It turns out that there’s a good percentage of readers on this site that enjoys the sport of motors — motorsport, if you will. Many of you are into Formula One, which makes sense given its rapid, Netflix-fueled rise in popularity. Given this is a car site, a lot of you seem to follow sports car racing. A few of you real freaks also watch WRC. I enjoy all of these series and others (oh damn, the Bathurst 12-hour is about to start), but I probably watch more NASCAR than anything else. It rules.
I don’t want to be alone in watching NASCAR so I’m inviting all of you to come on this adventure with me. It, too, will rule. If you do it right you’ll have a good time and I’m going to make it easy for you to do it right and to do it with other readers.
Why? Because it’s fun. NASCAR is America’s motorsport, it’s extremely competitive this year, and it’s raced on a mix of road courses, superspeedways, and ovals. And to make it easier, I’m suggesting we all watch the NASCAR Xfinity Series, which is below the top-level Cup Series, but above the entry-level Truck Series. There are a lot of good reasons for this.
Lemme explain.
Why NASCAR Is Good Now
I don’t know that I’d argue that NASCAR was ever bad, but it did get a little less interesting to me during the late Jimmie Johnson era in the late aughts/early teens when the cars got less competitive, the big teams got too big, and the calendar got a little repetitive.
We ended up with anodyne drivers racing for giant teams and, largely, thanking their sponsors for helping them go in a lot of circles.
Falling TV viewership followed and NASCAR has since had to shift to address many of its biggest shortcomings. New cars and new rules have made smaller teams more competitive, the schedule has been shifted and now includes more road courses, a street course, and a damn stadium. Since the introduction of the new Next Gen car, there have been way more race winners. While the new car isn’t stock, it’s more like what DTM and Aussie V8 Supercars use.
There are new team owners, like Pitbull and Michael Jordan, and a mix of new drivers who are finally allowed by NASCAR to have personality.
Also, NASCAR has always had the noise. Remember when F1 cars got quiet for no real reason? NASCAR has always been fun and loud. F1 disrespected Mario Andretti and the same people win year after year after year. Chaos is a great reason to watch racing and NASCAR has as much chaos as Toto Wolff has hubris.
How I’m Going To Make It Easy
The Cup races are competitive, but they’re long, and there are still a lot of big established teams and a few, uh, less charming drivers. Also, Sunday can be a busy day for people. I’m suggesting we all watch the Xfinity Series. This is for a few reasons:
- The races are typically on Saturdays and don’t compete with as many other professional sports.
- The races are often half the distance of Cup races, so they tend to be under two hours long.
- Xfinity cars are more like the stock cars of old and have the old-school appeal of being harder to handle, more insane to watch, and more ‘Murican.
- There are a ton of interesting drivers and teams this year, including the introduction of V8 Supercars Champ Shane Van Gisbergen, rookie Hallie Deegan (moving up from trucks), and road course hero AJ Allmendinger (coming back to Xfinity). Even Frankie Muniz might be racing, at least at Daytona.
Ok, so Saturdays are Xfinity days. Lemme make this even easier.
Sports requires context and context requires a starting point. If you’ve got a regular driver you like to root for, please continue to root for that driver. For the rest of us, it’s going to be NASCAR driver Parker Kligerman, who also contributes to this website sometimes. He’s racing the #48 Big Machine Racing Spiked Light Coolers Chevy Camaro. The car is super orange so it’s usually easy to spot. Here’s Parker finishing the Xfinity Race at Atlanta, backwards:
Parker is a pal and loves cars like the rest of us love cars. He’ll also be providing us with some thoughts on his podcast/newsletter The Money Lap and with some extra insight here from time to time.
Having someone to support helps a lot and Parker made it to the playoffs last year with a young team so there’s every expectation of him being competitive this year.
Ok, I Don’t Know Much/Anything But I’m In. What Do I Do?
The good news is that the Daytona 500 is this weekend, which means that it’s the United Rentals 300 this weekend, which is the first Xfinity Race of the year and it starts this Saturday night. Qualifying is supposed to be 11:30 AM ET on Saturday and the race will be at 5:00 PM ET on Fox Sports 1 and on FoxSports.com (and it’s easy to find online elsewhere).
Daytona is the classic superspeedway with a lot of drafting, high-pressure pit strategy, and, yeah, a few big crashes.
We’ll be watching the race and having an ongoing conversation on our Discord, which you can join to chat about the race with us. What else were you doing this Saturday?
The only caveat here is that it might rain, but there’s a good chance that the rain doesn’t occur until after the Xfinity Race.
Ok, did I convince you?
Went to an Xfinity series race at Portland International Raceway and it was a ton of fun, only NASCAR race I’ve been too-lots of racing action (I’ve gone to two IMSA races in the past couple years) and honestly more fun than I expected. Because they have less downforce they definitely run looser on the road course than the GT cars and certainly the prototypes. Highly recommend.
being a SVG fan I’m going to attempt to watch nascar this year even though the times suck, so yeah I’m in.
