Holding A Pretty Wheel: Could a Shorter Season Help NASCAR Hold Back the Rain?

As the rain fell over Michigan International Speedway, racecars sat on pit road with drivers and crews hoping for enough dry skies to get the Firekeepers Casino 400 in between ran showers on Sunday afternoon (Aug. 18).

Without lights at MIS, the window quickly closed, leaving NASCAR to postpone the bulk of the race (stage one had just ended before the rains came for the third time Sunday) to Monday (Aug. 19).

Racing on Monday doesn’t make anyone happy. Many of the fans with tickets can’t stay an extra day. Teams with an already tight turnaround time to get cars to Daytona International Speedway for next week’s action now lose a full day. Television loses viewers and fans at home miss out on watching because many have to work.

So everybody loses. And it’s nobody’s fault … mostly. Kind of.

With so many of the summer’s races being affected by weather, it sometimes seems like an endless loop of delays or shortened events.

While it looks like Mother Nature is not a NASCAR fan, NASCAR and its television partners are also a little bit of the problem.

The insistence on later-afternoon or evening start times is at odds with typical summer weather in much of the country. Mid-to-late afternoon is when showers and storms tend to spin up. There’s a good reason the summer race at Daytona used to start before noon: It beat the almost daily Florida thunderstorms. This week at MIS, had the race started an hour or an hour and a half earlier, fans would have gotten to see a lot of racing and teams would be headed back to Charlotte to get ready for next week instead of spending an extra night in a Michigan hotel. 

When you look at the start times of many of the rain-affected races in recent years, there’s a pattern: A lot of those races could have been official on the scheduled day if they’d started at the once-usual 12:30-1:30 afternoon post times. Ratings were at an all-time high well before those start times changed to later hours, so it’s hard to argue the TV rating angle.

Rearranging the schedule can only go so far. It’s already 36 weeks long with two exhibition races tacked on and just one scheduled week off most years — unless the Olympics happen to be going on, then it’s two weeks.

There’s only so much racing that can be packed in from early February through Thanksgiving. There is a finite number of weekends in the spring and fall. You can only move so many summer races out of the summer stretch of weekends. Many tracks are limited by weather. As it is now, there are tracks where race weekends are very chilly, like Martinsville Speedway in late March or early April. NASCAR couldn’t move a track like New Hampshire Motor Speedway or Michigan to February or March even if there was an open date.

Moving Phoenix Raceway or Las Vegas Motor Speedway to the summer months would be equally silly; it’s brutally hot to the point of being dangerous for teams and fans. Those races are kind of stuck on the schedule. 

NASCAR experimented with having a few races on Wednesday nights, a viable option for some locations (Charlotte Motor Speedway, North Wilkesboro Speedway, Bristol Motor Speedway, Martinsville and Darlington Raceway are all close enough geographically to make it work). But fans didn’t tune in, and that was that. Same with doubleheader races run at the same track on Saturday and Sunday, which seems like a pretty fantastic weekend for a race fan.

So what’s left?

There’s one more thing NASCAR could do. The 36-race season is ridiculously long, and it wasn’t that long ago that the schedule was 32 races in length. 

Cut it back to that.

That would allow a four-week summer break, five if the existing off-week was factored in. It wouldn’t eliminate all the issues with rain, but it allows races to be scheduled outside the worst weather in some places.

You could get half of that, at least, without eliminating races if NASCAR brought back the doubleheader weekend to a couple of tacks. Bristol immediately comes to mind because the cavernous stands don’t fill for two race weekends any more. They might for one with two races. Martinsville would be another option, though a harder sell because it’s date as the final cutoff in the playoffs. Kansas Speedway could host a double. So could Las Vegas.

Two doubleheader weekends would mean still cutting two races. Kansas has been so good with the Next Gen it’s hard to put a target on it, but Vegas could lose one. If Phoenix dropped a race, the title race would be the only race of the year, with no practice race in the spring. It’s not a terrible idea.

The rumored Mexico City/Montreal race is better on paper than in practice, and just not necessary. They were dropped because they were logistical nightmares for teams. Keep it that way. No current track would need to be eliminated completely if four races were dropped from the schedule.

NASCAR could kill two birds with one stone by lopping four race weekends. At least a few of the rain issues could be avoided, and the 36-week grind would be less of one for teams. They say absence makes the heart grow fonder, so maybe a summer break would be a good thing for fans, too, as they return energized for the playoff run. 

It couldn’t hurt to try. It wouldn’t be any worse than the status quo.

Amy Henderson

Amy is an 20-year veteran NASCAR writer and a six-time National Motorsports Press Association (NMPA) writing award winner, including first place awards for both columns and race coverage. As well as serving as Photo Editor, Amy writes The Big 6 (Mondays) after every NASCAR Cup Series race. She can also be found working on her bi-weekly columns Holding A Pretty Wheel (Tuesdays) and Only Yesterday (Wednesdays). A New Hampshire native whose heart is in North Carolina, Amy’s work credits have extended everywhere from driver Kenny Wallace’s website to Athlon Sports. She can also be heard weekly as a panelist on the Hard Left Turn podcast that can be found on AccessWDUN.com's Around the Track page.