Quote:
|
Originally Posted by Ricochet
the races go on forever
|
That's kind of the point of endurance racing, is it not? NASCAR also has sprint series, though, if you're interested. Just visit your local dirt track on any given Friday night if you want a shorter NASCAR race.
Quote:
|
Originally Posted by Ricochet
all they do is drive in circles
|
They're usually ovals, tri-ovals, or some variation on that theme, actually, which means they have turns and straights, just like a road course. If you think it takes any less skill, you're kidding yourself. They just happen to all be left turns, and most of the time are very high-speed left turns. Although if you watch the race at Martinsville, they're much slower, tighter lefts. NASCAR's major series also run five road races (one in the truck series, two in Busch, and two in Nextel). Plus, the driving in circles makes it so that you can watch the whole race at once instead of just one little snippet of the course at a time, and drivers have to deal with lap traffic more often which makes the race much more interesting and difficult.
Quote:
|
Originally Posted by Ricochet
and the same handful of rednecks wins every race
|
Joe Nemecheck won this past weekend. Last time he won a race was last year sometime. The closest finish in NASCAR history (less than four inches, after ten or so laps of back and forth lead changes) was won by Ricky Craven last year, and he's not good enough to even have a ride this year. Granted, the same ten or twelve guys win eighty percent of the races, but ten or twelve guys is a quarter of the field. What other major series has the percentage of winners per racers that NASCAR does? There are forty some-odd races in the NASCAR calendar, and everybody was amazed when Ryan Newman won eight of them last year. Granted, you occasionally have a Petty or a Gordon come along and just dominate for a year or so, but then everybody else catches up. It's the same in every other racing series (Schumacher, Said, Solberg).
Plus, the top ten are hardly rednecks anymore. The standings as they are as of this posting, and their places of origin:
1) Kurt Busch - Las Vegas, definitely not redneck.
2) Dale Earnhardt, Jr. - South Carolina... OK, he's a redneck. But a popular redneck.
3) Jeff Gordon - Southern California, anti-redneck.
4) Elliott Sadler - West Virginia, and a country boy no doubt.
5) Mark Martin - Arkansas, but not really redneckish.
6) Tony Stewart - Started his career racing carts in Indiana, not redneck.
7) Matt Kenseth (reigning champ) - Wisconsin, Yankee.
8) Ryan Newman - Indiana, not redneck.
9) Jimmie Johnson - California, also not redneck.
10) Jeremy Mayfield - Kentucky, country boy.
So we can see that only four of the top ten are even from the South, and Mark Martin and Jeremy Mayfield are so far outside the redneck stereotype that they shouldn't count as rednecks. Elliott Sadler and Dale Earnhardt, Jr., are the only two that could even possibly be considered redneck. However, Junior runs his own business (Chance 2, not DEI) and builds racecars as a hobby (could Schumacher fix his own car if it was broken?). Sadler is a really stand-up guy, but I dont' know what he does in his spare time. Junior and Sadler are both really country, but I wouldn't call them redneck. Neither of them stands around in a wife-beater and a John Deere hat smoking a cigarette and drinking a Coors, nor do either of them drive jacked up trucks (nothing against jacked up trucks or Coors). Both of them have prettier dates to the movies, drive better cars, and live in nicer houses than anybody on this forum. If you want redneck racing, check out the monster truck circuit or your local tractor pull.