Time to Lower the Curtains on Stage Racing
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I
was doing another of my little exercises the other day in which I try to
remember what it was that made so memorable certain races I remember decades
later. This one has a pretty simple lesson/moral.
There was an excitement about the night races
at Richmond that exemplified the peak of NASCAR’s climb in professional sports.
The
race was the 1997 Excide 400 at Richmond International Raceway, where I was a
“weekend warrior,” working with the public relations crew in the Infield Media
Center, only this time I had a special assignment. The National Geographic
Explorer television program was on hand to do a feature on the race, and I was
the track’s contact person with the production crew. It was an exciting, fun
weekend, except for a brief snag with a part-time infield parking attendant who
went on a power trip to show he was in total control and interfere with the
work – he did not return to that job in 1998.
The
Explorer crew had decided to follow Jeff Burton in the Jack Roush Ford
sponsored by event sponsor Exide Batteries, and it was a good choice. Starting
11th, Burton was involved in a multi-car incident 20 laps into the
race and ended up at the rear of the field.
South Boston, Va., is more than 100 miles from
Richmond Raceway, but on the track there, Jeff Burton was always a hometown boy
From
that point the South Boston, Va., racer mounted one of the great charges of his
career and RIR history, slicing through the entire field in 78 laps to take the
lead and begin a complete dominance of the race.
Unfortunately,
the Achilles’ heel of Burton’s day was the long green-flag run, and when the
race ended with the last 220 laps going green, Burton was toast. With 39 laps
left, Dale Jarrett in Yates Racing’s Quality Care/Ford Credit Ford took the
lead and was nearly two seconds ahead of Burton at the end.
Still,
it had been a great race, with multiple plot lines and an exciting finish, and
it’s a good thing it took place 22 years ago, because today it probably
wouldn’t have played out that way, thanks to stage racing.
The
continuing popularity of stage racing with the NASCAR brain trust just baffles
me. It was a reactionary move made at a bad time and it’s hard to hear anything
good said about it, unless you’re listening to those paid to say good things
about it. It disrupts the continuity of the event to create another artificial
means of maintaining close competition, and it creates a scoring system nobody
can comprehend.
Surely,
guys, there’s an old Car of Tomorrow that you can still see at the bottom of
that hole filled with NASCAR’s bad ideas; maybe the corpse of stage racing
could hide it from the world forever.
By
the way, there was another particularly memorable Richmond race just a year
later, also involving Jeff Burton. The 1998 Exide 400 saw another dominant
Burton performance (203 laps lead vs. 235 in ’97), but this time he had Jeff
Gordon nipping at his heels for more than half the event – the two swapped the
lead about 10 times.
The Jeffs doing
battle
After
a final caution left 28 green flag laps to run at the end, it was Jeff vs. Jeff
lap after lap, and the betting was on Gordon, who was having one of his
greatest seasons, headed for a total of 13 wins and the Winston Cup title.
Unfortunately for Gordon, nobody told the other Jeff he was supposed to lose,
and after lap after side-by-side lap, the home-state favorite rolled into
victory lane by .051 seconds.
Stage
racing likely wouldn’t have affected that finish, but we can only hope that the
next generation Cup race car brings back the kind of aerodynamic
characteristics that made such side-by-side encounters more possible. I think
that’s the goal; I hope it works.
We’ve
had some pretty decent finishes so far this year, and while it’s too soon to
see if this ship is turning around to a more permanent (and positive) course, I
think we can agree there’s more hope than we’ve seen in some time.
Frank’s
Loose Lug Nuts
Several
folks, including Area Auto Racing News’ always-worth-reading Stephen Bubb, have written recently about the fan engagement
benefit of allowing fans into the pits before and after shows. At short tracks,
this most often means ending a show early enough for fans (and teams) to feel
like doing this.
Bubb pointed to Winston-Salem’s Bowman Gray Stadium as Exhibit
A. BG has perhaps the nation’s best weekly attendance numbers – 12,000-16,000
fans on average – and the shows stick pretty religiously to a three-hour time
limit, allowing for fans to visit their favorites afterward – which they
apparently do in large numbers.
The incredibly successful Bowman Gray Stadium
in Winston-Salem, N.C. Other promoters could learn a lot from this little
place.
When
I was a teenager attending Friday night shows at Southside Speedway in
Richmond, we wouldn’t dream of leaving without a trip to the pits first. Of
course, there were big crows around Ray Hendrick, Sonny Hutchins and the other
big winners, but you could hang out with a lesser light or somebody in the
supporting Hobby Division (or even wait for a kid’s turn with Ray or Sonny),
and you’d leave with a little more attachment to the place – today it’s called
engagement.
Along
with clean restrooms, policing of unruly fans and decent car counts, that just
might help what seems to be a continuing slide in weekly racing, and that in
turn would help the whole sport, including NASCAR at the top.
This is how you make – and keep – fans