Carl Edwards races his car to its limits, fans forced to celebrate fifteenth place instead

Posted by Heath on November 17th, 2008 @ 7:45 pm, filed in NASCAR, Racing, Sports

There is no sport that drains the fun out of a championship like NASCAR. There still remains truth in the statement that it isn’t over until the checkered flag waves, but entering this weekend Jimmie Johnson needed to finish merely 36th place or better to secure his third title in as many years. When the last race of the 2008 NASCAR season finished the car in 36th place was the Chevrolet of Joe Nemechek… three laps down. While Carl Edwards drove his 99 Ford on fuel vapors to a well-earned victory, Johnson was walking his car to a 15th place finish. Apparently that’s how exciting NASCAR immortality is.

Now the cloud of ho-hum that has been hanging over America’s motorsport grows even thicker as 2008′s last hurrah can no longer hide the real news from the weekend. Read: Economic woes lurk as Johnson celebrates, weekend wrapup.

Maybe it’s all Barack Obama‘s fault, but amongst the NASCAR gloom I feel hopeful about the hammer coming down on the asphalt ovals. Could the shake up make the 2009 NASCAR season, dare I say it, interesting?

This brings us back to the Jimmie Johnson problem. History of NASCAR ranks Cale Yarborough as its only other three-peater. The “Greatest Driver Ever” argument has suddenly favored the Jimmie Johnson camp. This is the first sign of a flawed championship system: When personally, as a fan, I’m not seeing the correlation between three-peats and skill. I don’t equate Johnson with skill, I equate him with boring, and furthermore, eyebrows. I’d search google for “Jimmie Johnson inside move” but I’m more likely to find a clip featuring an x-rated spy thriller than I am good racing.

Okay, but we can equate Jimmie Johnson with consistency, eh? Consistency, the bread and butter of NASCAR, needs money. With four drivers in the Sprint Cup and two drivers in the Nationwide series Hendrick Motorsports (Johnson’s team) is valued at $335 million. Roush Fenway Racing is nearly as fat, operating five cup cars and four series cars worth a $313 million wallet. Lop off a third of that cash pile to unearth Joe Gibbs Racing in third place. In final chase standings that would be your first, second, third, seventh, eighth, ninth, tenth, eleventh, and twelfth place cars. Read: The Most Valuable Teams In NASCAR.

There is no arguing that in sports money can buy championships, we are already complacent to the practice (Example 1: New York Yankees, Example 1a: Boston Red Sox,) but forgiveness for the practice has been bred from the fickleness of sport. No victory is guaranteed. No lead is secure. (Example 1: New England Patriots, Example 1a: New York Yankees).

Two barriers bar NASCAR from shaking its new status as a sporting snoozer. One: Its got a laboriously long season that loses meaning once the summer sun retreats in favor of snowflakes and pigskins, and two: The Jimmie Johnson three-peat doesn’t seem impressive, it seems unfair.

NASCAR is an event that depends on American ingenuity and glorifies American gluttony. Now that the feeding frenzy that pre-dated this economic turmoil comes with a price for stock cars as well as the stock markets hopefully NASCAR will take some moments to tinker with its competition in a new way. Artificial consistency feels less like an achievement and more like a lie. True success should come from the ideal 2008′s incessant political drumbeat wouldn’t let us forget: The American Dream. Rewards should fall not to those who are born into the success but to the driver who races hard, does something new, and shocks the racing world.