Jonesy said:
I'll be watching, but seeing as the green won't be dropping until after 9 pm here, I will not be smoking anything for the event.
I'm going to go with Harvick winning. I can't stand the little peckerhead, but he's been fast the last two weeks.
That said, I hate restrictor plate tracks. The only strategy involved is "don't get caught in a wreck before the end, and don't be out front with two laps to go". Plate tracks are for the "JUST BLEED!" crowd of auto racing fans (old school UFC fans will understand that concept). Daytona and Talladega should be two ten lap heat races with a 25 lap main. Much like the PepsiWinstonCamelBudCoorsDoritosWhatever Open thingie they run the week before the 500.
That's blasphemous right there! Although once they start running single file, it really starts to suck! I once was a huge NASCAR fan until a fateful day in February of '01. I live 30 miles or so from CMS in Concord and from 89-00, I went to all three races every year until Sr. died. All the Earnhardt fans jumped right to Jr. it seemed, but I just couldn't do it. I gave up watching it. The Daytona that he died in was the first race my son and I watched together and he was only three, but that was also the last race I ever watched from start to finish.
That sucks to have your little boy's first race end like that. It's just one of those times you'll always remember vividly. I was watching, and I remember thinking, "OK, it wasn't that bad of a hit". Then they weren't even showing the brief, "Look, viewers at home, the window net is down and he's alright. Now back to the victory lap!" type of stuff that one would usually see, and I just had a bad feeling something was wrong. I didn't think it was THAT wrong, though. Even my father in law, who I didn't exactly have a "watch-the-game-with" relationship, called me from New York to ask me if I was watching what was happening. NASCAR definitely changed after that day.
I used to live about an hour from Pocono growing up in PA. I usually went to at least one, often years both races each season. They weren't always the most exciting, but it is a big, fast, loud place with an awesome infield. My sister worked as a medic there for many years and had a chance to transport a lot of the drivers after wrecks. She was working the truck when Davey Allison went for his wild ride there. He was my favorite driver at the time, and I was on vacation in Florida with my grandmother when he died in '93. I still have newspaper clippings from that. It was pre-internet days, so with the limited coverage on it and information available, I just kind of assumed he was going to end up being alright. I never expected that he would die a few days later.
I'm a big IndyCar and F1 fan. Definitely moreso than NASCAR. I used to go to the IndyCar races at Texas Motor Speedway, and had been to the last race they had in Nashville, as well as Iowa. I'm hoping to get to attend the German GP here for both F1 and MotoGP, but tickets are just so fookin' expensive.
