NASCAR is boring now

Saw most of the rain-delayed Daytona 500 Monday night, and I have to say that it was an incredibly boring race - except, of course, when driver Pablo Montoya blasted into a jet-engine-blower truck and everything blew up. No one was injured, incredibly, and so I can guiltlessly say that the episode was the only truly entertaining period of the race.

The problem is not new. NASCAR races became boring when NASCAR mandated that every Sprint Cup driver had to drive the "Car of Tomorrow" racer beginning in 2008. That means that all the Sprint Cup races - the big leagues of NASCAR - are basically just one big IROC series, a now-defunct racing series in which, "Drivers raced identically-prepared stock cars set up by a single team of mechanics in an effort to make the race purely a test of driver ability."

The problem with using the COT in NASCAR is that brand distinction (Ford, Chevy, etc.) now means nothing at all. It did back in, say, Richard Petty's day. The cars now are all the same except for very minor and immaterial differences. In Daytona there was a field of 30-plus cars that all had almost exactly the same performance envelopes and so most all the race looked like this:



A giant clump of cars in which almost none of the drivers are actually racing except for the handful at the front. Inside the gaggle there is no real racing, just each driver awaiting a screwup by someone else to leave an opening. The problem is that the screwups turn out this way:



This was merely the first of several (IIRC, four) such wrecks. Again, no one hurt, thankfully. In the old days it was rare for NASCAR wrecks to wipe out eight or so cars at a time. It happened, but not much. Now, it's rare when wrecks don't do so. All this does is stop the race (well, what little racing there actually is) for many laps under the yellow. What it does not do is make the race a race when the green flag gets waved again. There are fewer cars to clump together at 195 mph, but it's still just a clump. And so: another such wreck. In fact, the last of these wrecks of the evening took place mere minutes before the end, and when it started I thought for a moment that Fox was replaying the wreck in the video above.

NASCAR blames its multiyear attendance drop on the recession. Problem is that attendance peaked in 2005 and has shrunk every year since. Both 2009's and 2010's attendance were less than 2003's.

Why? Because the drivers aren't racing anymore; the winner usually just turns out to be the luckiest of the last men standing, having missed being wiped out in a pile up. That means the "race" is boring because viewers are not actually watching a competition, just a high-speed game of Russian Roulette. Even the wrecks are not entertaining, not because drivers don't get hurt (that's a good thing) but because they are so predictable and frequent that there is no longer a surprise factor in them and all they do is interrupt what little racing there might be. "Look, honey, twelve cars are spinning out of control again. I'll go get that popcorn for you now."

As I said at the beginning, the only entertaining part of the evening was this:



Related: The day I raced against Darrell Waltrip. He won.

NASCAR remains the palest of professional sports: "It makes the NHL look like a melting pot."

What is the fastest you have ever driven?