Dropping the Hammer: An All-Star of a Missed Opportunity

How often in your life have you learned something and immediately wished you could go back to not knowing it?

I can’t recall this ever happening in my years of following and covering NASCAR,.

Until last week.

That’s when the broader NASCAR world found out some rather remarkable and disappointing news.

In March, NASCAR offered NASCAR Cup Series teams the chance to run what you brung in the May 18 All-Star Race at North Wilkesboro Speedway.

Aside from safety concerns, NASCAR would largely give teams the chance to set up cars to their heart’s content.

“What we presented to the teams is, ‘you cannot modify any parts, you cannot build new parts, you can’t create any new parts,'” NASCAR comms guy Mike Forde said on this week’s episode of the Hauler Talk podcast. “Everything still had to be single source. But there was a list of things that we were going to allow teams to do.”

That included being able to do whatever they wanted with the car’s ride height, being able to put however much weight the desired in the front of the car, using either one of two possible diffusers, doing a mix-and-match of rear spoiler combinations and a few other things.

Forde said it was an opportunity to “born out of trying to improve” the much-maligned short-track rules package.

Think about it. A field full of cars with radically different setup going at it for 250 laps on a short track.

Sounds like a fun time, right?

I’ve actually fantasized about a run-what-you-brung race for years now. Let the engineers and crew chiefs really flex their muscles and their college degrees and put on a show … or a side show.

So what happened? The teams freakin’ turned down the opportunity.

I’m pretty sure I’ve used the following Star Wars: Rogue One GIF before in a column. But I’m using it again because it’s apt.

Why say no to a chance to make the All-Star Race an event worth looking forward to aside from the fact it’s held at a resurrected North Wilkesboro?

Oh, you know, the usual suspect: cost.

Denny Hamlin said on this week’s Actions Detrimental that he was initially excited at the prospect.

“If you’re just talking to me, the racecar driver and the fan, I’m going to say, ‘Damn, I wish we had this,'” Hamlin said. “This would be fantastic. There could be possibly something that gets learned for the short track package that could make it better.”

However, Hamlin then put on his 23XI Racing team owner hat. That version of Hamlin has to be concerned about $300,000 Next Gen chassis and the parts and pieces that come with it.

“I don’t see this as even remotely (as a) break-even proposition,” said Hamlin, who added that he believed it would cost his team roughly $2 million to go through with the endeavor (a figure Forde dismissed on Hauler Talk).

In a story by Jordan Bianchi at The Athletic, multiple competition directors said a run-what-you-brung race would be too much of a “distraction for a non-points race” or from “the mainstream stuff” that teams work on.

Hold on a second.

So everyone recognizes the short track package isn’t that great?

To date, NASCAR’s solution has seemingly been to let Goodyear mess around with its tire compounds in hopes of improving the short track product.

Now, NASCAR served up a run-what-you-brung race to give teams a chance to find a short track fix.

Teams said no, because doing so in an *checks notes* exhibition race, would be a “distraction.”

Last time I checked, that’s kind of what exhibition events are: a distraction from normal proceedings.

You know, fun.

In modern NASCAR, a lot of good can come from industry collaboration, to paraphrase one of the sport’s most used phrases in recent years.

But sometimes, especially now, I wish the ghost of Bill France Jr. would show up at a meeting of NASCAR’s stakeholders and tell everyone, “Here’s what we’re going to do.”