Miami offers NASCAR a little time in the sun (cont'd)

Still, every now and then you hear folks wonder about moving the NASCAR finale to a setting that's, well, a little more NASCAR-like. Evidently, all those cold, rainy weekends at Atlanta Motor Speedway seem glorious in retrospect. No, Miami is not exactly the hub of the NASCAR universe. Sure, there are other markets where the sport gets a little more attention. But it's time to get realistic here. Taking into account what November weather is like across much of the country, taking into account what NASCAR -- or any other sport, for that matter -- wants to get out of a championship weekend, then where else are you going to put it?

Go down the schedule. Right off the bat, 10 tracks are automatically discounted because of weather concerns. Hey, you may dearly love Bristol, Dover, Richmond, Pocono, Michigan, Indianapolis, Chicagoland, New Hampshire, Watkins Glen or Kansas, but it's just too dang cold there this time of year to race. Yeah, yeah, you're a tough guy, you don't care. Give you a parka and a thermos of coffee and fire 'em up, right? Wrong. Tell that to the sponsors who are paying the bills, who like to entertain in outdoor hospitality areas and in good weather. There's a reason most Super Bowls are played in Sun Belt cities, and golf majors are spread out from April to August.

Phoenix, Darlington and Martinsville are nice tracks, but they're also older, and in terms of facilities they're just not what you want to put forward with the eyes of the nation potentially upon you. You're not going to end the season on a road course, which discounts Infineon. As much as some pine for a finale on the high banks of Daytona, bookending the season in NASCAR's ancestral home, it would be unequivocally unjust to decide the champion on a restrictor-plate track, where whims and circumstance often determine who winds up hooked to the back of a wrecker. So sorry, Talladega. You're out, too.

That brings us to six -- California, Las Vegas, Homestead-Miami, Texas, Atlanta and Lowe's Motor Speedway. Atlanta hosted the finale for 14 years, with mixed results, and it seems highly unlikely that NASCAR would go back. Charlotte, because of its latitude (high temperature Tuesday: 45 degrees), would be just as unpredictable in terms of weather. Texas and California offer better conditions, but also the risk of empty seats, something NASCAR doesn't want to see for a finale. So in all honesty, looking at the situation critically and taking personal preference out of the equation, it comes down to two: Las Vegas and Miami, those glitzy neon capitals standing a continent apart.

Admittedly, in a sport with a bloated schedule, there's something to be said for the idea of crowning a champion in Las Vegas, staying an extra day, and fulfilling Bruton Smith's wish of holding the awards banquet at Mandalay Bay or the MGM Grand. Of course, you could do the exact same thing in Miami, a city with no shortage of gala events and grand places to host them. As with real estate, the difference is location, location, location -- a western finale surely wouldn't be ideal for television, and a four-hour flight home is the last thing anyone wants after 38 weeks on the road. For competitors, South Florida also offers an automatic, day-after-the-season getaway; during Sunday's race, the monitor on one pit box counted down circuits not as "laps to go," but "laps until Key West." Think these guys were ready for some R&R on the beach?

They're not the only ones. No, Miami isn't a place that lives and breathes NASCAR. But some of the diehards out there need to realize that getting provincial and insular is a surefire way to stunt growth -- just ask the Republican party. You put everything in Charlotte, then all you're doing is preaching to the faithful, all the time, and pushing the series further toward the margins of the American sports landscape. Give NASCAR credit for trying to make some kind of an imprint in places like South Florida, for trying to break free of the limitations its own fan base often places upon the sport. Plus, after 10 long months of hard work, everyone deserves a little time in the sun.

The opinions expressed are solely those of the writer