Smith: The long and winding road

Good thing Coca-Cola is the title sponsor of the tedious 600-mile race at Lowe's Motor Speedway. Without the overwhelming abundance of the sugary caffeinated elixir, I'm not certain it would be possible to make it through the thing.

	Marty Smith

As NASCAR's longest race, the Coca-Cola 600 is billed as a test of mental and physical fortitude unlike any other in professional sports. And that's just for the television audience.

I'm only kidding, of course. The 600 is one of NASCAR's most coveted prizes among competitors, mainly because it is such an immense measure of the entire teams' ability to maintain focus.

I love the premise, the requisite stamina involved in such a format.

But it's still too long to occupy viewer interest throughout.

And it's not the only race on the Nextel Cup schedule that presents that problem. Several of them do.

Racing 500 miles at Pocono, twice in six weeks, is absurd. Yes, it's the closest venue to the New York market. I get it. But that doesn't shadow the fact that 1,000 miles at Pocono is 400 too many.

Drop both races to 300 miles, and casual fan interest -- presently a significant point of focus for the sanctioning body -- will almost certainly increase. Folks in New York want things done yesterday, and this isn't the Yankees or Giants we're talking about.

They're not going to sit around for four hours watching a sporting event on television. Heck, for folks still paying mind to the stigma that "it's just cars riding around in circles," even three hours is a commitment.

The same can be said for my home track, Martinsville. Five hundred laps at Martinsville are too many. Make them 300-lappers, like they have at New Hampshire. Precious minutes would be lopped off the overall event, and it would promote a heightened sense of urgency for competitors to get to the front.

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Mark Aumann, an editor of mine, proposed a great idea for two-day shows: stage twin 100-lap races, one on Friday, one on Saturday. I thought about that for a moment and completely agreed, then developed a concept around it:

Sell a pair of tickets, one for each race, and fans get the chance to see their driver race four times in a single weekend. Two short qualifying races in the morning and two big shows that afternoon or night.

Who wouldn't rather see that than the current, mundane qualifying format?

People have things to do. How many of you have watched the first hundred laps, taken a nap, gone outside and done yard work, washed the car, gone grocery shopping, then come back inside to see the final 50 laps, and taken solace in the feeling that you didn't miss anything?

Thousands of you, certainly. But let's not be naïve. Five hundred milers mean more beers and brats and t-shirts sold at the venue, not to mention more advertising time for the television networks. That's also the reason NASCAR is still staging three- and four-day shows.

We could be in and out in two days, but it wouldn't make financial sense to NASCAR. But that's another discussion for another day.

And don't try to play the tradition card on this one, either. It doesn't apply. In 1964, just nine of 62 races were 400 miles or more in length. Even by 1972, only two-thirds of the races were that length.

Would this be a drastic change, dropping the mileage in a handful of races on the schedule? Sure it would.

But this is 2004. What hasn't been a drastic change?

Marty Smith is a senior writer for NASCAR.COM. His column appears each Thursday. The opinions expressed are solely of the writer.