Happy Hour: If you liked the past, this is your NASCAR weekend
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.
Enjoy the off-week? It’s now our busy season. 12 straight weeks of NASCAR coincide with 12 weeks of college football. Though we’re not sure we can complain too much. We’re looking forward to traveling to some Chase races as the season winds down and combining those trips with some college football games too.
In case you’ve been living under a rock and haven’t seen all the teasing over the past two weeks, be prepared to find your driver in different livery this weekend. Many teams are running throwback schemes and NBC is even going to have some throwback features during its broadcasts this weekend. Hopefully that doesn’t mean they’re going to broadcast the races in standard-definition (they aren’t).
Not every driver is running a throwback scheme, however. Jeff Gordon will be in that ugly silver 3M car. Gordon not going with a throwback scheme in his final race at Darlington may be a big of a disappointment, but was anything going to top the car he ran at Bristol? And with 3M on the car at Darlington, what where they going to throw back to?
The throwback schemes are great. And are proof that NASCAR teams can actually design really good looking cars. Hopefully this means we’ll see some better paint schemes in the future. And Darlington being a throwback weekend every year from here on would be cool too. Otherwise it would seem somewhat like a cheap ploy to celebrate the track’s return to the Labor Day weekend when the date should never have been taken from the track in the first place.
We talked about this a little bit two weeks ago but it’s worth mentioning again. There’s no miracle cure to create “pack racing,” passing in every single corner and close finishes every race even if NASCAR would like to have a highlight moment every single weekend.
And Darlington is a treacherous place. Seasoned NASCAR fans know that drivers have to set up passes entering and exiting the corners. You can’t simply get a run in the middle of turns one and two and have a lane to get by in the corner. The track isn’t designed for two lanes.
It doesn’t mean the racing isn’t entertaining at all. Just that it’s not indicative of what we see at other tracks. And it’s the other tracks where the softer tire compound and lower downforce will really make a noticeable difference over what we’ve seen so far in 2015.
NASCAR really hasn’t said what specifically it is looking for with the new configurations at Darlington. And while we would love to know how those in the series haulers and control tower view a race, we understand why they’re not tipping their hand as to what they really want to see on Sunday night.
It’s increasingly clear that NASCAR is going to change the rules for 2016, and given that what we’ve seen at Michigan and Indianapolis hasn’t worked, it’s very likely something like what we’ll see Saturday night will be implemented. So if the race isn’t a thriller, please, don’t panic. Darlington ain’t no cookie-cutter.
Oh without a doubt.
On one hand it was a great move to schedule the race when NASCAR wasn’t racing. And it was a great move to not have the finale end at midnight on the east coast like it has previously. We’ve always thought the IndyCar Series should position itself around Cup Series races more and more. While there’s a die-hard base of open-wheel fans, there’s also a large crossover audience of people who are simply race fans. And we count ourselves in that demographic.
On the other, the season was over in August. Should that really be happening? It was hard to comprehend that Sunday was the final IndyCar race of the season. The season is less than half of a Cup Series season, but it still felt too short.
Yes, IndyCar would have the potential to get lost on a busy fall television schedule. But with a television partner in NBC Sports Network, it’s going to have airtime if it wanted to run races in September and October — as long as they weren’t head to head with NASCAR, of course.
Which brings us to something we just noticed earlier in the week. Talladega is the same day as the United States Grand Prix in Austin. Both races start at roughly the same time. The Formula 1 race is at 3 p.m. ET on NBC while the Cup race goes green about 10 minutes before that.
Yes, NBC can’t control what the FIA wants to do with start times. And we know that the FIA really doesn’t (publicly) care about NASCAR. Remember how the USGP was the same weekend as the Texas race last year? But how cool would it be to see the F1 race start at Noon or 1 p.m. and lead directly into the Cup race? And then, if IndyCar was still racing, say in the finale at Sonoma, it could be after the Cup race.
We’re dreaming big. But it’d be fun.
Given that it’s a throwback race, shouldn’t the race “stink” compared to what we’re used to seeing?
The race has been touted as a throwback to the 1970s, so let’s take a look at the Southern 500s from 1970-1979. The winner won by a lap or more four times and the closest margin of victory was four car lengths, when Bobby Allison beat David Pearson in 1972. In the six times there was more than one car on the lead lap, the most cars that finished on the lead lap were four. Yes, four. That’s unheard of in modern NASCAR.
Maybe spread out racing is your thing. If it is, you’re really hoping for a throwback. But if you like how NASCAR is much closer right now, you’re wanting the only throwbacks to be the paint schemes.
And we’ve been out of Cadbury eggs since late July. What Halloween candy could we hoard and eat one a day of?
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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!
