It may be news to a lot of folks that NASCAR needs saving. Hey, the money is rolling in. TV revenues are up. Wherewithal revenues -- driver hats, driver toy cars, driver pork rinds -- are WAY up. By any 21st-century measure, NASCAR is a raving success. So where's the problem?
Salvation is about the soul, and NASCAR's has long been sold. Holding winners in their cars until the commercial ends so TV viewers can see a fake celebration was the first sign; moving Cup dates to cookie-cutter stadium racetracks and docking drivers points for talking like drivers were epiphanies; "aero matching" was the apocalypse. (In the same vein, selling TV rights to the Fox "It's About Us, Not the Racing" network merits its own column, as does the absurdly contrived "Chase for the Championship.")
Hey, the Crank's not on board with those commentators who hint darkly at fixed outcomes and scripted soap opera rivalries, accusing NASCAR -- and particularly Nextel Cup -- of becoming pro wrestling with Nomex. But where NASCAR and pro wrestling increasingly do overlap is their lack of authenticity, of grit, of soul. What was a grassroots sport with hometown heroes has become plastic and glossy as processed cheese. Drivers, tracks, and cars have been sanded and homogenized to be as little distinguishable as possible.
Today's drivers are bland pitchmen -- clearly skilled behind the wheel, but with personality edited (and fined) out to an alarming degree. There are no Fireballs, no Tinys, no Coo Coos; personal logos have replaced personality. (Thank you, Tony Stewart, for at least trying to resist.) And with the big teams throwing contracts at prepubescent karters, that's not likely to change; these kids are corporate entities before their personality's even had a chance to develop.
The only track the Crank can think of that's gotten better in the last few years is Homestead. The result is "what weekend is this?" racing in which multimillionaires working for big corporations wearing logos of bigger corporations try to defeat other big corporations' multimillionaires at tracks owned by yet more big corporations. You knew when you were in North Wilkesboro. Is this Chicago? Kentucky? Kansas?
Worst of all, the cars aren't even vaguely proper cars. You can't even call them silhouette racers; the silhouettes are all wrong. And the teams have long since given up pretending; Elliott Sadler's headlight-decal guy, for one, has evidently never seen a Taurus, nor has his counterpart on Carl Edwards' Busch car. They and anyone wearing an Evernham logo need to be told that headlights go up on the fender; if it's on the valance, it's a fog light.
Why does that little a thing matter? Again, authenticity. If it's a fake car with decal headlights, at least try to make it look like a real car, or admit to what you're driving and make the S in NASCAR stand for Screwy.
Part of these musings are inspired by looking over a new street-going Dodge Charger, which is aerowise pretty much a brick. Dodge's ads (et tu, Alain deCadenet?) emphasize styling points utterly absent from the NASCAR version. Will they sell on Monday if the car doesn't look anything like what won on Sunday?
Yet more fuel came from the introduction of Ford's new Fusion Cup car. My friends, I have seen the real Fusion, I have sat in the real Fusion, and yes, well, I have caressed the real Fusion. It is blunt, it is squared-off, it is not, in any respect, a Taurus. Yet save for a very few details, that's what the NASCAR version is -- a Taurus with a nose job.
Now, hold that thought for a moment, because the Crank is really on the same side as NASCAR, and here's how. For years -- really since Bobby Allison brought down the front-stretch fence at Talladega in 1987 -- they have been looking for ways to slow the cars down. They've tried some good ideas and some less so, but the quest continues for ways to back everybody off a bit while preserving decent racing and avoiding the kind of electronic solutions that make some other forms of racing -- SCCA Showroom Stock, for one -- nigh unpoliceable. (The Crank knows whereof he speaks here, but the statute of limitations hasn't run out yet, so he ain't talking.) And NASCAR also wants to give drivers more room inside the car, to help them get out of those things when they gotta.
Once upon a time, the Crank thought the answer to the speed issue was V-6 engines. There's nothing magic about V-8s except that those were the hot engines in NASCAR's formative years. After all, you can't even get an 8 in a Taurus, Fusion, or Monte Carlo. Make everybody run sixes and they'd be slower and cheaper, right? Wrong. As the waning days of V-6 Busch cars proved, they can be made to run about as fast as an 8, but at the cost of higher internal stresses and thus lower life. So I'll keep that one in the back pocket for now, while reminding NASCAR just how many foreign manufacturers have highly competitive race sixes on the shelf -- which may worry them more than it encourages.
Fortunately, my friends, there is A Road Back to authenticity and slower speeds, without constraining competition.
Two words: Stock templates. Make the cars look like the cars they purport to be.
There, in one shot, you slow the cars by reintroducing the more vertical windshields, creased exterior panels, and high parasite drag of real-world autos. You get more space inside, with artificially-squat rooflines giving way to driver-friendly headroom. You get big aero wakes that make drafting really work, without the twitchy aero push of today's tunnel-sculpted cars, so the racing's better. And you get back a key ingredient of NASCAR's success: The fan can identify with the race car. Heck, he can buy one just like it! Ain't that what stock car racing is all about?
Sure, the Crank's friends at the great car companies like the current state of affairs well enough. When the rules let you turn a brick into an anteater, why race a brick? Parity and "aero matching" mean anybody can win, no matter whether the real car is a wind-tunnel darling or the Lusitania. But is that right? Is it fair to the companies that build more aerodynamic cars for the street?
Some folks don't want the manufacturers to emphasize aero in new cars. They prefer the looks of a Charger or Fusion to more soap-bar slickness. But a move to stock templates wouldn't mean every car would be styled the same; it would more likely lead where it has in the past, to the emergence of specials, short-run wonders like the Torino Talladega and Charger Daytona and Monte Carlo SS, made in small (and valuable) numbers with racing in mind. (The Crank still remembers begging his dad to buy a Superbird, promising it would be worth much more someday. Dad balked at the idea of spending $3500 for a new car. Today, they're in the neighborhood of $50,000.)
And stock templates would at least crack open a window for what NASCAR really needs most: The next Bill Elliott. More than anything, today's NASCAR needs a guy who shows up with a car on a flat trailer towed behind his pickup -- with two toolboxes and five crew guys whose shirts don't match -- and runs competitively with Roush and Hendrick. Somebody the fans can identify with, not just buy shirts for. As long as you need milions of wind-tunnel dollars to stay with the pack, that just ain't gonna happen.
Just to start, here's a compromise for you, NASCAR: Use the stock templates for any track under a mile long. Aero matters a lot less there, and the teams build special cars for those tracks anyway, so different bodies wouldn't be a major hardship. Or give stock-bodied cars bigger restrictor plates on the big tracks to help compensate for the aero disadvantage. Either way, let's see how the fans react to seeing "real" cars on the track. Who's with me?
