The NASCAR Noncompete Clause

Another new season for NASCAR began last week, with the running of its most famous race, the Daytona 500.  Why they start their season with their biggest race is a mystery decades in the making.  To say the least, it's unique; to say the most, it's the dumbest thing a spectator 'sport' could do.

I'm not a car racing fan, I don't watch and I don't really care.  But I still can't get over how, inside every NASCAR race, are two dumber ideas that have come to fruition.  I submit to you 1) stage racing, and 2) overtime a/k/a the green-white-checkered ending.

With stage racing, each race has 2 or 3 'segments' to it, basically a prescribed number of laps.  At the end of each segment, the yellow flag comes out to pause the race, and the top finishers for each segment receive 'points' to be used in a season-long competition.

One of the outcomes of these stages is a re-bunching of the field.  So, if the driver leading the race was ahead by a lot, now his lead is gone.  In other words, it takes the strongest cars / drivers and evens them up with everyone else throughout the race.  Huh?

Imagine that happening in any other competition.  A team takes a big lead into halftime?  Reset the score for the second half.  A golfer has a big lead after two rounds?  Give the other golfers strokes to even things up.  It's unimaginably stupid.

However, when it comes to stage racing, NASCAR's overtime rules say, "Hold my beer."  The overtime rules were established years ago, after many races were being decided while the field wasn't actually racing, but proceeding 'under caution' due to a crash near the end of the race. While that type of ending was very much a buzz-kill for fans, the overtime rules don't help.

Now, instead of the race ending like that, extra laps are added, so that at least two laps can be run full-tilt to the end.  This sounds better, except it isn't.  Again, it hurts the race leader.  Plus, it often doesn't work.

Consider this year's Daytona 500, which went to overtime not once, but three separate times, because crashes just kept happening after re-starts.  In the end, NASCAR basically put the race out of its misery by declaring the race over, and naming the winner to be the car in first place at the last crash.

So after an extra 30 miles / one hour of boring caution laps, there was still no racing to the finish line.  The winner wasn't the best car / driver, it was more a matter of who was lucky enough to avoid the crashes.  Again, unimaginably stupid.

NASCAR has long fought the stereotype of being a good 'ol white boys 'sport' with fans that aren't the sharpest tools in the shed.  In the case of these rules, it takes one to know one.  If they were looking for ways to make races more boring and non-competitive, you could say they're the big winners.