What NASCAR needs: Shorter races
I like racing. But four hours of racing at one time? Ack.
College basketball clocks in at right about two hours. The NBA? About 2 to two-and-a-half hours. (And all you really need to watch is the fourth quarter anyway.)
Pro football is long -- about three hours and change. College football is roughly the same length. But both of those are deceptive -- on Sundays and Saturdays respectively, there are a hundred games and a thousand highlights, so it seems like it's actually one long game from noon to about midnight. And I love every minute of it.
Major League Baseball manages to squeeze about 10 minutes of quote-unquote action into about 10 hours. Yawn.
And racing? It's loooooong.
The shortest race of the 2008 season was the Watkins Glen race. That clocked in at a tidy 2 hours and 16 minutes, even with a red flag with 8 to go because the back half of the field exploded. The next shortest was Junior's most recent win, 406 laps at Michigan in 2:47. All told, nine of the season's 36 races went less than 3 hours.
But 13 of 36 -- more than a third -- of the races last season went on for three-and-a-half hours and then some. (Your winner not named the Coca-Cola 600: The 500-mile June race at Pocono, which came in at 24 seconds short of four hourzzzzzzzz.)
Throw in the pre-race shows that go on for 30 minutes or so, and that's a long day -- about two college basketball games worth, or about half a baseball game.
Like I said, long.
Remember when everyone was aghast when ABC dumped the end of the Phoenix race in November to ESPN2 so it could air America's Funniest Videos?
The issue wasn't that ABC did it. The issue was this: What took ABC so long?
1. It's Phoenix. That race usually stinks.
2. Jimmie Johnson was going to win the race. At least AFV has some suspense and surprise.
3. The current NASCAR season had started sometime back in 2005.
4. The Phoenix race had been going since Thursday.
5. Somewhere, somebody was playing football.
I understand ABC here: The season's long. Everyone's tired of NASCAR. This race has gone on for-ev-er. Oh, great -- a red flag. The hell with 'em.
I have no problem at all with the Daytona 500 -- it's almost always a good sporting event, if not a good race.
But does the world need 400 miles at Chicagoland? Or 1,000 miles in one season at Texas? How about 1,000 miles at Pocono? Five hundred laps of Bristol night racing is far too long now that nobody wrecks anymore.
Cut 'em all by 100 miles or 100 laps. If qualifying is all about going fast or going home, the races themselves should go faster, too.
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