Every week of the NASCAR season, our special corner of the social media platform I will always call Twitter gets asked a question by The Athletic‘s Jeff Gluck.
“Was _______ a good race?”
Of course, the answer to that question is very subjective.
This is the internet we’re talking about.
Answers can depend on a lot, specifically on who won or who didn’t win.
But also how they won.
Winner aside, the final result of Gluck’s poll, more often and not, can leave you scratching your head.
Honestly, the fact 72% of 24,176 voters this week wound up thinking Sunday’s (June 30) Ally 400 at Nashville Superspeedway was “good” surprised me.
And not because I don’t agree with them.
After the chaos of five overtime attempts, multiple wrecks and a “will they or won’t they” fuel mileage drama to rival a storyline on your favorite teenage TV drama (mine for the record is “Smallville”), a score in the 60s wouldn’t have been a shocker.
I mean, look at what happened the week before at New Hampshire Motor Speedway. The last chunk of the race was ran on wet tires, and every lap around the “Magic Mile” suddenly looked like a typical restart at Pocono Raceway.
It was very watchable.
However …
It got a D+?
Sure, Jan.
How much of it was due to Christopher Bell winning?
Was it because of NASCAR telling teams when they could or couldn’t change tires?
When the sport is breaking new, and potentially dangerous, ground, I’m OK with some short-term guardrails. I’d rather be over-prepared than lacking experience.
As for Nashville, even though I threw up my hands with every time the best stock racers in the world somehow couldn’t make it one lap without hijinks ensuing, I was entertained.
Really, I was entertained for almost the entirety of the race that took place after the extended red flag for rain.
Now, there are surefire stinkers.
Basically every Coca-Cola 600 in the late 2010s falls in this category.
Most of the Martinsville Speedway races of the Next Gen era are Platinum Card-carrying members of the club.
Sunday night was nowhere near those races.
Yes, we got 30 extra laps.
Yes, most of that was under caution.
But it kept things interesting.
After Denny Hamlin scooted by Ross Chastain, it looked like he was going coast to his fourth win of the season.
Enter Austin Cindric jumping into the deep end of the pool with his spin two laps from the advertised distance.
Enter …
There’s nothing more dry than having a good idea who’s going to win with less than 10 laps to go in a race.
It doesn’t particularly make for good copy on a deadline.
So give me Ryan Blaney running out of gas coming to the white flag World Wide Technology Raceway at Gateway.
Give me Kyle Larson cutting a tire down on the last lap of the 2021 race at Pocono, opening the door for Alex Bowman.
Or Martin Truex Jr.‘s and Jimmie Johnson‘s last-turn mishap at the Charlotte Motor Speedway ROVAL in 2018.
And maybe every once in a while — and I do mean a while — throw in five rounds of overtime to settle things (just make it further than turn 1, please).
Because before Sunday, like the tire-wear bonanza at Bristol Motor Speedway in March, we’d never seen that before.
Besides.
There are worse ways to spend a Sunday night.
Daniel McFadin is a 10-year veteran of the NASCAR media corp. He wrote for NBC Sports from 2015 to October 2020. He currently works full time for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette and is lead reporter and an editor for Frontstretch. He is also host of the NASCAR podcast "Dropping the Hammer with Daniel McFadin" presented by Democrat-Gazette.
You can email him at danielmcfadin@gmail.com.