There's a classic moment in This Is Spinal Tap where the band's manager tries to rationalize why he doesn't have the Tap booked in Boston: "It's not a big college town." The irony being, of course, that Boston has almost as many colleges as it has annoying Red Sawx fans.
Something similar surfaced Saturday night as the drivers circled past wide swaths of empty seats. I could almost see the NASCAR PR folks spinning the empty seats with a "Charlotte's not a big NASCAR town" rationale.
I can find exactly one commentary on the empty seats at Charlotte -- this one by Tom Sorenson, in which he details the usual litany of excuses: the weather was awful, Junior's season stinks, watching Jimmie Johnson and the Car of Tomorrow is dull, and on and on. Sorenson pulls no punches -- "I've seen most of the Sprint Cup races here since 1981, and I don't ever remember a race - a Sunday or Saturday race, not a race rescheduled because of a rainout - with fewer fans" -- and he shouldn't have. Saturday night's attendance was abysmal, and NASCAR's got to face some tough realities as a result.
There's nowhere on Earth that's more NASCAR-mad than North Carolina. So when you can't get those folks out to a race, something is very, very wrong. This isn't a tired old "racing was better in the old days" argument -- in the old days, Richard Petty and the rest used to win by three laps.
NASCAR fans love to dump on California, but let's be honest -- we've had two straight races now, on opposite coasts, of pretty lifeless racing. Now, with California, that's to be expected -- but is it possible that the NASCAR season has just run out of momentum? Maybe two dull races, combined with an all-too-expected result, have forced the casual fans to tune out and the hardcores to stay home? What do you think?
Maybe it's not Johnson, but it's different, isn't it? [ThatsRacin]
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