We Need a Little Less Perfection
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I
have this idea about what ails our beloved Monster/NASCAR Cup Series and its
siblings that’s a bit different, and I’m going to have trouble explaining it,
so please bear with me while I struggle.
I
saw this book title: “Be Happy without
Being Perfect.” That’s what we need, I thought. NASCAR today is too perfect,
but we’re never happy because it’s not perfect enough, and since we’ll never
find total perfection, we’ll remain unhappy.
Please
note that my “perfection” has nothing to do with rules enforcement,
points/championship systems or executive sobriety skills. I speak of something
else entirely.
The
perfection I see in excessive amounts is that which brings predictability. It’s
sterile. Eventually, it gets boring. We need some imperfection to make it more
interesting… to be happy.
Think
of it this way: In a race today, nearly all the cars finish, and they’re all so
close to the same speed that nobody can pass, and the same drivers are there
every week, so there’s no uncertainty among them about each other (OK, maybe
about Joey Logano every now and then), so why sit down on Saturday evening or
Sunday morning to watch something that completely lacks unpredictability?
The start of the Daytona 500 these days
consists of perfect but not so interesting cars, compared to the diversity of
starting line-ups decades ago.
Back
in my Stone Age racing glory days, cars were blowing tires, blowing engines,
losing sheet metal and generally being so unreliable that it kept you in
suspense to see who’d go and who’d blow. Also, the guys with big money could
run rings around the “little guys” with their second-hand tires and third-hand
cars, but all that passing created action on the track. Then there were always
a couple of new guys out there getting in everybody else’s way. While a
500-mile race had enough quiet stretches for your bathroom and beer breaks,
things perked up often enough that you didn’t fall asleep - as frequently is a
threat today.
This used to be a much more common site than it
is today.
The
Harvick spoiler fiasco is a case in point. We have a sport that is so
micro-managed - to create cars that are so equal - that minute tinkering with a
piece of sheet metal (work so subtle that it can’t be detected pre-race at the
track) is considered a threat to world peace and physics, and somebody gets all
but kicked out of the playoffs and fined an amount that could keep most
short-track teams running all season.
How
the hell did we get to this?
(Digressing Rant: How can so many fans equate this kind of
cheating with genocide and still revere Smokey Yunick? For that matter, how
many of those screaming at Joey Logano still have Dale Earnhardt ball caps?)
Here’s
another example that’s probably going to get me in all kinds of trouble, but I
still think it’s valid. Arguably, the most famous statue in the world is Venus
de Milo, and arguably, elements of that statue are pure perfection. But it’s
not all that hard to find a beautiful statue that includes bare female breasts;
Americans once commonly had them in gardens and parks. Ms. de Milo is all the
more alluring because she’s NOT perfect
- her arms are missing!
The
trouble with NASCAR is that, aside from some of the parts involved in the
thought processes of senior management, there’s nothing missing. Our races are
Venus with arms, pleasant enough but not interesting enough for 36 extended
viewings a year.
During
the short life of racing at the Kingsdale Volunteer
Fire Department Motorsports Arena near Littlestown, Pa., I saw a race (run on a
flat oval carved around a mud-bog pit) where a huge mud hole in the middle of
the third and fourth turns defeated all comers and forced them to go around it
every lap of every race. The racing went on as scheduled, and the fans loved
the unplanned hazard. In NASCAR, if it rains overnight, we have a “competition
caution” to stop and see if things have gotten too imperfect - can’t have that!
Yes,
you can. The 1963 Daytona 500 was run after a rain, and on the film of that
event, you can see a large water puddle at the entrance to pit road - drivers
had to take evasive maneuvers.
This appears to be a screen capture from TV,
and the quality is pretty bad, but you can still see the water on the infield
grass at the ’63 Daytona 500. It was even at the pit road entrance during the
race.
Yes,
sometimes things like that aren’t safe, but we can create safe unpredictability
and imperfection - or at least allow it to happen - understanding that it can make
the racing more interesting than the sterility of today.
If
we don’t do that, I’m afraid what happens next will be pretty predictable, too.
Frank’s
Loose Lug Nuts
While
looking for another of the photos used above, I found this one.
Did
he wreck so hard that it blew all his clothes off? I don’t see “Manufacturer of
Stylish Men’s Undergarments” among the sponsors on the car, so I’m not sure what
else to say… except that a matching helmet would have been nice.
For
the record, according to the Georgia Automobile Racing Hall of Fame, from whose
collection this arresting image comes, it’s from a 1957 incident at Lakewood
Speedway in Atlanta, and the driver is one Woody Coleman. I think he later
traded guardrails for brass poles.
(Editor's note: We found a naming contest for this photo that has some amusing content... as you might imagine.)
http://theoldmotor.com/?p=141435