I've heard a lot of griping on the NASCAR channel of my satellite radio about the last 30 or so minutes of the race being switched to another network. I myself consider this a minor inconvenience, as I had to make sure it was on the right channel when I turned on the TV anyway. If you have a TV that just automatically tunes to the race, drop me a line with the make and model. Otherwise, you had to do the same thing you did when you turned on the TV in the first place to watch the end of the race. Big deal; quit your wining. If you missed the end of the race because you weren't paying enough attention to notice, you weren't really watching the race anyway. NASCAR's ratings aren't going up either. A trend that they TV people are probably watching when they make their decision to cut to another channel. I'm sure they used the situation to make as much money per second as they possibly could. Don't think that's going to change under the new administration. No redistributing of the wealth is coming from that.

If I had to place the blame on anything making the race so long that the network had to consider switching networks, I would blame the tow truck drivers that cleared the two cars that had joined together in what appeared to be some sort of mating ritual. I watched some guy from the safety crew with a fire extinguisher stand in front of the exhaust pipe which was on fire for a good 30 seconds before he decided that the thing in his hand could possibly help with the situation, and finally put out the flames. Then a 20 minute red flag to clear a few cars off the track? If that had happened in NYC, they wouldn't have had to throw the caution. A crew would have cleared that before they picked up the pace car on the next time around. What are they trying to do out there? Hook up to the front car and pull it one way, the back car the other way, and drag them off the track. The cars are wrecked! No ones gonna say, "Man, this car is in remarkably good shape after that other car landed on top of it." It's gonna need a lot of new sheet metal no matter what. Grab on to whatever piece of the cage is closest to the tow truck, and haul it outa there. I can deal with a 60 minute caution to fix the safer barrier or to attend to someone medically, but for a wrecked race car? A truck with a push bumper could have plowed them off the track in seconds. a little bit of speedy dry, and we're racing on the same channel we started on.

# posted by theStewartFan @ 12:14 PM

1 Comments:

 Anonymous adds:
Yeah that was an insanely long race.

Hopefully the final race will be better.

Great blog... hopefully Tony does well next year. Let me know if I can add you to my blogroll. I just started a blog.

Thanks,

Brooke
Thanks  Anonymous for your comment. 

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