Nascar Sacrifices Daytona 500 for West Coast TV Market

What can you do about the rain? Plenty, but not when you start The Great American Race at 3:30 EST.

All week long Nascar has been endlessly hyping the dramatic finishes of the Daytona 500. The Allison-Yarborough fight in the infield. Petty's numerous wins. DW's silly dance in Victory Lane. Did you notice what all those old time dramatic moments had in common? Answer: They were all in broad daylight, not in pitch darkness.

Fast forward to 2009, when Nascar continues its wrongheaded quest for that elusive West Coast TV audience by starting the Daytona 500 in the late afternoon. And I do mean "late". A rain storm moved through the area around 6:00 PM, and in less than 30 minutes, they decided to call the race and declare Kenseth the winner. Dramatic? Uh, no, not at all. I love Nascar's explanation that at that time of night, the Florida air gets too damp to dry the track. That begs the question, if the track could be dried three hours earlier, why isn't race starting three hours earlier?

I'm not complaining about Kenseth being declared the winner. It's probably true that the track could not have been dried before 10:00 or 11:00 at night, if at all. Who knows? That is not the issue. The issue is that the race starts so late that at this point, any weather issue, even a passing shower, will almost always force the race to be shortened to less than 500 miles.

Furthermore, Fox is blatantly using the big race as an entry to their big Sunday night primetime lineup. Do you really think Fox wants to wait around for 2 hours in a rain delay, and disrupt the biggest TV viewing night of the week? Hardly. Fox wants the race done by 7:30 PM, one way or the other.

Nascar's West Coast dream is dead. The ratings are not there. The attendance is not there. Folks in California are just not that into Nascar. But Nascar continues to punish its core fan base, and the East Coast, by starting the Daytona 500 late in the day. All in hopes of drumming up a handful of TV viewers in Los Angeles. It backfired in a big way on Sunday, when the showcase event of the year, Nascar's "Super Bowl", ended with a damp whimper instead of a last lap bang. The same situation played out a few years back when Michael Waltrip won a similarly rain-shortened Daytona 500.

The Daytona 500 should start at Noon or 1:00 PM EST, at the latest. If there is no rain, the race would be over by 5:00 PM, in the daylight. If there was rain, even for an hour or two, in the middle of the afternoon, it would still be during the warm daylight hours, and Nascar would have plenty of time and sunshine to get the track dried and get the race in.

If the 2009 Daytona 500 had been held at a normal time of 1:00 PM EST, it would have been long finished by the time the rains came, and fans across the country would have gotten what they have a right to expect: a checkered flag finish at the end of 500 miles. Shame on Nascar for not doing their best to provide that.