Uniform Start Times A Good Move by NASCAR
NASCAR chairman Brian France has been a long-time admirer of the NFL, essentially considering it the gold standard of all professional sports leagues.
And rightly so, Pete Rozelle, than Paul Tagliabue and now Roger Goodell all ran a very tight ship. They took a sport and turned it into a well-run, organized business, much like a Forbes top-500 firm would be run.
One of the biggest things that Rozelle and Tagliabue stressed – and an edict that Goodell firmly adheres to today – is timeliness. They made sure that NFL games started punctually at a set hour and typically finished three or so hours later.
Finally, after several years of not being able to tell what time a Sprint Cup race would start unless you had a newspaper or Web schedule at your disposal, NASCAR moved Wednesday to make Cup race starting times uniform.
Starting with next year’s season-opening Daytona 500, most Sunday afternoon races will start at 1 pm ET. The exception is West Coast races, which will start at 3 pm ET, and night races, which will start at 7:30 pm ET.
Bravo, Brian. You’re finally starting to get this whole “we changed it because the fans demanded it” thing.
You and NASCAR are listening. Bravo, again.
Now, finally, we’ll be able to start races at a decent time, let alone a regular time. It’s a decision that was a long time coming, but it finally got here.
Up to now, many race start times were dictated by whichever TV network was televising the race. FOX, for example, wanted later starts to segue into its primetime TV lineup. Ergo, races started later, even when fans detested it – like this year’s Daytona 500 starting at nearly 4 pm, a race that in the past typically began closer to Noon or 1 pm ET.
Not anymore. No longer will TV dictate when a race starts. NASCAR will, end of story.
Granted, some of the reason for the new mandate is the economy. This is the second major move that NASCAR has made in the last few days that has been noteworthy. The other was Chicagoland Speedway and Kansas Speedway finally, after nine years of frustration to race fans, deciding to end its practice of forcing ticket buyers to buy a ticket to the IRL race at each respective track if they also wanted to buy tickets for the Cup race.
Empty seats – and lots of them, like we saw at Chicagoland in July and, to a lesser extent, this past weekend at Kansas – will cause that kind of thinking to be, well, rethought. Now, fans can solely buy tickets to Cup races at both tracks rather than, if they weren’t interested in the IRL, won’t have to simply toss those tickets in the trash can so that they can still go to the Cup race.
If there’s a loser in that scenario, it’s the IRL. Oh well, tough cookies. Besides, I’m convinced that NASCAR and the IRL will eventually come together to have joint race weekends at numerous Cup tracks in the near future, particularly if the economy makes it even more difficult for Trucks and Nationwide teams to exist.
But that’s a whole other story for a whole other column.
We now have universal starting times. Hey, hey. Now, what’s next? Lower ticket prices to try and attract more fans?
Just like the starting times, we can only hope – and sometimes, hopes do become fulfilled, as we saw Wednesday.
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