASCAR was about to come on. The average weight of the guys was about 300 pounds, and I think there were only a single pair of shirt sleeves between them but of course each had a visible tattoo of an eagle.
Someone complained that NASCAR was being put on the TV instead of an NFL game, and the guys got all crazy, (please envision with a Southern accent), “hey bud, we wuz all here first, and aint nuttin’ gunna stop us from seein Ernie Irvin.”
Yes, Rednecks sure do love their NASCAR also. For about 30 years their championship was called the Winston Cup after Winston Cigarettes, and I have never in my entire life seen a black person or a person from New York City smoke a single Winston cigarette, have you?
Yet, there is a vast irony in the entire concept and world of NASCAR if you take a second to think about it. Put it in perspective of other sports in America:
- Baseball literally has no strategy. ”Me hit ball.” Maybe there’s a matter of knowing pitchers tendencies, but that’s a tiny bit of memorization before a game, and probably doesn’t make much of a difference either.
- Basketball has a total of 12 plays that all teams run, and the biggest difference is the athletic ability and effort of each player.
- Football is much more complicated, considering that there are stories that certain coaches, like Mike Martz, have 411 page playbooks. But, in essence it’s mainly memorization, and a hell of a lot of it. But except for Quarterbacks, there’s not much thinking involved. Actually, I think if you were to ask a player they’d say that thinking is the last thing you want to do.
This is what bugs me the most about NASCAR – for all the redneckness, the beer guzzling, potbelly, sleeveless shirt wearing, trucker hat sportin’, accident cheering stupidity, it is the sport of Engineers!
Look beyond the obvious for a second, meaning the trained monkey’s sitting behind the wheel, and you’ll find that the true competition is in the Engineering phenomenon of taking a machine that has to be exactly the same as every other machine on the race track and finding tiny ways to squeeze a couple hundredths of a second from a lap time.
And sure, it may seem pretty unremarkable to shave an imperceptible amount of time from anything, but this is all in the context of cars moving in speeds of almost 200 miles per hour.
If you were to take a moment and think about NASCAR in it’s essence, extremely fast moving cars, separated by a speed that is slower than the pace that a human baby can crawl, it take the whole “they’re just driving in circles” complaint and makes it sound pretty ridiculous.
Behind it all, are a whole team of aerodynamic experts, mechanical engineers, materials engineers (tires and gravel), and all sorts of other highly trained science nerds.
This isn’t sport, this is a science experiment. This is tinkering an air brake system by millimeters so that the flow of air over the rear spoiler creates the tiniest bit of extra pressure on the back wheels for a bit of extra friction and track speed, or a looser front end resulting in worse handling (and probably an accident).
Yet, sadly enough, NASCAR sits behind a wall of missing teeth and beer guts. At least the next time you’re flipping through channels on a lazy Sunday afternoon, you may take a second to filter through the molasses thick country accents and find the greatness that is, and should be, Stock Car Racing.
getting one? Is she ever curious what happened to his graduation ceremony?
2 Angry Nerds is a Movie and Cinema podcast done by Ric Delgado and James Rigual. We span all sorts of topics, mainly hovering around the Top 5 Weekly Grossing US Movies and Top 5 Movie lists.
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