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Massa

Daytona Speedweeks

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1979...how could I forget to share this...first live-televised Daytona 500 and now you know why NASCAR is popular...

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Seems like the Gatorade races are on at a sensible time here, so I'll probably tune in tonight. I hope to catch the Daytona 500 too.

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7:19 PM start for you.

FOX was closing down streams of the Bud Shootout last weekend so be careful. TNT and ESPN were known to shut streams off last year, but FOX/SPEED usually never did, so we'll see. Seems they are going to this year.

You can go to motorracingnetwork.com and stream the radio coverage if you can't find a feed, and nascar.com (the site isn't run by NASCAR at all; it's run by Turner Media who will lose the rights after this year as NASCAR is going to take control of its own Internet presence, which is nice, welcome to 1999 etc) for "live timing" that is not actually live at all and doesn't like to refresh automatically.

http://www.motorracingnetwork.com/stream.html

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Alright, thanks for the info. I guess even that is favourable to not seeing/hearing about it at all. :P

Question for you - do you think these Gatorade races and the 500 will be as wild as the Shootout was? I'm not like WOO YEAH CRASHES, I'm just wondering if I'm going to see anything decent as a new fan, or just a lot of lengthy cautions. :P

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If you couldn't tell, I really don't actually enjoy the racing at Daytona and Talladega. I think it's a caricature of automobile racing; so over-the-top, over-exaggerated, almost insulting. It's like Ben Edwards is to commentary; these races are just a lot of noise to me.

So, here's what you will see today. You can determine whether or not it interests you; it doesn't interest me but even I'll still watch the 500. :lol:

1) You'll see a lot of close pack racing today. All the cars are going to be together, two and three wide, a lot of action.

2) You'll see tandems as a way to break out of the pack.

3) You'll probably see a close finish. It always gets extra wild at the end of the race.

4) You might not see guys going as hard today because they're already locked into the show, so they don't want to tear up good cars.

5) There will be a lot of lead changes, a lot of "passes" where you can't even control it...you're going past whether you like it or not because of how the draft works.

6) A lot of teamwork/working together/cutting deals.

7) There will be wrecks. There are always wrecks.

The 500? Varying levels of all of that. There will be periods of people being patient, periods of people going whether they like it or not, and people getting really wild at the end.

Cautions etc.? The Cup guys will probably take it a little easier today. The 500 usually has a lot of them, especially toward the end when people stop hanging back and really go for it.

It won't be like the ARCA race where they were basically in one big line until they all ran out of fuel. 1) The Cup cars are better suited to the track so they will be passing and 2) the Cup drivers are better, so they won't have as many stupid wrecks, though tandem drafting, when it happens, often leads to a lot of guys getting turned around.

Bud Shootout, I didn't see it, but it'll probably be a lot like that.

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Didn't watch the Duels.

Stewart and Kenseth won.

Drivers who made it:

11. Michael McDowell

17. Robby Gordon

24. Dave Blaney

34. Joe Nemechek

40. Trevor Bayne

41. Tony Raines

42. David Stremme

43. Terry Labonte

Drivers who won't run the Daytona 500:

Mike Wallace, J.J. Yeley, Bill Elliott, Robert Richardson, Michael Waltrip, and Kenny Wallace.

Races will be called the Budweiser Duels next year. Shootout sponsorship now up for grabs.

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Didn't watch the Duels.

Stewart and Kenseth won.

Drivers who made it:

11. Michael McDowell

17. Robby Gordon

24. Dave Blaney

34. Joe Nemechek

40. Trevor Bayne

41. Tony Raines

42. David Stremme

43. Terry Labonte

Drivers who won't run the Daytona 500:

Mike Wallace, J.J. Yeley, Bill Elliott, Robert Richardson, Michael Waltrip, and Kenny Wallace.

Races will be called the Budweiser Duels next year. Shootout sponsorship now up for grabs.

It's a worrying development when I watch a NASCAR race and you don't...

Even more worrying when I admit I enjoyed it and that I'm looking forward to watching the 500 this weekend. :P

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So John King wins a race.

Real cheap, hollow win, eh?

Makes a really dumb mistake, wrecks Johnny Sauter. Never ever has the lead, but NASCAR goes back to the last scoring loop, not the video, so where Todd Bodine had the lead, they give it to King who was second behind Sauter at the loop before he wrecked him. King stayed there, another wreck happened, race done, King wins a race he never even led.

John King:

Golly, I flat freakin' wrecked him.

