Well, two races into the 2010 season, and NASCAR, aka NAPCAR, is already showing some serious signs of crumbling at it’s foundations. The sheer volume of empty seats in California this past weekend, even noted on the NASCAR.COM site, shows that things are not all good and going to plan.

Over the winter, all sorts of changes have come to NASCAR, seemingly somewhere between rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic and wild desperation. Viewership in 2009 was way off, attendance was way off, and even the official collectables / t-shirt company has been in financial trouble. A number of tracks “revamped” their seating, which is to say that they got rid of many seats and changed around others. Daytona got rid of a back stretch grandstand and replaced it with a fan fun area, and they announced that none of the back stretch seating will be open for the July 4th weekend races. Richmond lost almost 20,000 seats, and overall NASCAR tracks apparently lost more than 100,000 seats for events from 2009 to 2010.

NASCAR made some major rule changes, put the driving “back in the drivers hands”, and have announced that the rear wing on the CoT (Crap on Track, I think) will be ditched in favor of the more familiar blade spoiler, which has been a part of stock car racing for as long as I can remember. It was little surprise to most fans that when the CoT took over, the best racing was actually in the Nationwide series, as the cars were the older style blade cars and just ran better. NASCAR also added more green white checker attempts to try to get a green flag finish to races, and so on.

Yet, two races into the season, attendance is down, and just as importantly, viewership is down. If a product is in demand but people can’t afford it, they will watch it on TV. NASCAR faces the hard reality that fewer people are turning up to the events and fewer people are watching on TV. Only the presence of one Danica Patrick has given them a ratings boost for their undercard series, which have done better than last year.

In the end, the big problem for NASCAR is their ill conceived attempt to become a national sport. Not every market wants or will support a race by buying tickets, and the California situation is a perfect example. All the population in the world, a rabid car culture, and half filled stands. NASCAR also has too many look-a-like tracks, D shaped 1.5 mile ovals that often produce dull follow the leader racing. These are tracks designed to make the track owners happy, not to produce good racing. All this is against a background of classic shorter tracks without NASCAR dates, yet that would likely pull better crowds and produce a better racing event. Rockingham has new owners and is apparently doing well with series like Pro-cup and others, and even North Wilkesboro is back in action with racing back at this classic facility.

NASCAR would do well to forget their overdone plans and slide back to the things that made them popular to begin with. Without that, the deck chairs will look nice but the ship will continue to sink.

I have been a lifelong racing fan, I can remember watching the highlights of NASCAR races on Wide World of Sports long before it became an every week, 12 hours per day extravaganza that is it today. In the last few years I have been less and less enamored with the product, and thought it was only me. But recently, I have noticed more and more people publically calling out NASCAR’s top series with names like NAPCAR and such.

Well, the capper I guess was this past weekend’s race in Talladega, typically one of the wildest and highest speed races, where a combination of engine restrictor plates and aerodynamic tricks get together to make the cars run pretty much in a pack. The only way to get ahead most of the time is bump drafting, where the back car pushes the car in front, making them both move faster. After a terrible wreck at the end of the last race here, NASCAR outlawed this practice this time out. The results? Well, let’s just say that the drivers showed than about 450 out of the 500 miles of the race was meaningless, and paraded around single file in a freight train so dull that driver Tony Stewart was heard asking his crew to tell him something interesting so he didn’t fall asleep. The ABC commentators for the race could obviously see this race has turned into a snoozer, and rather than deny the truth, they repeated over and over the fact that NASCAR had diddled with the rules to make this happen.

Well, it seems that NASCAR doesn’t like when someone points out the obvious: NASCAR got all huffy and spokesman Ramsey Poston said that “ABC missed a lot of very good racing”.

News flash Mr Poston: There was no good racing. For the first 400-450 miles, it was follow the leader, let’s not use up our equipment, throttle off cruising so painful to watch, it was beyond understanding. The only thing that saved the race for most of the “fans” was that in the last 5 laps, the aero package and rules came together to destroy pretty much half the field in two seperate wrecks that both involved violent rollovers.

Don’t get made an ABC, they told the truth. NASCAR (or is that NAPCAR) needs to wake up and smell the coffee, look at all the empty seats and closed seating sections at the tracks, and remember that “it’s the racing stupid”, before they are shrunk back to being a regional series without national coverage. Ratings are down for a reason, and it isn’t because ABC says you are boring.