I’m Going To Convince You To Watch NASCAR With Me This Year And I’ll Make It Easy For You

It turns out that there’s a good percentage of readers on this site that enjoys the sport of motors — motorsport, if you will. Many of you are into Formula One, which makes sense given its rapid, Netflix-fueled rise in popularity. Given this is a car site, a lot of you seem to follow sports car racing. A few of you real freaks also watch WRC. I enjoy all of these series and others (oh damn, the Bathurst 12-hour is about to start), but I probably watch more NASCAR than anything else. It rules.

I don’t want to be alone in watching NASCAR so I’m inviting all of you to come on this adventure with me. It, too, will rule. If you do it right you’ll have a good time and I’m going to make it easy for you to do it right and to do it with other readers.

Why? Because it’s fun. NASCAR is America’s motorsport, it’s extremely competitive this year, and it’s raced on a mix of road courses, superspeedways, and ovals. And to make it easier, I’m suggesting we all watch the NASCAR Xfinity Series, which is below the top-level Cup Series, but above the entry-level Truck Series. There are a lot of good reasons for this.

Lemme explain.

Why NASCAR Is Good Now

I don’t know that I’d argue that NASCAR was ever bad, but it did get a little less interesting to me during the late Jimmie Johnson era in the late aughts/early teens when the cars got less competitive, the big teams got too big, and the calendar got a little repetitive.

We ended up with anodyne drivers racing for giant teams and, largely, thanking their sponsors for helping them go in a lot of circles.

Falling TV viewership followed and NASCAR has since had to shift to address many of its biggest shortcomings. New cars and new rules have made smaller teams more competitive, the schedule has been shifted and now includes more road courses, a street course, and a damn stadium. Since the introduction of the new Next Gen car, there have been way more race winners. While the new car isn’t stock, it’s more like what DTM and Aussie V8 Supercars use.

There are new team owners, like Pitbull and Michael Jordan, and a mix of new drivers who are finally allowed by NASCAR to have personality.

Also, NASCAR has always had the noise. Remember when F1 cars got quiet for no real reason? NASCAR has always been fun and loud. F1 disrespected Mario Andretti and the same people win year after year after year. Chaos is a great reason to watch racing and NASCAR has as much chaos as Toto Wolff has hubris.

How I’m Going To Make It Easy

The Cup races are competitive, but they’re long, and there are still a lot of big established teams and a few, uh, less charming drivers. Also, Sunday can be a busy day for people. I’m suggesting we all watch the Xfinity Series. This is for a few reasons:

• The races are typically on Saturdays and don’t compete with as many other professional sports.
• The races are often half the distance of Cup races, so they tend to be under two hours long.
• Xfinity cars are more like the stock cars of old and have the old-school appeal of being harder to handle, more insane to watch, and more ‘Murican.
• There are a ton of interesting drivers and teams this year, including the introduction of V8 Supercars Champ Shane Van Gisbergen, rookie Hallie Deegan (moving up from trucks), and road course hero AJ Allmendinger (coming back to Xfinity). Even Frankie Muniz might be racing, at least at Daytona.

Ok, so Saturdays are Xfinity days. Lemme make this even easier.

Sports requires context and context requires a starting point. If you’ve got a regular driver you like to root for, please continue to root for that driver. For the rest of us, it’s going to be NASCAR driver Parker Kligerman, who also contributes to this website sometimes. He’s racing the #48 Big Machine Racing Spiked Light Coolers Chevy Camaro. The car is super orange so it’s usually easy to spot. Here’s Parker finishing the Xfinity Race at Atlanta, backwards:

Parker is a pal and loves cars like the rest of us love cars. He’ll also be providing us with some thoughts on his podcast/newsletter The Money Lap and with some extra insight here from time to time.

Having someone to support helps a lot and Parker made it to the playoffs last year with a young team so there’s every expectation of him being competitive this year.

Ok, I Don’t Know Much/Anything But I’m In. What Do I Do?

The good news is that the Daytona 500 is this weekend, which means that it’s the United Rentals 300 this weekend, which is the first Xfinity Race of the year and it starts this Saturday night. Qualifying is supposed to be 11:30 AM ET on Saturday and the race will be at 5:00 PM ET on Fox Sports 1 and on FoxSports.com (and it’s easy to find online elsewhere).

Daytona is the classic superspeedway with a lot of drafting, high-pressure pit strategy, and, yeah, a few big crashes.

We’ll be watching the race and having an ongoing conversation on our Discord, which you can join to chat about the race with us. What else were you doing this Saturday?

The only caveat here is that it might rain, but there’s a good chance that the rain doesn’t occur until after the Xfinity Race.

Ok, did I convince you?