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Fireball22's Blogs
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Doing Something Original
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Historic Stock Car racing VS the "Golden Age"
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So, just how many sites are you guys on?
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| Jan 09, 2008 |
Park and Fly?
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| Dec 30, 2007 |
Whoa! They woke up!
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| Nov 26, 2007 |
NASCAR's COT has made me an FOY
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| Nov 19, 2007 |
Carster: Asleep at the Switch?
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| Oct 25, 2007 |
Who are those guys?
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| Oct 24, 2007 |
Well, here I am! Now what...?
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NASCAR's COT has made me an FOY
Monday Nov 26, 2007 10:20:00 PM
Well, it's finally done.
I've been a fan of NASCAR for as long as I can remember. Now I don't much care for it. Brian France: This ain't your grandaddy's NASCAR. And it isn't mine anymore, either. But let's go back to that long-ago fandom for a moment...
Sacramento, CA is not exactly the birthplace of NASCAR, so stock car racing must have gotten in my blood somehow, right? Well, Sacramento used to host NASCAR-sanctioned events out at the old state fairgrounds as part of the national tour. For three years they ran a 100-mile feature in conjunction with the state fair. On the day I was born, September 8, 1958 (yup, I'm that old) Parnelli Jones won the NASCAR 100-mile event at the Sacramento track that usually saw horse racing.
I guess that after three years of running a race clear on the other side of the country, NASCAR decided to skip us in favor of closer venues. Still, as I was growing up I followed the NASCAR Grand National circuit as best I could. My dad and I attended the Sacramento Autorama annual custom car show every year. After I grew restless looking at the cars, I would plant myself in the impromptu theatre and watch every reel of the old 16mm movies of classic NASCAR races they would offer. I was hooked.
My imagination was fueled by names like Richard Petty, David Pearson, Big Bill France, Little Joe Weatherly, Curtis Turner, Darel Dierenger, Lee Roy Yarbrough, Fred Lorenzen, and Holman-Moody. I also got a kick out of hearing names like Speedy Thompson, Smokey Yunick, Tiger Tom, Cotton Owens, Shorty Rollins, Tiny Lund, Flocko Jocko, Buck Baker, Coo-Coo Marlin, and of course, Fireball Roberts.
Another dozen years later, the broadcast networks started putting a few NASCAR events on TV. By the time that cable service finally made its way into our little corner of nowhere, I had the excitement of ESPN bringing nearly every event into my living room, live and in living color. And on the heels of that, NASCAR gave me a live race in my back yard when they added Sears Point as a venue in 1989.
Then I became an historian and webmaster for the Historic Stock Car Racing Series in 1999. Now I was immersed in NASCAR: TV, live events, and hands-on. Life was good.
Then Winston Cup bowed out of the series. Now we had a new series sponsor and a "chase" format. I gritted my teeth and accepted it. Some love was lost, but I still considered myself a fan. Then two more things happened that have pretty much killed off my interest: Jimmy Johnson and the Car of Tomorrow.
Let's be clear; Jimmy Johnson is a hell of a driver. Back-to-back championships is testiment to that. But he's so plain vanilla (downright bland) that I just can't get close to him. His personality is so robotic, so *blah*, it makes him perfect for the Car of Tomorrow, or COT. A plain vanilla, bland, robotic, *blah* excuse for a race car.
NASCAR has pretty much legislated personalities out of its drivers, and now has driven all personality out of its race cars. While the "stock" in stock cars
did disappear long ago, at least they weren't all 3,500 lb. Indy cars, which is what they really are now.
Jack Roush recently commented on NASCAR.com that the driver is being taken out of the equation in a stock car's set-up in favor of the 7-post rig, an engineer with a laptop and a simulation program. No wonder NASCAR is attracting Formula 1 drivers... it's turning into a mid-tech version of the same thing!
Plain vanilla race cars will result in more plain vanilla drivers, and result in more plain vanilla racing.
The Car of Tomorrow (COT) has turned me into an FOY... the Fan of Yesterday.
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Comments
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Posted By: LedZeppelin
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2008/02/13 01:52:53 AM |
| I spent some tiome at Tomorroland....does that count? |
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