Send As SMS

Saturday, April 08, 2006

NASCAR… I don’t get it.

I am sitting here today trying to watch the Bush Series: O’Reilly 300 from Texas Motor Speedway… at least that’s what the info button on the TV tells me it is. I’m watching it for two reasons… first because I got hooked at Wizard World LA on these little Race Day cars you can buy where you get Magic Cards and assemble the little racecars. I bought a few packs this morning and was building them when I saw the race and stopped. The second reason is very simple… there is absolutely nothing else on.

The first thing I notice when looking at the cars is every square inch is covered with some kind of corporate sponsor logo. Some of the ones I’ve seen today are the Army, Coast Guard, Navy, Marines, National Guard… which makes me wonder exactly how much of our tax money is going to slap logos on these cars. Other sponsors: Clorox, Dollar General, Target, Du Pont, Pennzoil, Penske, Auto Zone and Ameriquest Mortgage. But those are the main sponsors. You can’t look at anything in the race without seeing a sponsor. The inside car camera has “FreeCreditReport.com” and the overhead shot is constantly passing by the Dickies logo. My personal favorite is Texaco… how about instead of slapping your giant ‘T’ on the number 42 car, how about dropping gas prices instead?

Does anyone think these sponsorships work? Am I supposed to believe that the #41 Discount Tires car is really running on discount tires? When I see the Marines car, should I feel like enlisting? Is the MacDonald’s car going to make me want French Fries?

Even when the post the pictures of the drivers, the put the logo of the car manufacturer behind them: Ford, Dodge, Chevy, etc. Even the walls and the turf around the track are covered in sponsors. Their fire suits have logos everywhere. Hell, even the series name and trophy have sponsors… the Bush Series is for Anheiser-Bush and their racing for the Nextel Cup… it used to be the Winston Cup and at not point did they think being sponsored by a cigarette company was bad until the contract ran out.

Now the most ironic part of all this… in this sea of color and logos, each car has two decals where the headlights would be… since they don’t race at night they don’t need headlights… so what type of decals do these logo-happy individuals place where the headlights should be… that’s right decals of HEADLIGHTS!!!!!

So basically, from what I’ve been able to tell about NASCAR in my afternoon of watching it is this: you have 35 drivers pushing their cars as fast as they can, yet their cars have restrictors in place to keep them from going too fast… they are covered in sponsor logos and going around in an oval for 200 laps only making left turns. Now why it’s called the O’Reilly 300 when they are only doing 200 laps… I don’t know. And why they having started putting sponsor logo’s on the track itself… just wait for it. Overall, a NASCAR race really is just a very long commercial that people watch in hopes that someone will crash.

I wonder what it would cost to have danwickline.com put on the hood of a car…

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home