Some advice for a fair-weather sport ...
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- By Ed Hinton | August 13, 2009 9:17:43 AM PDT
Big Bill France, who had the vision to found NASCAR, also had enough common sense not to defy the weather.
In July, he would start the Firecracker 400 at 10 a.m., knowing full well that if he went up against the afternoon thunderstorms along Daytona Beach, he would lose. Every time.
He scheduled some races by the long-range forecasts in the old Farmer's Almanac. It seldom steered him wrong.
That wisdom seems lost on his posterity. NASCAR keeps flouting the weather, and losing. Just asking for it, and getting it.
Two rainouts in a row now. Can we make it three? The long-range forecast for Sunday at Michigan International Speedway is partly cloudy, but we shall see. Another midafternoon start in the summertime on the North American continent, another risk of thunderstorms, another shot at racing on Monday.
One young crewman, trotting out of the drizzly garage area at Watkins Glen on Sunday evening, yelped, "I'm LOVIN' this Monday morning racing." The wry connotation was that he might as well get used to it.
Soon afterward, one fan commented in an ESPN Conversation, "Rainy days and Mondays always get me down."
A few more weekends like the past two, and those words, borrowed from the late Karen Carpenter, might become bumper stickers and T-shirts.
And that was one of the milder comments. TV viewers -- not to mention the fans at the tracks, who, by and large, can't come back on Mondays.-- are up to the gills with rainouts.
Little could have been done at Pocono on Aug. 2-3, with intermittent rain in the morning, other than for NASCAR to have demanded in advance that racetrack officials repair the "weepers," the cracks in the pavement that let water seep through, maddeningly, after rain has stopped.
Watkins Glen was another matter. I sat for nearly three hours and watched a massive weather front on the radar come down from Canada, mosey on across Lake Ontario and right at us. It was obvious the front was going to hit the Finger Lakes region of New York almost precisely at the scheduled starting time for the race. The lightning began only seconds before the command to start engines.
You sit and watch the weather come, and watch NASCAR officials sit there dawdling, staring at the radar screens without changing the schedule by a minute, then you start to figure many fans, who for years have been calling for emergency early starts to beat the weather, might be right.
By Monday, local fan Brian Ciaravino, who owns his own business and was able to come back for the postponed race, was wondering why they hadn't rescheduled the start for 10 a.m. instead of noon, noting that the humidity was building so that he feared another round of afternoon thunderstorms.
He'd been on the grounds since 7:30 a.m., as he had been every day of the race weekend. Had NASCAR called for an emergency noon start on Sunday, instead of 2:20 p.m., "I'd have been there," he said. A 10 a.m. start rather than noon on Monday? "I'd love it," he said.
As NASCAR has gone more and more to mid- and late-afternoon starts, and to night racing, I've noticed that NASCAR fans still tend to show up at the tracks early in the mornings, regardless. It's a habit formed through the decades.
Should NASCAR, on a given Sunday, see that rain was inevitable by 2:30 p.m. and call an emergency 10 or 11 a.m. start to beat the weather, I think cheers would go up from the incoming crowds. Fans would know NASCAR was trying to do something for them, the people who bought the tickets and traveled to the race, and therefore -- assuming you want to be fair about it -- those who deserve the highest priority.
But even TV viewers often complain vehemently about Monday starts, because they have to go to work and can't watch the race.
The assumed reason for the midafternoon starts is the West Coast TV market. How many woefully missed sellouts at Fontana and small gatherings at Sonoma will it take for NASCAR to realize that Californians largely don't care about the sport?
And from Californians who do, I've gotten plenty of e-mail over the years indicating that they're long accustomed to getting up early on Sundays to watch sports events in the East, and wouldn't mind doing so for NASCAR any more than they mind it for the NFL.
The other long-proposed alternative, developing rain tires for Cup cars, still seems a long way off at best. The difficulty is that the 3,400-pound cars are just too heavy for rain tires. Once the track went from wet to damp, treaded tires would tend to burn up through the corners due to the high friction and heavy weight.
Last year, Nationwide cars ran on rain tires on the road course at Montreal, but no tests have even been conducted on the current Cup car for rain tires.
With enough engineering and development, over time Goodyear probably could come up with adequate rain tires for Cup races. But neither the tire maker nor the sanctioning body is showing any inclination to go to such expense.
So the only real answer in the summertime is flexible starting times, and/or earlier starting times.
As it is, the midafternoon starts are ticking off fans nationwide, two ways: forcing them to wait hours longer for the race to start than they want to even on a fair-weather day, and subjecting them to rainouts on the stormy afternoons.
The other element of nature that Big Bill France never defied was human nature -- the wrath of his fans.
He knew he'd have lost. Every time.
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