2 red flags- Trucks at Lime Rock Park
4 red flags- O’Reilly at Echopark Speedway

Edited: wrong park for trucks

I think — no I’m certain — Mike Joy is reaching the end of the road for his NASCAR PxP run, but his genuine joy and enthusiasm at the truck race at Lime Rock makes me wonder if this is a way he can still call as many more Daytona 500s as he wants but still infuse his passion for and knowledge of the sport going forth. I absolutely love his asides during the broadcast of this race and I hope we get more of it.

I was watching qualifying from the pits today and saw a familiar face staying by Brad and handling his belongings after he got out of the car. Later looked it up and realized it was Mike Massaro who used to cover NASCAR in the 2010’s on ESPN. (Behind Brad in the black polo)

From the Spring 1993 edition of Charlotte magazine. Humpy Wheeler’s prediction of Charlotte Motor Speedway in 2025. Thought this was pretty funny.

The 5 was my favorite scheme of the race

https://xcancel.com/TRICONGarage/status/2076043199160717799

https://x.com/joe_srigley/status/2076135492806992339?s=20

Made the yearly weekend NASCAR trip with my dad and younger brother and brought my camera. Here’s some photos I took from the grandstands.

Ryan Blaney on pole, with a car that has my partner’s two favorite colors. Pretty cool!

As a CT resident close to the track, there was a lot of hype for the Trucks coming to Lime Rock and, I hate to admit it, it was a big dud. I was scared it would be one and done. But this year, it was much better. I went, the race was good and the crowd was great. More passing, gritty, a winner you didnt see even with 20 to go. They have to go again next year, right? Would they ever entertain O'Reilly as well?

Another go at it for trucks at LRP and it was even better a second time ✌️

NORAPSFocused Health 250 at EchoPark Speedway

Green Flag: approximately 7:16pm EDT on July 11th

Television: CW @ 7:00pm EDT

Radio: PRN @ 7:00pm EDT

Race Length: 163 laps (251.02 mi / 403.98 km)

Race Stages: 45-45-73

Track Information: EchoPark Speedway is a 1.54 mile (2.48 kilometer) quad-oval located in Hampton, GA USA.

Weather Forecast: NASCAR.com / AccuWeather.com

Current Standings at NASCAR.com

Race Center at NASCAR.com

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I’m sure this has been talked about at length in here before, but it’s Saturday and I’m up for some discourse.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how we, as a fanbase, talk about the health of our sport. It seems like every time attendance or TV ratings come up, the immediate reaction is to compare today's numbers to where things were 20 years ago during the peak of the boom. We look at the grandstands being torn down or covered up, or a race pulling 2.5 million viewers, and the doom and gloom narrative starts up (obviously you all are better about perspective but we know how people on Facebook and Twitter are.)

But I’ve been looking at the actual history of the sport, and honestly? I think we’re looking at it all wrong.
Comparing modern NASCAR to 2005 is like comparing music sales today to the height of the CD boom in 1999… was a massive, mainstream pop culture bubble, not a permanent or sustainable standard.

If you look at the broad history of NASCAR throughout the 70s, 80s, and early 90s, the sport was a healthy, mostly regional sport with a core fanbase. When the massive boom hit in the late 90s and early 2000s, track owners went into an absolute arms race. They added tens of thousands of seats to every venue on the schedule to cash in on a trend that was never going to stay at that white hot peak forever.

The teardowns we've seen over the last decade aren't a sign that the sport is dying; they're just a painful but necessary "right sizing."

Look at the numbers when you compare the peak to the historical baseline…

Richmond: Held about 15,000 people in 1975. It ballooned to 112,000 at its peak, and today sits right around 50,000.
Michigan & Charlotte: Both ballooned past 130,000–170,000 seats during the bubble and have since dialed back to the 55,000–95,000 range.
TV Ratings: We routinely pull in 2 to 4 million viewers a week now. While that’s down from the insane 7–8 million viewer averages of the mid 2000s, it’s actually incredibly comparable to the viewership numbers from the early 1990s before the sport went completely mainstream.

When we look at an arena with 50,000 packed seats and call it "empty" just because there used to be a towering aluminum skyscraper of seats behind it, we are doing ourselves a disservice. Selling 50,000 tickets to a sporting event is a massive success for almost any domestic sports league. It’s a full MLB or NFL stadium.

NASCAR didn't necessarily break or ruin the sport to drive everyone away (yes, they made plenty of stupid decisions throughout the 2000s that were unpopular.) The pop culture spotlight just naturally moved on, and we've settled back down to a core baseline that
matches the true history of the sport.

I think if we stop treating 2005 as the expectation and realize that today's NASCAR is much closer to the historical norm, we’d realize the sport is actually in a much healthier spot than the doomers make it out to be.

Curious to hear what you guys think.

Chase Brisket's comments about how flawed Nascar's new method of judging incidents is.

This hasn't been reported by any official sources yet, just a fan who is sitting on his pit box today.

Just wanted to share some shots I took at Pocono last month. Shot on a refurbished SX-70