Twitter got alllllll pissy Friday night during the Truck Series race at Daytona, acting mad over NASCAR’s new rule that requires crash repairs to be completed in five minutes.
People were legitimately angry over this. For real!
My God, people! If you want to see damaged cars on a track that badly, go check out your local demolition derby.
I care about who battles for the win, not whether the freaking 26th-place driver who wrecked before halfway can ride around long enough to finish 25th. Catch the excitement!
If a vehicle is so damaged it can’t be repaired in five minutes, just go home. Why does it need to be on the track? Just because that’s how it’s always been?
I’m not anti-repairs. Look at Christopher Bell’s example: Contact sent him into a spin at the end of Stage 1, he literally went airborne, landed, fixed the damage and was leading the race by the halfway point. Neat!
But it was neat because his vehicle could continue and didn’t have a bunch of debris-caution-causing crap hanging off it. In the examples people cited on Twitter (“But Tommy Underdog came back from two laps down after hitting the wall at Talladega in ’02!”), did the repairs really take longer than five minutes? Or do you just remember a damaged car having a comeback?
Because in most cases, a repair that takes longer than five minutes is often going to take a car out of contention for a good finish anyway. So it doesn’t matter, right?
Now, some of you are probably thinking: But Jeff, what if a team misses the playoff because of two or three points it could have picked up during a race when repairs took too long?
My answer is: TOO BAD!! Holy crap, are we really worried about this? Maybe try harder at other races next time!
I just can’t get fired up about telling a team to pack up for a night because stuff is so broken that it can’t be fixed quickly.
Look, I hate it just as much as everyone else when NASCAR takes away some long-held traditions — but is this really one to get upset about?
It’s like someone pulling the weeds out of your lawn to make it look better, and you get mad because you preferred it to look how nature intended.
They’re freaking WEEDS! Just look at how nice your lawn looks now and focus on that, OK?