Rain-Shortened Daytona: Taste the Excitement!

In case you missed the Daytona 500, here was the most exciting part of the three hours worth of racing they got in before it was called due to rain:↵

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That ain’t gonna work boys, indeed. There’s much debate today as to who was at fault -- Brian Vickers or Dale Earnhardt, Jr. -- for that wreck that knocked out many of the top contenders, including Kyle Busch, who held the lead for most of the race. To the casual NASCAR fan, it really doesn’t matter who’s to blame. Because in a race that ended in the most anti-climatic way imaginable (with Matt Kenseth being told he’d just won the sport’s biggest event while sitting in his parked car on pit road), it was the only moment that stirred me from the trance that the purring of American horsepower had me in. For NASCAR, this isn’t a good thing.↵↵To someone like me, who watches bits and pieces of the other races, but tuned in for all of the “Super Bowl” of NASCAR, it was incredibly disappointing. I’d love NASCAR to give me a reason to be more interested in their product. Ending their biggest event 48 laps shy of the finish line wasn’t exactly what I was looking for. Kenseth led seven of the 152 laps they raced, six of which were under caution. He was declared the winner, basically by default, when the rains came because he was leading at the time. Exciting.↵

↵↵Perhaps NASCAR should look into what golf, or tennis, or baseball, or any other sport does with its major events: If they’re called due to weather, they are simply postponed until the next day. This way you get an actual champion, instead of handing the trophy to a guy who happened to be in the lead at the right time.↵

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