Happy Hour: Our driving experience, race lengths, engines and more
Throughout the week you can send us your best questions, jokes, rants and just plain miscellaneous thoughts to [email protected] or @NickBromberg. We’ll post them here and have a good time.
It’s Talladega week.
Here’s to turning up, slowing down, and cars that go real fast.
We’ll be taking care of some non-racing business this weekend, but we’ve got the race on the DVR and Jay Busbee will be at Talladega. We can’t wait for October, where we hope to see both the Alabama Crimson Tide and Talladega in person. And it will be wonderful.
Side note of actual news before we continue. Joe Gibbs Racing has confirmed that Erik Jones will be in the No. 18 starting at Kansas. David Ragan moves to the No. 55 at Michael Waltrip Racing that weekend.
Back to our regularly scheduled nonsense.
Did the Richard Petty Driving Experience at Kansas Speedway last week and man, was it a lot of fun. It was our first time in a stock car on an oval and got up to 134 MPH. Which, frankly, is embarrassing. WE NEEDED TO GO FASTER.
We figured out why we didn’t, however. Throughout the instruction process, you’re implored to be very smooth with the accelerator (you don’t touch the brakes at an intermediate track like Kansas). We were too smooth. Only on our last lap did the realization hit that we weren’t flooring it as soon as we could off the corner and instead smoothly pressing the gas pedal down as if we were on the highway.
The big takeaway for us wasn’t the sense of speed either. It’s the banking. You feel like you’re going fast, of course, but it doesn’t overwhelm you. The banking just shoves you down onto your left buttcheek harder than you think it’s going to.
If you’ve got the opportunity to ever do the driving experience, do it. It’s something we’re glad we crossed off our racing bucket list. Next is to compete in the Daytona 500, so we’re gonna start working on that now.
Yesterday, the following was the afternoon topic on Sirius XM’s NASCAR channel.
It got us thinking … just what was the average race time in 2014? Because we initially wondered just how much racing would be cut if all NASCAR races were timed similar to road course racing events.
So we did a little math and for the 35 full events in 2014, the average race time was approximately 3 hours and 11 minutes. So, at a track where a lap takes 30 seconds, that’s roughly a race 22 laps shorter under a 3-hour timed format.
At a shortening of such a short distance, why would a three-hour race even be considered a debate? And especially so when you dive deeper into the numbers. 21 races last year were over three hours, however only 10 were over 3:20. And if you take out the Southern 500 at Darlington and the Coca-Cola 600, the average race time is shortened by four minutes.
We understand why shortening races is a discussion and we’re not trying to dismiss it. We’ve been known to drift off into a wonderland in the mid-stages of a three-hour race as drivers are “clicking off laps” at the mid-point of a race. Shorter races can create more urgency and we didn’t initially counter SXM’s tweet yesterday with the intention of firebombing it.
We’re just not sure that time is the way to discuss a possible change and feel it’s important to frame the discussion in the context of current NASCAR race times. With exceptions for longer races, NASCAR is coming pretty close to fitting into the standard three-hour sports window. NFL games routinely run over three hours and don’t get us started on how long college football games now take. If you think NASCAR drags and drags, we’re not sure what you’d think about some near four-hour CFB games.
And besides, the reason other sports are trying to figure out how to speed up games is because of the added time via commercial breaks. As you know, NASCAR doesn’t stop for commercials. It’s not nearly an apples-to-apples comparison.
Marc brings up an interesting question. So we went back into the annals of NASCAR box scores, and engine failures and related retirements (based off official reasons for retirement) are actually up compared to last year at this time. Through the first nine races of 2014, there were seven engine failures. This season there have been 11. The increase is because of the three engine failures at Daytona (up from two in 2014) and three at Texas.
WE THINK SHE WILL.
Now, does this throw a wrench in plans for a return to Stewart-Haas Racing? Potentially. However, we’re also not going to act naive and pretend that Wednesday was the first time that SHR and Patrick knew that GoDaddy wasn’t coming back, either. This has likely been known for quite some time.
And is GoDaddy’s departure a bigger deal to SHR than it is for Patrick? GoDaddy was a pillar sponsor for the team – they sponsored the most races of any SHR sponsor in 2014 outside of Gene Haas’ own company – and the money Patrick brought in was a given. They can likely replace it if they want to, but it could be with a similar arrangement to Kevin Harvick and Tony Stewart’s teams.
Given the events at California, we’ll admit that we did wonder just how many people were bracing for a late debris caution with Busch leading.
This is why Brian makes it into Happy Hour nearly every week, you guys. Good questions.
We’re going with the night race. We’re spending all day at the track regardless, and the night race is on Saturday night. That gives us the rare Sunday off, and with Mother’s Day, the chance to grill out with the family and enjoy the late afternoon. Yeah, it may be a late night, but it won’t be an early morning the next day. We’re a huge fan of spring and summer Sundays with no obligations.
And the Cadbury Creme Egg stash is holding up better than expected. We haven’t eaten more than one a day and have actually skipped a few days. It could make it to August.
– – – – – – –
Nick Bromberg is the editor of From The Marbles on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at [email protected] or follow him on Twitter!
