No racetrack? Then take it to the streets

NEW YORK -- Get right down to it, and it's a city built on speed. Cab drivers plunge headlong into small gaps in traffic, as if they're making a banzai run into the first turn at Watkins Glen. Female executives trade office high heels for sneakers, better suited for the harried pace of the sidewalk rush. Elevators whoosh visitors up to Rockefeller Center's 86th floor observation deck in a matter of seconds. There's always a trade to make on the market, a subway rattling beneath Midtown, or a flight to catch out at JFK. Movement is constant, all of it fast. Much like Talladega, the slow get run over. No wonder Jeff Gordon feels so at home here. So would Usain Bolt.

And yet the belief persists that New York is no place for NASCAR, despite the fact that speedy racecars would seem to fit in with all the other things in New York trying to get from one point to another as quickly as possible. Attempting to win hearts and minds this week are the drivers participating in NASCAR's championship Chase, all 12 of them in the Big Apple for a few days for a media blitz prior to the playoff opener in New Hampshire. Tuesday night, the whole lot of them did David Letterman's show. A few stopped by the headquarters of Sirius Satellite Radio on Sixth Avenue. Thursday brings a barrage of morning-show appearances. In three months they'll all be back, making the rounds again in advance of the postseason awards ceremony at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel.

It's all NASCAR's way of penetrating the populous and sponsor-friendly New York market, the best the series can do without a racetrack in the vicinity. The sport's premier series hasn't raced in the area since Richard Petty won the final Grand National event at Islip Speedway out on Long Island in 1971. International Speedway Corporation's much-ballyhooed attempt at constructing an oval on the site of an abandoned oil tank farm on Staten Island was buried under an avalanche of local politics and bureaucratic red tape. Although everyone in NASCAR agrees that NASCAR needs to be in New York, it seems that all plans for a venue in the city have been placed on an indefinite hold.

The idea of a Sprint Cup race with the spires of New York in the background has proven a tough sell. So it's time to get creative, and race among the spires themselves. That's right -- a street race along the wide, beautiful boulevards of New York itself.

OK, so NASCAR doesn't do street races. The closest thing in the record books appears to be the old Daytona Beach beach-road course, only half of which took place on Florida A1A. Many open-wheel drivers hate street races, because their lighter vehicles feel every bump and rut in the road. Sprint Cup crew chiefs who have found it difficult to make their cars turn, even on the relatively wide curves of a 1.5-mile intermediate racetrack, would surely fret over the prospect of having to make the corner of Lexington Avenue and 49th Street. And oh yeah, locals might bristle at the possibility of a large chunk of their city being shut down for a while.

But we're running out of options here, people. With little to no current activity on the New York racetrack front, it could be a decade or more before the kind of facility NASCAR envisions becomes a reality. Nothing against New Jersey, but no one wants to settle for the Meadowlands. Even Formula One has seen the potential, toying with the idea of pursuing a New York street race as recently as 2004. Nothing would do more to shake the wrongheaded image many have of NASCAR than Carl Edwards and Kyle Busch banging fenders along Broadway at 150 mph. Hey, NASCAR already conducts its "Victory Lap" each December, when the top 12 drivers in final points tool around Midtown at a crawl. Just add some concrete barriers and throttle it up.

Think of the spectacle! It would become the most anticipated event perhaps in the sport's history, with the potential to be bigger than anything else NASCAR has ever done. Imagine a start-finish line in Times Square, with massive temporary grandstands on either side. A hard left onto West 42nd, past the New York Public Library and Bryant Park. Another left onto Park Avenue, zooming by Grand Central Terminal, beneath the looming towers of the Chrysler Building and 30 Rock. All the way up to Central Park South, around Columbus Circle, and back down Broadway to the finish. There you have it, a roughly 3-mile street course with sweeping vistas for television. Even my cabbie Abdul, who said the only kind of racing he's ever followed is "that one with the German brothers" -- he means F1 -- is into it.

"I can drive for 10 hours a day," he says proudly. "How do I get to drive in NASCAR?"

Of course, there's the small matter of there being no place to accommodate spectators on much of the course. There's that little question of how to install SAFER barriers on a temporary street course. There's the tiny issue of a large chunk of Midtown New York being off limits for the better part of three days. And where do you put pit road? And the garage area? And the driver motor home lot? As amazing as the whole thing would be, it's probably completely impractical. No wonder the New York City Sports Commission -- I called them to ask if anything of the sort was possible -- didn't get back to me.

Oh, well. We'll always have Pocono.

The opinions expressed are solely those of the writer