QOTD: Should Race Series Mix It Up?
I posted yesterday that in my opinion, NASCAR should continue to mix up the types of tracks it races on.
Now it's your turn.
I want to know what you think -- should NASCAR continue to race on road courses and perhaps street courses? Or it should it stick just to turning left on ovals?
There's no reason to limit this to NASCAR. IndyCar currently mixes in street races, ovals, and road courses. Should that series just pick one type and stick with it?
Maybe F1 should try some ovals, hmmm? Imagine F1 on the high banks of Daytona...
OK, I'm getting a bit loopy with that last one. That said, what do you think? Is mixing up the track types, within reason, good for a series? Or is it better to stick to one type of track?
Sound off below.
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Tim Healey grew up around the auto-parts business and has always had a love for cars — his parents joke his first word was “‘Vette”. Despite this, he wanted to pursue a career in sports writing but he ended up falling semi-accidentally into the automotive-journalism industry, first at Consumer Guide Automotive and later at Web2Carz.com. He also worked as an industry analyst at Mintel Group and freelanced for About.com, CarFax, Vehix.com, High Gear Media, Torque News, FutureCar.com, Cars.com, among others, and of course Vertical Scope sites such as AutoGuide.com, Off-Road.com, and HybridCars.com. He’s an urbanite and as such, doesn’t need a daily driver, but if he had one, it would be compact, sporty, and have a manual transmission.
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Didn't Formula One used to run on high banks, at Monza?
I would like to see NHRA Funny Cars compete in the FIA European Hill Climb Championship.
The better question is: should NASCAR go back to it's roots and race actual production cars? The then-"Big Three" would game the system by offering optional engines, transmissions, and suspensions for racing, selling a very, very, few examples, just to win NASCAR races for the B-R (Bragging Rights).
Maybe NASCAR should drop the crazy rules they wrote to stop that, and simply limit the entrants to the most popular sedan models sold (by volume). Then they could divide the entrants into proper size classes, and we could see how actual stock Corollas, Civics, Focuses, etc. compare.
Some makers stopped making subcompact, compact, midsize sedans? Too bad, they have nothing to compete with. That might induce Ford, GM, and Stellantis to keep making those size classes in production.
All automakers seem to be dropping the low-margin, high volume sedans for high margin, lower volume small, medium and large CUVs and SUVs. It's like the old joke about a dealer trying to sell a Chevy Impala for $5 million, saying "I just have to sell one a year!"
NASCAR is a spec series now, so why not.
F1 would be interesting at Indy.