Inside Line: In NASCAR, always a place for the longer race (NASCAR.com)
August 28, 2010
Everything about NASCAR is big. The schedule eats up almost 10 months of the year. Race tracks are mammoth facilities set on dozens of acres, and sometimes ringed by 100,000 seats or more. Events on the sport’s premier circuit are day-long festivities in which people often arrive hours early and leave hours late. Cup Series races are designed to test the limits of both drivers and equipment, and even on television they come across as long, loud, larger-than-life experiences.
That is why it’s a little surprising to see so many races this year become so much more manageable in terms of their length. Anyone who’s been around NASCAR for any period of time fully knows that events can go on for a while, to the point where nobody blinks an eye at a race that lasts four hours or more. Fans have just become conditioned to it, just as baseball fans know that American League games can drag on forever, just as tennis fans know that a five-set men’s match can take all day. Throw in a mid-afternoon start time and an extended pre-race show, and a NASCAR race can swallow an entire Sunday.
This season, though, things are different. For whatever reason, the races seem to be taking less time—indeed, eight of the past 10 Cup Series events have lasted less than three hours, among them a brisk Bristol night race that clocked in at 2 hours and 41 minutes, and left ABC so much free time pit reporters interviewed almost everyone in a firesuit afterward. Although the television ratings this year have left something to be desired, the earlier, standardized start times for Sunday races allow fans a little time in the afternoon to do yard work, and reporters to leave the race track while it’s still daylight out. Everybody wins.
It all shapes up to make the sport a little more accessible—watching a NASCAR race these days doesn’t require devoting an entire Sunday, something that you’d think would eventually help attract more casual fans. To a certain extent, tracks are playing a part; the two realigned races for next season (Atlanta to Kentucky and California to Kansas) are 500-milers that will be reborn as 400s. And Phoenix’s spring race, which was extended by 100 kilometers this season for a twilight finish, will drop back to its traditional 500-kilometer distance next year when it moves to daytime and follows the Daytona 500.
There are still some races that are too long. California’s lone event next year will likely continue to be 500 miles, as will both Pocono races—which clocked in at 3:46 and 3:44 this season. But the moves by Kansas, Kentucky and Phoenix are a good start.
“I think it’s the right thing,” Jeff Burton said last week at Bristol. “I love the fact that our races aren’t sprint races. They’re endurance races. But I’m not sure that a 400-mile race is a sprint race. So it’s still a plenty long race. From the perspective of the younger audience, I have a 9-year old that loves racing but struggles watching a four-hour race. Hell, I struggle doing a four-hour race. … A lot of it is the race track. I think Kentucky is going to be right at 400, I think Phoenix is right in bringing the laps back down. All that makes sense to me. I’d like to see the California race that we’re running, I’d love to see that a 400-mile race. I think the races at Michigan are 400 miles and I don’t know why you would want a two-mile race track to run a 500-mile race. I love to race and I like the fact that they’re long, but I think the quality of the race could be a little better if it was a little bit shorter.”
Races at NASCAR’s premier level are long for a reason—equipment has to last, and drivers have to find that balance between patience and aggression. But as Burton points out, there’s no question that action picks up the closer an event draws to the end.
“I don’t think it’s a coincidence that we have more cautions in the last part of the race than we do in the first part of the race,” he said. “The quicker we can get the drivers into the position of ‘Now’s the time to go,’ the better the racing is going to be, I think—less opportunity for the long, long, long green-flag runs and all those kinds of things. Having said that, I like the long green-flag runs, but I do think shorter races tend to have a little more action, and I don’t honestly really even know why, because it’s not like we’re riding around. I don’t drive any different for the Coca-Cola 600 than I do the 300-miler at New Hampshire. I just think for the viewing audience, a little shorter time frame may not be a bad thing.”
Determining race length is often a decision the track and sanctioning body make in concert with one another. When current Darlington Raceway president Chris Browning was working at North Carolina Speedway, that track held two annual races that were each 500 miles long. Events that dragged on for four and a half hours weren’t uncommon, leading press box wags to coin the phrase “24 Hours of Rockingham.” The track had always hosted 500-milers, dating back to its founding 1965. But for the 1995 season, NASCAR asked Rockingham officials to consider making one of its races a 400-mile event. The next year, both races were.
“Quite honestly, they were long races for a mile track,” Browning remembered. “Five hundred miles, that was a long day for everyone, for the crews, the teams, everyone. We got to the point where we agreed with them. We tried one race at 400 miles and it went well. Granted, you had a group of fans who were against it and voiced their opposition to it. But then you had an equally strong group of fans who said, ‘That was cool, we like it better that way.’ It wasn’t really a mandate. The one experience I had with changing race distances was not a mandate. It was a good discussion between the promoter and NASCAR. We sat there and weighed the pros and cons of everything. Luckily at that time we had the luxury of two races and we were able to try it.”
For many tracks, it’s hard to resist the lure of placing a “500” at the end of a race name—that magical distance seems to convey a certain degree of importance, linking it in spirit with marquee events like the Daytona 500 and the Indianapolis 500. When Darlington dropped to one race, former track president Andrew Gurtis kept the remaining event a 500-miler, in homage to a Southern 500 that at the time was falling off the schedule but has since returned. That event can be a mouthful, as this season’s 3 hour, 57-minute edition readily attests. But in NASCAR, there’s always a place for the longer race. The trend may be toward shorter events, but the long races are long for a reason.
“What separates the Cup guys is the fact that they can put it on edge for three hours, for three and a half or four hours, versus an hour and forty-five minutes,” Burton said. “And that’s a major difference. You see it when really, really good race car drivers come into this series, you see them struggle with that. There’s an art to it, and it’s really what separates it.”
You see that in the course of 500 miles at Darlington, where even the best drivers struggle to hit their marks and keep their cars off the wall when running right up next to the concrete for more than four hours. You see that in the Coca-Cola 600 at Charlotte, where the day-to-night transition tests crew chiefs and the distance leaves some drivers needing intravenous fluids at the end. You see that in 500 punishing laps at Bristol. You see that in how young drivers used to shorter events break into the Cup level and are humbled by being too aggressive too early, or left worn out by a distance double what they’re accustomed to.
“The ability to operate at 99 percent, a lot of people have that ability,” Burton said. “Very few people have the ability to do it for four hours. In tennis, every professional tennis player can hit a shot that hits the corner. Only the best can hit that shot seven out of 10 times. The fact that you have to do it more times in a 500-mile race than a 200-mile race is what separates the best. You cannot be successful in this series or any series without operating at close to 100 percent. And the best can operate at close to 100 percent more often than the guys that aren’t the best. Some guys, 99 percent is faster than another guy’s 99 percent. Being able to couple all those things together is what makes the best drivers.”
And for all the talk about entertainment value, identifying the best drivers is ultimately what it’s all about. Perhaps that’s why Browning, whose track admittedly caters to the more traditional members of the NASCAR fan base, has heard zero complains about his event’s distance even though the reborn Southern 500 can last well into the night. You need some of those grueling races each season, just as you need some PGA Tour events featuring rough up to a player’s shins. And yet, you don’t want the racing equivalent of a U.S. Open every weekend. If people start muttering about the “24 Hours of Pocono,” you know you’ve gone a little too far.
The opinions expressed are solely those of the writer.
