As an American racing fan, be it NASCAR, IndyCar, F1, or just about anything else, you know racing really isn’t covered well at all by mainstream sports media.
Here in Southern Maryland, I may see a mention or two during Speedweeks or Indy month, but outside of that no mention on local TV. On ESPN I have to wade through NFL, MLB, NBA, and NCAA before maybe a mention of NASCAR or something with Danica Patrick. Fox Sports is basically the same. Now granted both sports groups have hour or half an hour long NASCAR shows (NASCAR Now and Race Hub) each day in season, but nobody watches them compared to SportsCenter or even Fox Sports Live (I think, but either way I doubt the FSL audience is 100% NASCAR fans).
The problem with this being, of course, that both sport groups air every single NASCAR race from its three National series with the lone exception of TNT’s six race summer series. I know what you may be thinking right now: “Well, that’s pretty dumb. Why not really promote something you’re going to air?”
Guess what? They aren’t being dumb, they’re being smart, because NASCAR simply isn’t accepted as a sport by the majority of the viewing public.
Even if you hate football and have never played it, I’m pretty certain that you can at least accept that there is athleticism and that it is a sport. Same with basketball, hockey, and baseball. Unless you’re a Yankees fan, I’m pretty sure you see it as throwing big money at cheaters but I digress. People generally go to college and throw all of their hopes into making it into the NFL, MLB, NBA, NHL, or XFL (In Vince McMahon’s mind).
Last time I checked, the NCAA doesn’t sanction a racing series. Sure, drivers have gone to college before but that’s primarily to have a back up plan if it doesn’t work out – only 43 drivers start in Cup races, so the chance to make it big is pretty darn low. Mechanics are a different story but they don’t receive a tenth of the credit the driver usually does.
If I wanted to go throw a football, I have a buddy who lives down the road who has an old football we can play with. I don’t have a buddy with two Sprint Cup cars along with a quarter mile we can play with. Herein lies one of the big problem with mainstream opinion on motorsports – they do not understand that there is a core difference between driving and racing, they simply believe it is one and the same. I drive every day to work in my Toyota, this is the only connection many have with motorsports, even though the only similarity between the two is controlling an automobile down a road for a distance.
Driving is to travel a distance to get to a location and something the general public does everyday. Racing is something most sane people will never get the opportunity to do outside of carney go kart tracks where half the karts don’t work and the green one is always the fastest (in my experience). Just because I drive everyday in a Toyota, which has AC in the summer, doesn’t mean I can hop into the #18 Camry, no AC in a fire suit in a 100 degree cockpit, and become the next Kyle Busch. It took Busch 20 years of racing to get where he is today. I haven’t had a minute of it.
When I watch football, when Aaron Rodgers is on an absolute roll I can see the fire in his eyes, just how perfect he is at throwing the football. On the flipside, when Jay Cutler is having a bad day, I can see the anger, the heartbreak in his face and in his body language, every bad throw. This is why Tim Tebow was such a big deal to the mainstream – he has emotion, charisma, and fire most athletes could only dream to have, just no talent. You do not see this in motorsport, especially NASCAR.
Unless you really watch at driver motions in the windshield, you can’t see through the car and watch Busch wheel a loose car from the back to the front. Thus, there I think might be the biggest disconnect of all, the perceived lack of emotion on display. Outside of the insane wreck or two, when do you hear about NASCAR in mainstream media? Post race, when the emotion and the fights, the heartbreak, and the joy are all on full display.
Finally, the short attention span of Americans today make it hard to watch things for extended periods of time on TV if you don’t know about those involved. If I were to watch Landon Cassill swap the lead back and forth with Aric Almirola, I’d be pretty happy and would be interested. To the average channel surfer, they don’t know or care about that and would leave in a few minutes if it is the same old same old. Compare that to football, within a few minutes different players are guaranteed to be on the field doing different things.
No matter how well the sport of racing is doing ratings or fan base wise compared to its contemporaries, there will always be a Donovan McNabb out there who obviously doesn’t understand it and demeans it. If baseball is relatively easy to follow and football hard to understand at first, racing might be the single most complicated of them all. And it might have the most raw emotion out of its fans- even during a bad race fans are never going to keep to themselves about it.
