Where have all the good times gone for NASCAR?
tOO MANY SEATS AND TOO FEW RIVALRIES LEAVE THE SPORT GOING IN REVERSE
CONCORD - A long line of traffic stretched from the exit at Concord Mills all the way to the race track Saturday, and for a while it seemed like old times. People rolled down their windows to listen to a preacher on the side of the road, and over it all a Merle Haggard song wafted through the air.
"Are the good times really over for good?" he sang as the preacher preached and the good ol' boys drank and drove their cars in perfect lines from the highway into Charlotte Motor Speedway.
The good times probably weren't that good to begin with, but they're definitely over, at least for now.
A decent crowd came to watch the Bank of America 500, far more than the old National 500 attracted back in the day. But there were far fewer seats then and no apparent need to build more. That didn't stop them, though.
You can put every race fan in North Carolina inside this speedway now. That's basically what's changed. NASCAR has lost its fans. It seems every time they come back here, fewer people come to watch. And let's face it, even with a great "Chase" going on and Jimmie Johnson chasing the greatest to ever race in this sport, no one cares.
Jeff Gordon was asked about it this week, and he said the sport just doesn't make any noise. He thinks it has something to do with the old Ford-Chevy rivalry disappearing. He also thinks the racers are too nice.
"I think there need to be more rivalries out there," he said. "When I won my first championship, obviously there was the rivalry with (Dale) Earnhardt," Gordon said. "In the other championships, I never really had rivals like that, but there was always Ford versus Chevy."
Gordon was a Ford driver who was stolen away to drive for Chevrolet back when things like that started fights in the infield. Nobody fights in the infield now. They don't even listen to Merle Haggard in the infield anymore. Saturday night, while track officials tried to kill a daredevil, a band played bad renditions of Lynyrd Skynyrd while a few thousand people shifted uncomfortably in their seats.
Suddenly, the giant television screens in the infield showed a chase down the backstretch with a cop car following an RV. On the side of the RV, someone had painted "Watch this" and "Somebody hold my beer."
The chase entered the frontstretch, where a crude ramp had been built, and the RV and cop car hit the ramp simultaneously. Then something went wrong. An explosive device went off too early, and the RV bobbled on the ramp before slamming nose-first into a bed of junk cars. Everybody laughed. And waited. And waited. And waited.
Then the fire trucks arrived. Then the ambulance. For a brief time, it was assumed the daredevil was dead. The band never stopped playing, though.
They got him out of the RV, and about an hour later, track officials pronounced the guy "OK." Then they ran the race, and everybody went back home.
They don't come back here for a long time. They'll go to Martinsville next, then Talladega, and then Johnson will win another championship and next year they'll go to a bunch of strange places before they make it back here and find even fewer fans in the stands.
And they won't even know why.
It's not the economy. It's not the lack of rivalries or Ford vs. Chevy or Toyota or cars of tomorrow or anything else. It's simply that all those people who came to all those races all those years ago don't come anymore. They just don't care anymore. Racing has lost all its momentum, and it built all those seats and all those race tracks for all those people who weren't really fans to start with.
Racing is a simple sport. It's all speed and noise and the smell of gasoline and burning tire rubber. It works here, and it always has because it was born here. They forgot that, and now they can't get it back.
They'll pack the place at Martinsville, then the sport will nose-dive and disappear again. They don't love racing in Kansas or Fontana or Chicago. They don't understand that it's supposed to be dirty and noisy, that you're supposed to sit in traffic for hours and listen to road-side preachers preach and Merle Haggard sing about the good old days.
"I wish a Ford and a Chevy would still last 10 years, like they should," Haggard sang on the country radio Saturday. "Is the best of the free life behind us now? Are the good times really over for good?"
I reckon so.
Contact Ed Hardin at 373-7069 or ed.hardin @news-record.com
