NASCAR returns this weekend to fill NBC’s athletic void, because if there’s one thing Olympic viewers love, it’s some good ol’ short-track racing. The trucks and the Cup cars are at Richmond, and in the Cup Series, they’re trying different tires again. Some background:
When the Next Gen car debuted three years ago, it did so on the heels of an exciting era of short track racing, a breakthrough era for road course racing, and a disastrously boring era of racing at the 1.5-mile intermediate speedways. NASCAR was adapting: It was in the process of adding a street track in Chicago and a short track at the Los Angeles Coliseum. It was pulling out of 1.5-mile tracks. It even swapped out the Brickyard 400 for an Indianapolis Motor Speedway road course. Then, the Next Gen car launched, and suddenly road course racing sucked. This was inconvenient, but it wasn’t bad. NASCAR bears no genetic tie to turning right, and 1.5-milers were suddenly fun. The trade would have netted out positively for stock cars had it only involved road courses and the 1.5-mile tracks. Unfortunately, road courses weren’t the only diminished product. Short track racing started to stink too.
NASCAR has tried to make adjustments to the car itself, and it continues those efforts. They’ve yet to work, though, and with Bristol, Martinsville, and Richmond part of stock car racing’s DNA, the issue is a little bit dire. So, the sport’s governing body took a big step in May: It asked Goodyear to bring two different tires to North Wilkesboro for the All-Star Race.
It’s not uncommon for racing series to use multiple tire compounds each race. F1 and IndyCar have long used tire choice as a gimmick to try to increase their entertainment value. For example: In F1, Pirelli brings three types of tires to every grand prix, and each car must use at least two of them at some point in the race. (Unfortunately, there’s never a compound that’s secretly rigged to blow out after three laps. The game would be way more fun if one of the three tires was a landmine awaiting ignition.)
NASCAR didn’t go that far at North Wilkesboro, and it isn’t going that far tomorrow at Richmond. The approach, for now, is to give teams a few sets of the “option” tire and to leave it up to crew chiefs to decide whether to use it and when. The option tire is softer than the normal compound, which theoretically should make it faster over short runs and quicker to degrade than its conventional counterpart. A boom-or-bust option…in theory. At North Wilkesboro, this isn’t what happened. The option tire did degrade at first, but the fall-off settled down. Joey Logano ran 90 straight laps on the softer compound. Tire wear didn’t slow him down enough to make him lose the lead.
There are reasons the All-Star Race tire shouldn’t be called a failure just yet, with the race odd (Kyle Busch brought out an unusually early caution when he wrecked Ricky Stenhouse Jr.) and the track kinder to tires than Richmond’s should be (North Wilkesboro was repaved this year in anticipation of All-Star Weekend; Richmond has one of the oldest pavements on the circuit). Hopefully, it works tomorrow without being too gimmicky. Or, you know, it causes chaos. As we often say: The great thing about NASCAR is that its stupidest races are some of its best.
The weekend schedule:
- Saturday, 2:30 PM EDT: Truck practice (FS1)
- Saturday, 3:00 PM EDT: Truck qualifying (FS1)
- Saturday, 4:30 PM EDT: Cup practice (NBC Sports website/app streaming)
- Saturday, 5:35 PM EDT: Cup qualifying (NBC Sports streaming)
- Saturday, 7:30 PM EDT: Truck Series – Clean Harbors 250 (FS1)
- Sunday, 6:00 PM EDT: Cook Out 400 (USA)
Alongside Kyle Larson, the Joe Gibbs guys are the favorites given their history at Richmond and Denny Hamlin’s win there this spring after Martin Truex Jr. led late.
Other NASCAR developments:
- Connor Zilisch will race in the Xfinity Series next season and for a few races later this year, driving the JR Motorsports #88. Unless I’m the biggest idiot in the world, he’s still a Trackhouse driver and this is happening because Trackhouse doesn’t have an Xfinity ride. We still haven’t gotten a good chance to parse Zilisch’s vibes against those of other potential Futures of the Sport. He doesn’t look like Draco Malfoy’s son, so he has a leg up on Ty Gibbs on that front. I’m going to assume he’s also more likable than Ty Gibbs, because it would be so hard to be less likable, but I don’t want to say that too confidently just yet.
