Mother Nature once again put a damper (some pun intended) on the racing action at Michigan International Speedway on Sunday, Aug. 18.
As such, the race was suspended at the conclusion of stage one to Monday. While race postponements and suspensions create logistic nightmares for drivers, teams and media alike, there is perhaps no greater demographic affected than the fans.
When a Saturday race gets postponed to Sunday, it’s a lot easier for fans to come back to the track – with no work or school on Sundays, fans could squeeze out an additional day at the track before heading home that evening. But when a Sunday race gets postponed to Monday, fans are at a crossroads.
This is amplified especially with a race like Michigan, one that falls right in the middle of back-to-school season. Now, not only do adult fans have to decide whether or not they want to take a day off of work, but some also have to decide if they want their kid to miss one of their first few days of school or leave them heartbroken and head home before they can see a race.
A lot of times on Sundays, race postponements could be avoided if the start time of the race was moved up earlier. Michigan was no different, as the weather was never a factor at the track until right as the drivers left pit road for the opening pace laps. The race was slated to start around 2:30 p.m. ET – had NASCAR decided to move the race up by even so much as an hour, the race could have gone halfway and there would have been no need to come back Monday.
But that’s where TV comes into play. TV largely dictates the start times of races nowadays. Generally, when it comes to East Coast races, the desire is to start at 2:30 p.m. ET or later to allow the West Coast audience to tune in after waking up or after church. Back when races started at noon ET, West Coast fans would’ve had to wake up at 9:30 a.m. PT to catch the green flag.
By starting races later in the afternoon, there’s a bigger West Coast fanbase tuning in every week. But it comes at the expense of fans at the track, who risk not being able to return the next day if the race gets postponed for any reason.
Several racetracks, Michigan included, also don’t have any lighting to potentially delay a race into the evening. For those tracks, it’s always going to be a race against sunset instead of a race into the night.
It’s much easier to just rely on the West Coast audience to wake up in the morning and cook themselves some breakfast before settling in for an early morning race. It’s a small sacrifice to make, given that when NASCAR comes to the West Coast, those races generally start around 12:30 p.m. PT, so they can sleep in a little before race time.
There’s nothing wrong with starting races before 2 p.m. ET. In fact, there’s no reason to start a race at a track with no lights after that 2 p.m. ET mark. It just leaves more daylight to complete races in full. That’s not even for rain. If there’s a big crash or something causes a red flag, that takes away more daylight that could be used to complete a race.
It just makes too much sense.
But rain-delayed races aren’t the only things that inconvenience the fans who trek to the track to see their favorite driver. The fan experience as a whole has waned significantly since the COVID-19 pandemic. The biggest (and most obvious) example is practice.
Drivers have made themselves quite clear that more practice sessions and longer practices would be super beneficial on any given race weekend. That goes for fans too. It gives them more of a reason to come to the track and it gives tracks a better opportunity to sell more tickets. It’s a win-win for all parties, now the onus is on NASCAR to just bring back more practices.
Then there are the traffic issues. On several occasions, there have been major traffic jams this season that have resulted in multitudes of fans missing the beginning of races. The two that come to mind are Dover Motor Speedway and Pocono Raceway.
Pocono was by far the worst. A sellout crowd was on hand for the Cup race, but a bunch of fans ended up jammed in standstill traffic right outside the track and ended up turning around by the time stage two went green. Dover had a similar but less extreme situation. Dover’s issue though lies in the fact that it’s right next to a main road with several businesses and not out in the middle of nowhere like Pocono.
It seems as if tracks have regressed in preparation for large crowds. Michigan also had similar issues. The similarity between the three tracks I just named? They all used to have two race dates but now only have one. Those fans now just have one chance all year to see NASCAR at their track. Of course, there’s a higher chance of selling out, and tracks need to be adequately prepared for it.
Not just the vehicle traffic, but the foot traffic, too.
At Michigan, fans who were able to return to the postponed race on Monday were surprised to find out that only one singular gate was open and letting fans in. This came after parking opened a mere 90 minutes before the race’s resumption and the lone gate opened just one hour before the green flag.
So now the fans who returned to the track even after the postponement were treated to a late arrival to their seats well after the race resumed. The phrase “arrive earlier” always comes up when fans get into the track late, but these fans were only able to arrive as early as 9:30 a.m. ET just to get parked. And had more than one gate been open, the stands would have been a lot more full by green flag.
And don’t even get me started on the decision to wait several hours in hopes of resuming the Coca-Cola 600, only to call the race anyway when the track was almost dry and leave fans furious that they could’ve been home hours ago.
Add in tracks like Nashville Superspeedway denying coolers from being taken into the track when it’s over 90 degrees out, and now we’ve got a serious question of why fans even go to the track anymore.
It’s time for NASCAR to stop and think about the fans who pay money and make travel plans to journey out to a racetrack for a weekend. It seems like recently it’s thought of every other party involved in putting on a race weekend except for the party that actually brings the majority of the money.
Fans like to threaten on social media week in and week out that they’ll stop watching NASCAR for one reason or another. If fans keep getting the short end of the stick while actively at the racetrack, those fans may just stop coming to the track altogether.
NASCAR has to at least consider the feelings of at-track fans who put the most time, money and effort into going to see races. They didn’t have to go to the race. But they wanted to. They wanted to give themselves, their family and/or their friends an experience like no other. But if they keep getting overlooked in NASCAR and the tracks’ decisionmaking, they might just stop showing up.
Then we’ll have seats like we did in 2020. And nobody wants that.
Anthony Damcott joined Frontstretch in March 2022. Currently, he is an editor and co-authors Fire on Fridays (Fridays); he is also the primary Truck Series reporter/writer and serves as an at-track reporter. He has also assisted with short track content and social media, among other duties he takes/has taken on for the site. In 2025, he became an official member of the National Motorsports Press Association. A proud West Virginia Wesleyan College alum from Akron, Ohio, Anthony is now a grad student. He is a theatre actor and fight coordinator in his free time.
You can keep up with Anthony by following @AnthonyDamcott on X.