And how much is the "End Hunger" people paying to sponsor Jeff Gordon's car?
Gotta be at least 5 million a year.
If they just spent that much on feeding children, there'd BE no hunger. Ohhhhhhh. Wait a minute. I may have stumbled across something here.
And then you add to it that the cars all look the same. And absolutely NOTHING like what's on the road. Hard to build brand loyalty when you can't tell the brands apart.
And since you asked, the cars are more like slot cars than stock cars. With the huge rear spoiler and front air dam and side spoiler, you may as well just have the car owners drive the cars by remote control from the roof where the spotters stand.
Then there's the ticket prices. The last race we went to was about ten years ago and the tickets were 50 bucks. I can't imagine what they are today. The hamburgers were ten bucks (again, ten years ago), bottles of water were 4 dollars (and they took the caps off before they handed you the water). You could barely fit a stick figure in the "seats".
And then there's the announcers. Don't even get me started on the announcers. Too late. The announcers suck. They are so bored with what's going on on the track they don't even bother commenting when there is three-wide racing or a challenge for the lead or anything remotely connected to what's going on on the track at the time. Two laps after a lead change, they'll say something like, "Oh, looky there. Someone else is leading. We'll get back to you on that as soon as we spew a few more idiotic statistics and useless technical mumbo-jumbo."
You nailed it. I used to have a 1970 Torino with the 429 CJ engine. The car was designed for NASCAR. The 1970 Fords on the track were just like mine, gutted and caged.
Toyota never built a pushrod V-8, but they race one in "stock car racing". All the cars have identical chassis. There is nothing stock in NASCAR.
That is why folks like me quit watching many years ago.
Saaaaaaaaay ... I think you are on to something. Make that part of Speedweeks, maybe at one of the shorter tracks in the area. No, not Bithlo :) New Smyrna or one of the Disney tracks for TV coverage?