By Buster McNutt
And you thought “The Chase” was confusing. Let’s see if I’ve got this right. Faced with declining attendance and television viewers, NASCAR decided to shake things up, and adopt the motto of other professional sports in their desperate hours — “we don’t need no stinking traditions!”
After a couple hundred years of “tradition,” baseball added the designated hitter, put hydraulics in the pitcher’s mound so they could raise it or lower it depending how successful the pitchers were getting, and changed the name “bat boy” to “multi-gender-preference, bat-retrieval specialist.”
After years of deliberation, professional football decided “concussions” were not, in fact, the same thing as “concessions” and were not in our country’s best interests since so many retired players become school crossing guards or, worse, members of congress. Their solution was to do everything possible to keep one player from hitting another player when they are traveling at speeds exceeding that of your typical great grandmother in one of those little motorized handicap carts at the grocery store.
Since almost no beer/car/weed-whacker-buying men were watching woman’s tennis, the sport man-dated a minimum knee-to-bottom of skirt length of 18 inches. Since almost no males over the age of 12 play, much less watch, soccer in America, ESPN transferred their broadcast rights to Nickelodeon, who immediately made a rule change that goalies were required to dress like Teletubbies.
For women’s professional soccer, they also raised the knee-to-bottom of shorts length to 18 inches, which had little effect since almost no one was aware there even was a professional woman’s league.
Back to NASCAR. As I understand it, the changes go something like this: All races will be split into three stages “designed to make every lap matter.” Points will be awarded to the top 10 in the standings at the end of stage one and two, and the third stage will decide the race winner. Huh? And you get extra points if you “win” stage three. So you could be “pointless” in stage one and two, and then win stage three, and be the winner of the race!
And it gets better. There will be breaks between the stages, long enough for, and I quote, “the segment winner to be interviewed, for television to air a block of commercials and for fans to grab a beer and a bathroom break”! How high on the woosie scale does that register? What true NASCAR fan doesn’t have a TV and a beer fridge in the bathroom? So they will be running commercials while the driver is being interviewed? And does the interviewed driver get to take a bathroom break as well? Who is going to notice? The viewers are all watching commercials in the bathroom! Does this also mean no more adult diapers for the longer race? Depends is so going to drop their sponsorship!
The races will obviously be a lot longer now. Just think about the segment-winning driver interviews. Instead of just one, we’re going to have to hear three renditions of, “It was a team effort. I’d like to give large credit shout-outs to our sponsors: Featherlite Trailers, Bees Lip Balm, Trojan Enhancement Products, Moon Pie, ROC Cola, Rapid Ringers Horseshoes, Slinky, Monkey Grease, and, since it’s past their bedtime, goodnight to Jim Bob, Elizabeth and John Boy. There are a few others, but I really need to go to the bathroom!”
The goal of the “segment” points is to keep the drivers from laying back and waiting for somebody ahead of them to crash, bringing out the caution flag, which means the slackers (and Danica) get to catch up to everyone else who is actually racing, and then do the exact same thing when they start back up. This was a previous NASCAR change to keep all but the seven drivers who actually ever win a race from packing it in and going back to pro bass fishing. This make-up-the-gap-during-caution strategy will always be popular, unless they put magnets in the track, and when a caution comes out, each car is magnetically frozen where it was, so there is no advantage to laying back. Was that provision in the rule changes? I think not! They really need to “exorcise” caution here.
So when is the race “official” in case of rain? Word is that NASCAR will consider it official at the end of the second stage. So who will get the extra points for “winning” that race? Logically you’d think it would be the winner of the second stage, but this is NASCAR we’re talking about — that would be way too simple. I’d just give it to Danica and be done with it. But you probably already knew that.
And then there is the new Damaged Vehicle Policy. In the past a car could get really messed up in a crash, and they could tow it back to the garage and spend an hour or more repairing it, while the driver took a potty break, downed a couple of non-alcoholic beverages, took another potty break, and then climbed back in the born-again race car, and go back on the track, 30-40 laps behind, with no chance of winning, but still get points for finishing. Talk about your “participation trophies” in youth sports! But no more. Now there is a five-minute repair window, and you can’t leave pit row. So if you thought the garage-repaired cars might not be in the best of shape, just think about the five-minute bananas-in-the-differential, duck-tape-on-fenders ones. And who knows what they’ll be able to do with bobby pins, bailing wire, chewing gum, super glue, rubber bands, and that black sticky/bottomless boat sealing stuff in the commercials with that loud talking Australian guy with the bad hair?
This is all a bad idea, and rather than calling the race segments Stage One, Two, and Three, they should come up with a more descriptive name. I’m thinking Moe, Larry, and Curly.
Nyuk, Nkuk, Nyuk…. •
