Quality of product

By DAVID GREEN

Previously on Turn 3...

The matter of a crisis of leadership was the primary topic. We were to resume our discussion, focusing on the quality of product, yesterday, but I'm a day late in doing so. No excuses, other than sloth.

Turns out that may be a good thing, though, because Saturday night's Coke Zero 400 gave us good material to use in discussing the quality of the NASCAR product. It was the gol-durndest finish to a race I've ever seen, and I have seen quite a few of them.

I shouldn't have to sell the notion of races not being entertaining in this venue. A majority of the posts I read on this subject are critical. It is a topic of discussion among all major forms of racing except the straight-line form, and this is the first time I can remember that Formula One, IndyCar and NASCAR were all suffering from such a public relations malady.

Over the past couple of decades, NASCAR has shamelessly hyped the competitiveness and entertainment value of its product. In my opinion, it wasn't so much the product as it was the players. It was character-driven.

During the past decade, the Indy Racing League established itself as the series with the most to brag about, with split-second, side-by-side finishes the norm. In this case, it was most definitely the product, as the IRL was struggling to develop characters fans could get excited about.

Perhaps F1's dilemma is the most shocking, because for years and years, fans of that discipline would look down their noses at other forms of racing, especially stock cars, and explain how we hicks in the Colonies weren't sophisticated enough to appreciate the subtleties of "real" racing.

Now, those same folks are in a dither as a good many of their fans (the supposedly sophisticated ones) are yammering about how there's "not enough overtaking."

I just wonder what kind of consensus might be obtained in a scientific survey of race fans, asking them just what would satisfy them in terms of the product?

For some, it is statistically quantifiable -- number of leaders, number of lead changes, number of cars on the lead lap at the finish, margin of victory, and so forth. X number of all of these would be required for these fans to believe they had gotten their money's worth when the race was over.

For others, it's more abstract than that. The numbers don't matter so much as the closeness of the competition, and that might mean a nip-and-tuck dogfight that does NOT produce a lot of lead changes, for example, but does feature a furious effort to make a pass.

It's safe to assume that a good many fans want to see an exciting finish; NASCAR believes so, anyway, and the green-white-checkered finish rule is evidence of that.

And, let's be honest -- for some, it's how many wrecks there are and how spectacular they are.

Last night's race at Daytona should have satisfied just about everybody, if all race fans' preferences are explained by the summaries above. Perhaps the statistics were a little short, particularly with regard to number of leaders and number of lead changes. Perhaps much of the race, during which Kyle Busch or Tony Stewart were pulling the train lap after lap after lap, was short on the "furious effort to pass" standard.

But overall, I thought it was a quite entertaining race with a spectacular finish.

Regardless of any consensus or individual fans' opinions, I don't believe there is any magic formula to produce a "good" or entertaining race. I also don't think there is any significant difference in the overall quality of races now and in past years, with one exception -- technological advances have made racing more and more technical in nature and have raised speeds, even in the face of some 25 years of concerted efforts to keep them within limits.

The faster the cars go, the narrower the groove on any track becomes, the more fragile drivers' control becomes, and the more dramatic the consequences of any mistakes they may make.

Another problem is unrealistic expectations on the part of the fans. In nearly 50 years of being an avid observer of racing, I've seen lots of races that did not measure up to any of the standards I described above. I'm perfectly OK with that.

There are things that organizations can do to enhance the product. NASCAR's new two-abreast restart rule is a good example of that.

But nothing they do is going to make every lap or every race fit any specific criteria. Race fans like me are fine with that.