|Video| Gordon and Bowyer- WTF #NASCAR!

I’m not an intense follower of NASCAR, but today’s race at Phoenix caught my attention. Not for epic racing, but some ridiculous driver behavior. Four-time Cup champion, Jeff Gordon intentionally turned into Clint Bowyer to put him into the wall with two laps to go.

Granted, Bowyer was trying to low-side Gordon when there was plenty of space on the high side.  Granted, Gordon and Bowyer have come together a few times during this season  and Gordon had gotten fed up with it, but this debacle left me shaking my head.

I don’t care what the intentions were from Gordon or Bowyer. At the speeds that Sprint Cars are traveling at, there is NO place for on-track retaliation like this. The childish behavior of both drivers took out Joey Logano, and put the rest of the field at risk. Hapless race-victim, Logano put it best on Twitter after the race:

“When I was young I thought @JeffGordonWeb was the best driver. Now I’ve lost a lot of respect for him. #verydumb”

Well said, Joey. This was all just very dumb. Just stupid. The ensuing post-crash fight, which partly caused the race to be red-flagged had my mouth hanging open. It was just ridiculous.

Entertaining, but ridiculous.

/rant

|Rant|-Racing Drivers! Tweet to me, not at me! #f1 #nascar #indycar

With the introduction of popular social media tools like Twitter, people stay connected better than ever before. Through your social network, people are able to share life experiences anywhere around the world. People gather in these online communities when they find something or someone that they find to be interesting.

As its impact has become more mainstream, more people are reaching out on a social media platform of some sort. They are people who are looking for some sort of engagement.

In real life, no one likes being talked at. They like being talked to. They like feeling that they are part of the conversation, rather than just being forced to observe one at a distance. Social media works the same way. When fans feel like they are a direct part of the experience, the more they want to engage with it and bring more people to experience it too.

With all that being said, why don’t more racing drivers engage more directly with their fans?  In a world where finding sponsorship dollars is harder every day, you would assume that racing drivers would do whatever it took to engage more with people in order to prove to sponsors that they are a person with large market appeal?

Surprisingly, that doesn’t happen.

|Video| NASCAR on the Road Course

What’s it like to drive a NASCAR Sprint Car around a road course?

Well thanks to Kevin Harvick, and Richard Childress Racing, we now know that it’s like this.

I personally would love to have an entire NASCAR series, dedicated to road course racing. It would the closest thing that Americans would get to V8 Supercar racing.

Martin Brundle explains rain tires for those of us wondering…

With the recent Daytona 50 postponed and delayed by rainfall, I got to wondering about how rain tires provided such wet-weather excitement. Interesting watching Brundle driving rain tires on a dry track, just to show the extreme tire wear that can happen once the track dries up.

However, I still think that rain tires on a superspeedway would be a terrible idea…

Ever want to see a NASCAR Sprint Car run around Monza?

Of course you do. We know you. 😉

Thanks to Max Papis, the dream is now real.

An added 10 bonus points is that he had one of my heroes,two-time IndyCar Champion Alex Zanardi along for the ride!

If NASCAR ran an road-course only series…

… then it would be Australian V8 Supercar, which would be no bad thing. NASCAR is running at Watkins Glen this weekend, and I’ve been following Qualifying on and off. I have to say with these NASCARs on the road courses, they are an interesting sight to see.

Funfact- Did you know that some NASCAR teams have drivers that substitute in for road-course races only? Think that maybe I’ve found myself a new job? ;P

Lewis Hamilton and Tony Stewart swap cars @ Watkins Glen (Six- Part Video)

A few weeks ago, we featured a teaser video about Lewis Hamilton and Tony Stewart doing a car swap at Watkins Glen. Yesterday, the event finally happened with Hamilton driving the NASCAR and Stewart driving the MP4-23. Below is some video of the event.

Honestly, I had more fun enjoying watching Hamilton drive the stock car than Stewart in the Formula 1. Still fun stuff. Not as much as a branding success as Jenson Button taking the F1 car around Bathurst, but still a cool event nonetheless. I’m really hoping that Formula 1 uses this event to connect with the North American market in a stronger format than in the past. (Click on the title to see more video, as it comes in six parts.)