I'm more negative in this thread than I am on the F1 board. :lol:

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Time you took a long good look at yourself in the mirror then and do something about this negative attitude of yours then.... :P

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:lol:

You know I did that with F1 (or maybe I just got so excited by reading Kobayashi's English language tweets; they're priceless). I honestly would have disbanded this thread but I started it so I feel a need to keep posting in it. :P

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Interesting tidbit: Kyle Busch Motorsports never got paid by Telcel for races in which they sponsored Germán Quiroga, Jr. Telcel can be seen on the Sauber F1 cars, and their parent, Telmex, sponsors many Mexican drivers throughout the world (as well as Senna through Emrbatel, but that's all separate from this). Just thought I'd pass that along...big-time sponsors stiff teams, too.

Also: NASCAR has a committee of fans that provide them with feedback. It's not just a PR thing; they actually listen. There have been ideas that NASCAR implemented that really came from the fans. One of them was cutting this deal with Budweiser to sponsor the Duel races and release the Shootout, so that the Shootout could go back to the original format of just pole winners. It isn't always instant, obviously; the Budweiser deal took years to negotiate.

However, their next project is eliminating the top thirty-five rule for 2013. In Cup, the top thirty-five from the previous season's owner points (basically the points go to the car; so if the #67 car had eight drivers in 2011, all eight of their points in the #67 car are totaled up to the owner) are guaranteed in to the first five races of the next season...and then the top-thirty five at present are locked in each week. This rule was made after a race in Atlanta back in 2005 or 2006 where two big-name sponsors, Valvoline and Caterpillar, FTQ'd from the race. Back then, they used provisionals; thirty-seventh or thirty-ninth on back (forget which) were filled based on current owner points of the drivers that hadn't qualified among the fastest thirty-six. If you had a lot of guys at the top of the points and perhaps a past champion that didn't make it on speed, quality mid-pack teams could end up going home. Sponsors didn't like that...

...but fans really don't like the new system, where teams are buying and selling owner points from other teams in all sorts of deals (some even are three-way among different teams) that get more and more creative and confusing each year. They want to see the fastest forty-three cars race and everyone else go home (I mean, let's face it, if a guy like Gordon or Junior FTQ'd, their sponsors would obviously buy out one of the cars already qualified...it's happened before at Indy even just last year, it's happened before in NASCAR with the Waltrips both having done it).

And for NASCAR, the pressure from fans is getting more and more increased, with attendance at tracks (many of which NASCAR owns) going down (ratings are stable; up last year for the first time in a while...though they are half of what they used to be at the peak). A lot of sponsor deals were made in a time when everyone was richer than they really were, and NASCAR was on a bubble of sudden fan interest in the TV ratings, and races were sold-out, and tracks were adding seats and building new fan experiences and all that. So they were really over-valued; NASCAR had to bend over backwards to people investing that much in the sport. But as sponsorship values are half of what they used to be in the mid-2000s, and many big name brands are now NASCAR partners rather than sponsors of cars/teams, there's more pressure from to retain and gain fans (to drive sponsor values back up for NASCAR and help offset the total waste of money building up these tracks right before the economy's bubble and NASCAR's bubble burst).

Would make the Duels interesting next year...

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For a race series built around moonshine runners and a bunch of Billy-Bob's and Joe-Schmo's, the way the series runs sure is extremely complicated....

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For a race series built around moonshine runners and a bunch of Billy-Bob's and Joe-Schmo's, the way the series runs sure is extremely complicated....

You're telling me. I've been watching some of the action this week and haven't understood what's been going on 99.99% of the time. As I said to Eric, Americans sure do know how to make a sports event really drawn out and overly complicated. I'm looking at you, Super Bowl.

Saying that, I have been entertained.

I mean that in reference to Daytona btw, not the Superbowl. ;)

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Ah, now American Football I can understand more than this whole Duel/Shootout/Pole/500 thing.

For American Football, think Rugby League* really slowed down. For all this Daytona stuff, think psychedelic drugs....

* by far and away the best oval ball code in all of global sports

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NFL is a hideously boring sport in concept, but the Super Bowl was a really exciting game this year. Of course playoff anything is usually better...though never playoff baseball. You know, hockey games are fast, so you can do a best of seven series and it is fantastic. Football games are slow, so you can do single-game eliminations and they are fantastic. But baseball games are both slow and they do a best of seven; it's just agonizing. By the time they decide who is moving on to the next round, the next season has already started and you've stopped caring.