- The Braves and Reds will play at Bristol Motor Speedway next August, and…I’m nervous. For one thing, big unforced error by Major League Baseball to not make the banked turns part of the field of play. For another, 150,000 is a big capacity for baseball. I’m worried about empty seats. It’s the right choice of teams (the Braves would presumably raise hell if asked to give up a home game against the Yankees or another big brand), but I’m worried about empty seats, and I will stay worried about empty seats for the next 51 weeks. It’s good that it’s on a Saturday.
Canapino Out
I didn’t understand who Agustín Canapino was back when Juncos Hollinger effectively suspended him in July. I thought he was an Argentinian racecar driver with a cult Argentinian following. I didn’t realize he was one of Argentina’s greatest athletes. At one point, he and Lionel Messi had won the Olimpia de Oro* the same number of times.
Given that, it makes more sense that there’d be fans sending death threats every time another car came within sniffing distance of Canapino’s. When an athlete’s fanbase is gigantic, there will be nuts. I thought Canapino had an unusually crazy fanbase. Turns out he’s some kind of Argentinian Jeff Gordon.
Juncos Hollinger and Canapino split up this week. It’s over. It didn’t work. After the Detroit maelstrom, the #78 car wasn’t competitive, and that made the whole experiment no longer worth the trouble. I wonder if Canapino’s ready to just be back in Turismo Carretera, the Argentinian stock car series. He’s only 34. Messi’s retiring. Go grab some trophies, Agustín.
*The Olimpia de Oro seems like an award that should go to Lionel Messi every year. It appears Argentina’s press corps has corrected this recently, giving Messi three in a row, but the fact it took so long is a red flag. Are Argentinian sports journalists getting too haughty? I need Stephen A. Smith to weigh in.
F1 Should Be Great and Terrible
We’ve been aware of the impending Brad Pitt F1 movie (because they keep letting him dress up as an F1 driver during race weekends), but we haven’t really figured out what’s going on with it. Now seems like a good time.
Evidently Pitt is working on this with the guy who directed the Top Gun reboot. This is a good sign for the movie. It implies the movie will make F1 cars look very cool (which they definitely are, to be clear). Is it also a bad sign, though? Because my impression of that Top Gun movie was that it didn’t face any requirement to be remotely realistic. In 2022, mainstream society didn’t know enough about fighter jets or international relations to care how accurately Tom Cruise and Miles Teller depicted America’s most badass citizens. At the same time, mainstream society did know enough to assume the movie would be inaccurate. We understood that we were walking into the theater for nothing more than fun.
With Formula 1, the situation’s different. This is going to be a lot of Americans’ first ever taste of F1, which is going to lead to a bunch of headlines saying, “Brad Pitt Introduces America to Formula 1.” It’s another round of Drive to Survive, but with more of a single, glamorous pop.
As with fighter jets, mainstream society doesn’t know enough about racecars to care how accurately Pitt depicts an international racing series. The problem is that mainstream society also doesn’t know enough to know that the movie will be inaccurate. Like rain washing shit into the Seine, the movie has the potential to create another wave of insufferable F1 bros. Eventually, they’ll clear back out, but in the meantime, this movie could annoy a lot of people who really care about the sport.
To be clear, this would be great. This would be hilarious. The best case scenario is that like the first season of Ted Lasso, the movie is simultaneously candy for the masses and impossible for self-righteous F1 fans to enjoy. The worst case is that it’s accurate enough about on-track F1 to satiate the diehards while being inaccurate enough about off-track F1 to make casual Americans think F1 is the greatest racing series in the world.
Lewis Hamilton is involved as an executive producer. That will probably help with the accuracy? Again, probably more with on-track accuracy than off. For as annoying as Drive to Survive became, it did make clear that Lance Stroll’s dad bought him an F1 team.
