Regarding the All-Star Race and NASCAR’s Divided Fan Base

Photo credit: Jared C. Tilton - Getty Images
Photo credit: Jared C. Tilton - Getty Images

Welcome to the Game Show Race … featuring your host … Eddie Gossage.

Green flag -- come on down!

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For a one-off exhibition race, there was nothing particularly wrong with the All-Star Race on Sunday at Texas Motor Speedway.

Everything leading up to it was something else, a spectacle deserving a three-ring circus, but nothing unexpected from Eddie Gossage's last promotional hurrah.

The race itself featured everything it was designed to do -- keeping cars jumbled together using countless arbitrary restarts, artificially flipping the running order while providing a finish where the results were in doubt over the final 10 laps.

The destination was probably worth the journey, for one night only, even if you just had to trust NASCAR and FOX Sports to get you there.

In a vacuum, this was a largely fun experience, but the All-Star Race has never entirely been in isolation, has it?

Segmented races, double-file shootout style restarts and the high downforce, low horsepower abomination were all tested in the All-Star Race at Charlotte Motor Speedway before its introduction to the regular season dynamic.

Even underglow and pushed-back numbers were implemented last summer in the All-Star Race at Bristol Motor Speedway as a testing ground for new ideas.

This historically isn’t a one-off.

Make no mistake: Inverts, random draws, more and shorter stages and varying horsepower options are all on the table and your reaction to the All-Star Race will ultimately go a long way in deciding how heavily they are phased in.

But you know what, if you’re reading this on Autoweek.com, they actually don’t seemingly care too much what you think. It’s not the car enthusiasts and motorsport fans they’re after.

NASCAR found itself in the right place and the right time in 2001 with the original FOX and NBC television agreement that truly propelled the sanctioning body into the mainstream with an eager audience willing to sample stock car racing.

For a while, they liked what they saw but slowly began to tune out, in the pursuit of whatever that next bubble phase was -- mixed martial arts, soccer, whatever.

For everyone who isn’t the National Football League, this is a normal demographics shift.

NASCAR’s response to this casual fan’s exit has been to pursue them wherever they’ve gone, largely at the expense of racing fans who brought them to a point where they could do business with FOX Sports and NBC Sports in the first place.

President Steve Phelps, back in 2019, conceded that the sanctioning body ‘lost our way’ somewhere over the past two decades.

"I think we were trying to search for that next-generation fan ... and I don’t think we listened to what the hardcore fan wanted," Phelps said.

He said, 'never again,' while never lifting off the figurative throttle -- just like the NA18D rules package.

A race like the All-Star Race on Sunday has been so polarizing in the NASCAR community because it’s reflective of the battle lines that have been decisively drawn between its two most vocal factions -- those who inherently like racing cars and those who prefer a show utilizing cars.

It’s motorsports versus motorsports entertainment.

The biggest challenge NASCAR will face in the coming seasons under Next-Gen will be working to build some kind of bridge to close the gap between these two entirely polarized factions.

To racing fans, it’s completely unacceptable to watch the likes of Kyle Larson, Brad Keselowski and Chase Elliott relegated to running full-throttle on an intermediate length track and blocking like its Daytona and Talladega.

It’s insulting to their intelligence, knowing what these cars and drivers are capable of, regardless of how close the finish appeared to be.

To them, it’s contrived and manufactured.

Meanwhile, the other group is completely on-board for Daytona and Talladega every week. Anything less than side-by-side pack racing is fundamentally boring. NASCAR has conditioned them through rule changes and social media clips that racing is only something that happens when cars are side-by-side.

Crashing is a byproduct of racing and the only way the get them crashing is to keep them racing.

Photo credit: NASCAR YouTube
Photo credit: NASCAR YouTube

In laps, out laps, strategy over long runs without stages and taming the most powerful cars in the discipline doesn’t keep cars close enough for this audience.

Boring.

The only way to achieve their definition of racing is to continually pull levers that keep the field closer together and bring them back together anytime a leader is good enough to pull away.

Punish the leader.

They used to call it debris cautions, then they became legitimate stoppages that pay championship points, and NASCAR has started to have conversations about adding more of them. Of course, they may not need to with a precedence that a car getting remotely sideways before catching it now results in a caution.

The thing that made the All-Star Race so amazing to one audience is also what made it so grotesque to the other.

In true No Limits, Texas fashion, “this town isn’t big enough for the both of us.”

NASCAR is trying to straddle the fence with higher horsepower and low downforce on short tracks and road courses, albeit reluctantly after a dismal 2019 season that featured the giant ass spoiler everywhere, while staying the course with low horsepower and high downforce on the speedways and superspeedways.

NASCAR further reduced the power for the All-Star Race in the name of entertainment, and there was indeed a market for more.

It’s no secret that Next-Gen represents a significant shift in NASCAR’s identity.

It’s a spec car on a diverse schedule that intends to emphasize personality and closer competition. But defining each of those elements will be the tricky part.

Perhaps the All-Star Race, for once, was just a one-off exhibition.

This race, with a pack racing rules package and arbitrary restarts and field jumbling did everything it was designed to do. It was fun in an irreverent, silly and kind of stupid way, if you didn’t take it too seriously as a legitimate sporting contest.

It’s the slam dunk contest or home run derby of motorsports.

But there will be a call for more slam dunks and home runs from fans who don’t actually like baseball and basketball. That’s a analogy, by the way, that essentially says racing is meant to be so much more than restarts every 10-20 laps and the resulting crashes -- 20 second social media snippets.

Racing is also figuratively about singles, pitching duels, defense, full court presses and rebounds.

Was Sunday night the future of the All-Star Race or was it a snapshot of NASCAR’s vision for its entire future?

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