NFL takes three-and-one-half hours to play sixty minutes. Daytona takes 500 miles to decide what effectively becomes a two-lap race. Run eighteen races on short ovals, and eighteen races on road courses...Daytona just isn't racing to me. The driver is totally out of it; you just get shuffled around and have no control over when you go and when you stop and when you wreck. It's a damn shame to me that the biggest race in America is also the silliest. To me, it isn't a "big event" because not everyone who wins it is a good driver, and not everyone who loses it is thought less of for never winning it. Everyone knows it's a lottery that Derrike Cope and Michael Waltrip can win as easily as Dale Earnhardt or Jeff Gordon in this era of plate racing.

Just look at the Indy 500, and that event has fallen, too, but...no one cares that Hélio Castroneves has never won a championship. He's a three-time Indy 500 champion! Michael Andretti has more wins than anyone in the CART era, but he'll never be one of the greats because he never won the big one. You think Scott Goodyear comes up in the conversation? Hell no, he blew the 500 THREE times. He'd never admit it but you know what Tony Stewart would trade to get Indy. I'll give you that 1996-1999 had really weak fields due to the split and as such you may have gotten some guys winning that weren't that great, though Lazier, to his credit, did it with a broken back so he's got my respect (500 miles, in that position, with a freaking broken back, is that guy tough or what), Arie Luyendyk won a real 500, Eddie Cheever wasn't that bad though he's a weaker one, and Kenny Bräck won in the real beasts in CART with Rahal so he was alright in my book.

The Daytona 500 doesn't have that "feel" to it that Indy does. Stewart is one of the greatest of all-time whether or not he wins Daytona; if he were a three-time IndyCar champion without ever winning Indy, he'd be a nobody, a fluke. Cope and Waltrip still suck even though they've won it.

Are you going to look at John King and James Buescher and say "wow, those guys were real legends" or are you going to look back and laugh at how crazy and senseless their wins were? Why do you think no one in the ARCA garage respects Bobby Gerhart? He has 9 career wins, 8 are at Daytona, 1 is at Talladega (just like Daytona). They'd care more if he'd won at Toledo or Salem or Pocono or DuQuoin or any other track you've never heard of.

I hate on IndyCar all year long and they get to the month of May and it's sunshine and rainbows for me. The Indy 500 is everything that is good about IndyCar. I love NASCAR all year and they get to Daytona and I'm a whiny little one. The Daytona 500 is everything that is so awful about NASCAR, the exact reason no one outside NASCAR respects NASCAR.

This year I've been having a real "never meet your heroes moment" with Daytona the "hero." There's just no substance to this stuff...

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Since you seem somewhat despondent there Eric, here are some video's to make you cheer up a little, and maybe reach out to your hockey self. (And yeah, convert you away from your 210min "bores")

First off, a quick overview of the rules, if you didn't know them:

Like NFL, you get so many attempts with the ball before handing over to the other team, except in NFL you get 4 attempts to make 10-yards, in rugby league, you get 6-attempts to score a try, which, depending on your starting position, could be 100m, 50m, or 5m...

Unlike NFL, you can only pass to the rear

Unlike NFL, you don't wear helmets or plastic padding...some players who have had concussion wear soft helmets, like NFL guys like the Grey-Ghost wore in years of old

To score you have to touch the ball on the ground, whilst still in control of it

You are allowed to shoulder charge, which when running at top speed towards each other, results in big hits

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1TyI1Hpgbg8&feature=related

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Now I know where Tim Tebow/every college team in the U.S. gets their ideas. :P

Cheers Craig, that was interesting.

Out of curiosity, do you find that there are less concussions (injuries, too, but mostly concussions) because of the lack of padding? A lot of people are attributing the pads to the huge concussion issue in ice hockey (one for how damaging pad-to-head can be at the speeds these guys are skating, and two for how having helmets and pads has taken a lot of respect out of the game).

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Yeah concussions are pretty much on the low side. The head is a no go zone, and any arms that drift up in a tackle towards the head will be penalised. Also things like spear tackles are outlawed (these being where you lift the guy up, turn him upside down and drop him on his head). Also the guys are taught to tackle properly. NFL guys would call it "open field tackling". The purpose being to wrap the guy up, ground him, and ensure he doesn't get a pass away.

Most concussions come from head to head contact (like the Paramatta player in the yellow and blue top that is in the still of the vid clip). The other concussions come from a fist...:P

And of course, they're tough b#####ds :P

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Getting back to the 500 for a moment, and it doesn't look like there's much chance of the race taking place today. Heavy rain.

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