NASCAR is the best and I won’t hear anything otherwise. I still love Indy and my local short tracks, but NASCAR is always the top dog for me. F1 I enjoy, but I find the pretentiousness of European fans and that being a fan is (or rather used to be) a costly endeavor that makes it hard to enjoy as an American fan. It’s a bit like how they’ve polled folks after a Euro NASCAR event and they’ve found it to be more fun and exciting than F1, only to followup that they find it too low brow and won’t watch it on TV.
Malcolm in the middle best summarizes Nascar (like most other things in life). No need to add anything. S1E10.
Nope.
So many negative comments. My goodness folks, it’s not going to change back to the “good old days”. 2003 broke NASCAR. Kenseth won the championship with 1 win and pretty much had enough points to coast through the final few races which turned the end of the season into a anti-climatic snooze fest. Change was needed. Also, back then, the low budget teams were getting lapped from the get go and really didn’t harbor any hopes of finishing in the top ten ever. It was really messy to witness. More lows than highs if you were a fan back then.
Add the fact that the end of the NASCAR schedule falls within the beginning of the NFL schedule, the final leg of races is a tough sell for sports fans as a whole. They really had to change things up for the survivability of the sport. The only other alternative would be to end the season before NFL starts, but there’s too many tracks to make happy overall.
Some of the changes have been regrettable. But quite a few changes have re-introduced some excitement to the sport and empowered more teams to be competitive and prosper. Back in the 90’s – 00’s if a team/car was outperforming the entire pack it wasn’t uncommon for them to lead wire to wire for the entire race… which is a great accomplishment… but frankly boring to watch. Stage Breaks mix things up and allow the pit crews to shine more often, which also push for the team contribution to winning rather than a top-notch car with a top-notch driver. We respect more of the crew in NASCAR now than ever before.
rant over <3 I’ll be watching. It’s fun!
I like having NASCAR on. I also like watching the last 20 laps or so. So the length of the race doesn’t bother me all that much.
While I agree they have done some good things to improve the product. I just can’t get too interested. I’ll be sticking with Indycar for now but would love a second series to follow. Screw F1 though.
Pros:
Cons:
Also, the complaints about how winning on Sunday creates sales on Monday THEY AIN’T STOCK CARS bitching needs to go away. It’s not going to ever come back so let it go. Much like how the playoff system will never go away so my fandom will never return.
No No and No. Nascar didn’t really kill Nascar ( it did help some though ) It is the broadcasting that killed Nascar. Hell, minus Baseball and Hockey, broadcasting killed all sports.
Would love to watch Shane stomp on everyone this year ( sorry Parker ) but Nope. Not happening.
Nope.
I was a lifelong Nascar fan that slowly watched the sport get ruined by bad decisions. Last year was the first year that I didn’t watch a single race. To put it into perspective, I once watched every time the cars were on the air. Practice, qualifying, race, interviews, you name it, and for all three of the top series.
As the sport has been ruined, I’ve watched less and less, until in 2022 I just watched the Daytona 500 and a few laps of another race. Last year I watched none.
You missed some good races then!
Probably not.
Best way to watch a NASCAR race?
DVR it and start watching the beginning of the race about an hour or so after it starts.
You can fast forward through all the commercials and boring parts and if you time it correctly, watch the end of the race live.
Sadly the last NASCAR race I went to was when Dale Earnhardt was killed.
I was unable to attend for a few years because of work commitments then I grew bored with the cookie cutter drivers thanking their sponsors after every race .
”The (insert team sponsor name here)( insert car manufacturer here)(insert car model here) team did great this weekend.We wouldn’t be here in the winners circle without this team sticking together through all the tough times this weekend.God was with us and my team is off to CrackerBarrel to celebrate while I helicopter to my personal jet to get to my multi million dollar mansion on Lake Norman to be with my trophy wife.”
They ( the owners of NASCAR )tried to go too mainstream and it lost its way.
The corporate sponsorship didn’t want a driver with a personality, they wanted a young,thin,handsome,articulate ,crisp shirted ,logo wearing ,white guy who looked good on TV.
The reason I feel people watched NASCAR in its glory days was they could relate to the cars and drivers ,now they can’t.
We watched to see the wrecks and fights interrupted by some V-8 pounding noise.
if the stickers and graphics were off the cars now there’s zero chance you have any idea what make or model car it is.
Gone are the days of “what wins on Sunday sells on Mondays” because they all look the same in a non relatable way to what is in the showroom or online.
Even the author wants us to watch the second tier series instead of watching the premier series ….why can’t ”Nicecar” see that the product they are producing /promoting isn’t one that the people want?
F-1 produces a slick easy to watch back story series on their product and increases viewership while Nicecar is standing by wringing their hands watching their viewership dwindle.
Nascar is hanging on by its fingernails and its demographic it appeals to is getting older and older.
Like me I see it fading into history in ten years.