Should NASCAR try a ROVAL Cup Series night race?
This weekend’s NASCAR Xfinity Series race at the Charlotte Motor Speedway ROVAL is slated to begin at 5 p.m. on Saturday (Oct. 4), which will almost surely make it so that lights will be used to finish the race itself. If you’re a fan who’s been around since 2020, you might even be doing a rain dance right now in preparation and hopes for a potential re-creation of that fateful night.
As most Xfinity racing is, I’m assuming it will be a good race no matter what. However, since NASCAR can never turn down a good gimmick, it now only makes sense to ask the question of whether the NASCAR Cup Series could take on the ROVAL at night now, too.
There will be detractors, of course, as there are already naysayers for any road course race in general. However, those people aren’t fun and probably don’t get invited to many parties. Don’t overcomplicate this: Making the Cup ROVAL race a night-time affair would only help its case for viewership.
Those who might bemoan the visibility can be easily appeased by simply bringing in extra lighting (they sell that, you know), and those who completely disavow stock cars turning right are barking up the wrong tree anyway. Would Shane van Gisbergen still probably trounce the field? Absolutely. Do I expect him to do so this weekend? I would say that it’s a safe bet. If the start time isn’t going to affect how this race plays out, why not start it after dark? It only makes sense.
The race is already competing with the NFL for viewership, but for those would-be channel flippers, a nighttime ROVAL race would only be more attractive. To me, this is a softball of a question, and I’ll bet you that if the Xfinity race goes off without a hitch (which it probably will), we get the ROVAL after dark sooner than later.
Was Carson Hocevar’s $50,000 fine warranted?
On Wednesday, NASCAR levied a hefty fine to none other than its least favorite unfortunate son, Carson Hocevar, as a penalty for what amounts to essentially spinning his tires at low speed while being hooked up to a tow truck following his crash last weekend. NASCAR deemed the infraction as a behavioral level violation of the NASCAR Member Conduct clause. I’ll allow the video, which NASCAR Communications posted, to speak for itself.
Coming from someone who spends a lot of time around racecars, I’ll throw my two cents in before debating the right or wrong of this issue. This doesn’t look like Hocevar just dumped the clutch out of frustration and revved his car. It looks like he let off the clutch without realizing it was in gear. However, I wasn’t in the car to see, so I don’t know.
What I do know, though, is that if the safety crew felt as though they were in any amount of danger, they sure don’t show it. I’ll let you be the judge of that.
To NASCAR, this was a $50,000 infraction, and that’s that. Hocevar did what he normally does and made light of the situation, this time by placing a donation goal at the bottom of one of his streams.
I’m not going to sit here and say that a car being in gear while being hooked to a tow truck isn’t a safety concern — it is. I am going to sit here and say that there’s a difference between not realizing your car is in first gear and letting off the clutch and trying to run a wrecker over. I don’t believe the latter occurred here, but I am going to offer a suggestion.
Maybe make the car in a manner that doesn’t cause it to become a beached whale if there’s something wrong that’s as common as a tire puncture. Just a thought.
If NASCAR is correct and Hocevar did this completely intentionally, I think the fine is more than warranted. Instead, what I think happened is NASCAR saw one of its most problematic (in their eyes at least) drivers goof up, and now he’s paying the consequences of being just that. Go ahead and tell me with a straight face that Chase Elliott gets that same fine.
Will a new crew chief shakeup help Kyle Busch?
Richard Childress Racing announced on Tuesday that with Randal Burnett and the team set to part ways following the end of the season, the team plans to go ahead and make the switch atop Kyle Busch‘s pit box to Andy Street.
Street is considered to be one of the brighter names in the sport, having previously been the crew chief for Austin Hill in the Xfinity Series, and serving as crew chief for both Hill’s and Jesse Love‘s Cup Series starts.
The question now is can this bring back any of that KFB magic? And as much as I would like the answer to be “yes,” as the sport is better when Busch is in a fast car, I just don’t believe it can. That isn’t at any fault of Busch, though. A slow car is just slow. And that’s exactly what RCR has a garage full of at the present moment.
That being said, the team needed a shot in the arm in a bad way. The radio communication from last week sounded like a crew that had already packed it in, and for any Busch fan, that’s a reality you can’t ever truly become used to, a far cry from the days when he would light up any radio he could, no matter his track position.
There haven’t been all that many dark days for Busch or his fans, but the two are getting both barrels at the moment, and there is still something to be said about RCR for realizing that the current level of competitiveness isn’t sustainable.
Is the NASCAR 25 video game actually going to be good?
I must admit, when it was announced that NASCAR and iRacing were teaming up to bring back one of my favorite gaming series, I was ecstatic. As someone who would stay up late at night playing NASCAR Thunder when I was a kid, this hit home for me. Months went by and, as Joel Embiid told us all to do, I kept trusting the process.
Now, gameplay footage has been released, and I feel a bit unsettled, as I’m sure many do who expected this to finally be the leap in the right direction to take NASCAR gaming to another level.
The actual racing AI looks wonderful, and that will take care of most of the problems with previous games off the bat. Bump drafting is realistic now it seems, and cars actually race like you would expect them to filing in and out of line. Score one for NASCAR 25.
The first concern I have, though, is with the damage model. With the capabilities of the Next Gen consoles, I expected more than I’ve seen thus far, but I’ll withhold final judgement there until I play myself.
Secondly, why can’t we have realistic daylight/dark transitions? Every build of the game I’ve seen thus far transitions between the stages. I know this sounds nitpicky, but it truly is an easy feature to get correct, so why take the easy way out on it? Post-race fanfare is another aspect that seems to have gone by the wayside. Race winner celebrating clips are short (at least what we’ve seen of them) and above all else, there are no race-winning burnouts.
If that seems nitpicky, it’s because it is. That doesn’t mean I won’t be playing this game come Oct. 14, though. It just means that I’ll still have to keep wondering why features that were added on previous generation consoles, which we all loved, seem to be impossible on better technology.
I do think this game will be good. Perhaps, then, a better question is will it be good enough?
Tanner Marlar is a staff writer for Sports Illustrated’s OnSI Network, a contributor for TopSpeed.com, an AP Wire reporter, an award-winning sports columnist and talk show host and master's student at Mississippi State University. Soon, Tanner will be pursuing a PhD. in Mass Media Studies. Tanner began working with Frontstretch as an Xfinity Series columnist in 2022.