DAYTONA: AFTER SHOCKS

I’ve been paying attention to all the stories that have been written since Sunday’s Daytona 500. In the literally hundreds of stories I’ve seen, I’ve only seen one that called the race “exciting.”

That article was written by Ernie Irvan for his new FoxSports gig. At least his byline is on it. If you took his name off of it, you’d swear it was written by NASCAR and put out as a PR piece. Surely Fox Sports isn’t sucking up to NASCAR already, even before the broadcast their first race?

Every other article I’ve seen on the race described it as boring, “Dulltona,” and to show great minds think alike, another writer also characterized it as a cure for insomnia.

You know something’s wrong when Paul Harvey mentions on his noon broadcast how dull the race was. Yesterday he called it a “parade” and today, when he mentioned it again, he said specifically that NASCAR should take a look at the new shock rule. I don’t know how big a fan Mr. Harvey is of racing, but during the season he usually limits his racing commentary to who won, who’s leading the points, and sometimes who’s won more money.

NASCAR is taking the three makes of cars to the wind tunnel. While that may give them some interesting numbers, how are they going to figure out how the aerodynamics are affected by the new shocks?

Anyone with eyes should be able to see that the Chevrolet body style was at a major disadvantage Sunday. You hear about how Fords took the top five spots, but that doesn’t far enough. There were only four Chevrolets in the top 20. Now to be fair, there were a few more Chevrolets that could have ended up in the top 20 if racing circumstances had been different. Gordon, Earnhardt, Nemechek, and Hamilton could have been top 20 cars if things had gone their way. But did any of the Chevrolets have a shot at the win?

Are we, as fans, doomed to another season where the drivers of one make dominate the races, with NASCAR constantly fiddling with spoiler or front valence heights before each race?

Maybe the answer is for NASCAR to make the Winston Cup Series a spec series (at least more than it already is). Forget Ford, Chevy, Pontiac, and Dodge. Or give them each a one year contract on supplying the series with bodies, and let each team race the same body style. (Hmm, that sounds a lot like IROC. Imagine IROC with 43 drivers instead of 12 and you get the picture.) But NASCAR would never go for this. It makes too much sense.