And Now, A Rant...

A wrapup of day 2 of qualifications is upcoming, but I decided to raid the internet for reading material before getting to that.

In my travels along the information superhighway, I found this editorial by SpeedTV.com's Tom Jensen. It it, he offers a "modest proposal" to revitalize Pole Day at Indianapolis. His idea is to put the Indy 500 and Coca-Cola 600 on consecutive days over Memorial Day Weekend in order to allow drivers to run both of them, then offer a ridiculously large sum of money to the person who can win both races in the same year.

It's an interesting idea, certainly, and there is some merit to it, but there is also a certain degree of "what the hell is wrong with you?"

First of all, the problem with Pole Day is not the lack of names. IndyCar has name drivers piloting entries for name teams that are all very close when qulifying rolls around. Sure, it would be nice to have Stewarts, Gordons, and Allmendingers on the 500 entry list, but they need to take care of one thing at a time -- the first being getting money into the series to begin with.

Another major issue with this idea is the fact that NASCAR has its head too far up its butt to even consider doing this. Nothing in the past several years has shown that NASCAR would ever want to collaborate with the IRL to do anything that might be good for the sport as a whole. It's gone so far that NASCAR, through International Speedway Corp. does its best to make sure IndyCar races fail at ISC's tracks. NASCAR also has no appreciation for its own history, much less the history of other series. Otherwise, they would be rudely awakened to the fact that the Indianapolis 500-Mile Race has been, and always will be, a bigger event than the 600-mile gimmick at Charlotte.

What really is the likelihood that NASCAR would move its race from Sunday to Saturday or Monday? There's no reason that the 500 should be the one to move because, even though the 500 has moved days many times in the past, there is absolutely no way it would be moved from Sunday in favor of an inferior event. NASCAR won't move the time of their event because they're more stubborn than a barn full of mules.

There are two chief problems with Pole Day that Jensen has no idea about because he doesn't know what he's talking about: speed and television.

The people who came packed the grandstands to watch qualifying through the late 80's were there to see speed records fall. Sure people knew that an Indy Car could go 200 mph, but to see Tom Sneva make an average of 200 over the 2.5-mile lap of the Speedway somehow legitimized the speed. Same with the 150 mph lap of Parnelli Jones in 1963. People came to see how fast the cars could go that year, but the officials rightly decided that, as the speeds were reaching 240, the cars needed to slow down. There's no one calling, "it's a new track record," so there are many fans that don't show up. There is no reasonable solution to that issue because it would be nonsensical to put the drivers in danger for the sake of the show.

The other thing that keeps people away is the fact that they can crank on their television and watch every second of every attempt live on whatever channel they might be on, and one does not need to go to the track to watch the battle for the pole. The solution to that is the same solution that local Indianapolis station WRTV came up with to make sure locals go to the race: don't show it live! Do a condensed review show of maybe two hours after the fact and don't actually let fans watch live qualifying. Besides, live qualifying on TV is simply the most boring thing this side of drying paint.

Tom Jensen has proven that, not only does he not understand the problems involved, but he doesn't understand the complications (most of which would be NASCAR's fault) of implementing his own solution. Of course, I expected nothing less from the Speed Channel.