Watkins Glen on Monday

I attended the race at Watkins Glen on Monday and, while I enjoyed the race, a couple of comments are necessary.

The race should not have had to been held on Monday. In the good old days (before NASCAR’s gazillion dollar television contracts) ESPN came on the air for this race at 1:00 PM and engines were started at 1:06 PM. Remember that? If that was done this year the race would have reached around half way before the rain started. Since it stopped raining so that the race could have been restarted at 6:00 PM, the entire race could easily have been run on Sunday.

The ratings just came out for the Monday race and, as expected, they are abysmal. I don’t have a clue how the television contracts are worded. There must be a ratings factor in it. Does the network benefit from a long pre-race show? Does anybody watch it? I keep wondering how much the ratings have to go down before big changes are made. NASCAR and ESPN – please feel free to offer me a job to help you out in this area. I can make things better. Just leave a phone number in the COMMENTS.

I have attended 20 of the last 22 races at Watkins Glen. At most, 60% of the fans attended the race on Monday that were there on Sunday. That’s sad. Fans remember those things. After what happened at Richmond last September you can bet I’ll never buy an advanced sale ticket again. NASCAR needs to work with the networks to have a better chance of getting a race in without carrying over to the next day. Granted, a 1:00 PM start will not work all the time, but this is an example of when it can.

At most, only 25% of the food vendors were there and operating on Monday. I guess contracts for getting food to the track end on Sunday?? Whatever the reason, I felt overly gouged for a $6 slice of pizza and a $4 bottle of soda. Maybe those were the prices on Sunday. Whether they were or not, I was held captive to their prices if I wanted to eat.

Pocono Problems

The Pennsylvania 500 at Pocono brought to light three huge NASCAR problems:

1 – Rained out qualifying. There was no time on Saturday to run qualifying? True, all teams present got into the race, but it seems that the process of putting on qualifying is not high on NASCAR’s agenda.

2 – Rained out race. The attempt to dry the track looked pathetic. Four jet dryers are not going to dry a 2.5 mile track very quickly. Put a gazillion vehicles of all sorts out there and see how fast it gets dry. Having been in that situation I feel very sorry for all the fans that could not come back on Monday. ESPN was very careful to not show a good crowd shot, it appeared the seats were only about half full. I’d love to see the count.

3 – Lucky Dog. Jimmy Johnson only raced 490 miles! He was given 10 miles - 4 laps. For 2 of those laps he was more than a lap down. This is racing? Does NASCAR ever consider that nonsense like this is why the old, hard core fans are losing interest? Do other sports do anything like this?

I'm not taking away the incredible job Johnson's pit crew did to fix their engine problem. But that does not earn them 10 miles! The gushing of the on air television personalities was sickening! Any positive comment they made about Johnson finishing 13th should have been accompanied with a great big "BUT"!