Is this the dumbest race I have ever seen?

I watched The Bud Shootout at Daytona last night and the bump drafting was taken to a new level. Instead of two cars doing it for a couple of laps to move up through the pack, almost the entire race was made up of two-car tandems, one pushing the other around the track for extended periods of time (the teams have gotten around the cooling issue that previously prevented drivers from pushing for more than two laps or so). Restrictor plate racing has always been silly but this seemed even more random than before.



The race had a strange ebb and flow to it. One tandem would overtake another with a speed differential that was said to be as high as 15 mph! Then the other pair would speed back up and re-pass somehow. Jumping out of line to sling-shot past the car ahead looks risky, since two cars together are so much faster. Hamlin crossed the line first, but it was so close, who knows if he would have been able to do it had he not gone "out of bounds."



If this still goes on during the Daytona 500, how will it feel to be the guy who pushed the winner across the line first?



(scroll down for video) http://nascar.speedtv.com/article/c...shootout-daytona-international-speedway-nasca

OMG, I had no idea it had become this farcical.



I'm surprised they aren't trying 3 and 4 trains. Maybe on the faster tracks they will be able to make multi-car pushing work w/o spinning the guy in front.

Geonerd said:

OMG, I had no idea it had become this farcical.



I'm surprised they aren't trying 3 and 4 trains. Maybe on the faster tracks they will be able to make multi-car pushing work w/o spinning the guy in front.

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It used to be 8-10-15 cars in a draft, but you had to separate before you got to the banking. Now with the new pavement, the grip is so extreme, 2 cars can hook and stay hooked all the way around the track. The car doing the pushing is 100% blind as to whats going on, and has to trust the car that is leading the duo to steer him where they need to go. Any more than 2 and things get crazy because the 3rd guy in line cant react to what the other 2 are doing at 200 mph, and will either lose the draft, or cause the other 2 to spin.It wasnt any more or less stupid than restrictor plate racing usually is, just something new. I actually liked it better just because it was new. The position swap from pusher to leader was pretty cool, the ones that did it best stayed up front, and the ones who had not perfected it would lose a bunch of positions that ultimately led to them being in the mid pack wrecks.Bayne said the new strategy worked to his advantage because it was not business as usual and he was learning just like everyone else, which made his rookie status less of an issue.

I gotta admit that watching this novel sport (?) was sorta fun, but I can't ignore the small portion of my small brain that cries out in anguish, "This is not proper motor racing!"

Geonerd said:

I gotta admit that watching this novel sport (?) was sorta fun, but I can't ignore the small portion of my small brain that cries out in anguish, "This is not proper motor racing!"

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That's why I had a question mark in the title. I wasn't sure about what I had just seen. I think what bothers me more are the suspiciously-long caution periods. It seems they keep the pace car out for long enough for everyone to get their stops done. Gotta keep everyone bunched up now!



Five hundred mile races are pointless now. The endurance factor seems so diminished when these things aren't allowed to play out. They need to go to a heat race and feature format if they're so concerned about an actual long-distance race playing out. They do the same thing with Grand-Am's 24 hours too: long caution after long caution. Then, "oh my God look at how close this race is!"

I didn't watch enough to see any yellows. Aren't the artificially long caution periods a given, and don't they also allow lapped drivers to go around?

Geonerd said:

I didn't watch enough to see any yellows. Aren't the artificially long caution periods a given, and don't they also allow lapped drivers to go around?

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I'm not sure if the excruciatingly long yellows are the way it has always been, but I do know they suck, along with making a long race seem questionable.



As for lappers, they have the "lucky dog" rule which means the highest placed alpped driver gets to go around and get a lap back. This was instituted after they stopped racing back to the yellow, since a lapped driver could race to get his lap back in those days.



I seem to remember a race in which Jeff Burton was a lap down, right behind the leader, racing back to the yellow, and the leader kept his foot in it and didn't let Burton get his lap back. Jeff was pissed.