re: 2024 NASCAR Season Thread

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An early wreck shenanigans and after race fight likely helped it.

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When did the script get released before the race to get people to tune in?

Ratings have been up for many races. NASCAR is just generally doing a good job (shocking, I know).

Now they need more ways for people to watch on streaming platforms.

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The Larson double is big news in racing world.

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More people watching to me points to more non-racing world people tuning in who probably don't care that much.

Just don't think the Larson stuff is that big of a deal nationally. Its cool for us who enjoy racing for sure though.

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Fight penalties:

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Stenhouse team suspensions:

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Richard Stenhouse Sr. (indefinite)

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Deserved. Should be the most lengthy suspension out of all

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mechanic Clint Myrick (eight races)

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This is supposedly due to putting hands on Kyle and on a NASCAR official, so should be more races than 8 races because of the official.

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engine tuner Keith Matthews (four races).

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For putting hands on Kyle, deserved

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Stenhouse fined $75,000.

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Should not have been anything. Let the drivers fight if it’s over a wreck, as long as it’s one on one

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No penalties to Busch

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No problem with that

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or his team.

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Nor a problem with this. They never left their “bench” so to say and were merely moving people off their trailer and pulling people off of Kyle

Jeff Burton, Carl Edwards and Biffle did not have Hall of Fame careers. I'm with you, put some of the older people in now so they can enjoy it.

Hornaday is in already.

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Just don't think the Larson stuff is that big of a deal nationally. Its cool for us who enjoy racing for sure though.

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I sort of agree with this but I think your comment is a bit too vague. Specifically the last sentence. Many people who enjoy racing aren’t watching all forms of racing. Generally, what Larson’s success and high profile is doing is drawing interest back to NASCAR that had been lost. I’m an example of this. I watched it religiously 20 or so years ago but drifted away and barely followed it. Larson gets the suspension, hen he goes on an absolute tear running dirt tracks that summer and gets reinstated. Boom, my interest is back in NASCAR because of him. Same thing applies to his Indy program. I’d casually pay attention to the 500 but that was it. Now that he’s attempting the double I’ve been following Indy practice and qualifying like I’ve never done before.

I’m not alone in this. I attend many dirt races a year and you’ll see the standard Earnhardt shirts around a dirt track but since Larson’s suspension year the number of Larson shirts and conversations around those dirt track pit areas I’ve been to have exploded. To the dirt crowd he has taken NASCAR from being an afterthought and turned it into something relevant. The same thing is happening with Indy.

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Am I the only one that thinks the Hell of Fame is slowly running out of legitimate candidates?

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No.

It seems like they are just putting anyone in there and that there is no criteria for selection.

Biffle absolutely deserves inclusion.

Hell of a wheelman.

Smokey while he was dying of leukemia wrote not just an autobiography, he wrote an epistle. Three volumes, 1,100 words. He wrote every word of it himself because the bad grammar and misspellings are left in.

The original three-volume hardbound set is so long out of print it goes for, as of this morning, $6,974 used on Amazon.

There is a paperback version for $195 with microscopic type, but at least it's available. I managed to score a Kindle copy, cheap, in the very limited time it was available, and I have made multiple backups of that file.

Any racing library that doesn't have this book is painfully incomplete. It is one of the best racing books ever written by a human being, although the racing was only a part of this man's life, his stories of being overseas during World War II will grab and hold your attention as much as the racing.

The reason I bring it up is that in this book, because he was dying and didn't give a s**t and had nothing to lose, he settled all family business, settled all family accounts, unhesitatingly and unashamedly naming names, in a way that would have made Michael Corleone if not the Don himself proud.

Oh yes, he fileted the Frances, but it wasn't just them, it was every doofus in the racing world who ever, at any point in time, crossed him or rubbed him the wrong way.

That is why he will never get into the Hall of Fame. He didn't just burn that bridge, he hydrogen bombed it.

I'm almost glad he did, because he left that marvelous book with us.

I mean he even names some pretty prominent names of people ... one of them who's in the NASCAR Hall of Fame and another who probably should be, plus a F1 world champion who tried Indy several times ... writhing on the floor in gang bangs, he held nothing back.