racewriter's Blog

So all of us NASCAR FANatics found ourselves sitting around this past weekend at the mercy of Mother Nature. We watched the radar and the satellite views, and we listened to the weatherman expecting him to pull a miracle out of his pocket so we could see our promised weekend of three NASCAR races at Infineon Raceway in California.  Well…he sure tried to anyway. 

The NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series did manage to get there time in, and it was a good race, allowing us to get geared up and excited for the big one that we hoped would be held on Sunday. As the weekend wore on, there wasn’t a weather alert or message that I found anywhere that said we’d have clear skies long enough to get that Sprint Cup Series race in, but I guess someone else was listening to another channel, because we all hung around for awhile…more like for many torturous hours…waiting for the race to either get going or get postponed.  And it did. After getting around 83 begged and borrowed laps completed, it was officially postponed… something like ten hours after the original start time.  What?? You can’t be serious!  Oh, but I am…we watched, we paced, we dozed off, we sat in the rain, we stood in the rain, and then we all said…enough is enough!! And NASCAR agreed.  Well, actually it was the other way around. NASCAR, in their ultimate wisdom finally bowed down to Mother Nature and let her have this one. But only for a few hours.

On Monday, less than 12 hours after the rain stopped our party, we saw the engines crank up once again on a track that was trying it’s very hardest to stay dry.  The poor thing had been soaked for days, and had sprung little leaks around the seams. After determining that there wasn’t enough water to be concerned with, the rest of the race was finally run. Were we excited? Well…I guess. Were we thrilled? Well…sort of.  Don’t get me wrong, I love racing and I’ll watch it anytime, anywhere…but dang it, it’s just not supposed to be on a Monday.

Not that NASCAR had any other choice; I mean if you can’t run the race on Sunday, well, you have to run it on Monday, right?  Sure….but yuck.  A whole slew of us had to be back at work on Monday, and there’s just something about sitting back in your office chair with popcorn, a beer and your feet propped up on the desk that the boss just doesn’t quite approve of.  So, as a second choice, you crank up the computer and get what you can off there…find the channel on the TV and set it so that when you hit the right button it will toggle back and forth between NASCAR and something that looks business oriented like the stock market channel. 

But hmmm…it just wasn’t  quite as exciting as it should have been.  I thought maybe it was just me, but I scanned around and listened to the driver’s radios and was surprised at what I heard…most fellows were a little off kilter.   Some were even more testy than they usually are, fussing about the little stuff and fussing some more just because.  It seemed the waiting and waiting and what seemed to be more endless waiting put them in a “mood”, much like it had done to me.   

It did make me wonder though,  I remember when my kids were in Little League, if it started to rain, we hung around for 30 minutes, that’s all…if it was still raining the game was called and we were out of there.  Sure, NASCAR involves a whole lot more than a dozen boys and anxious parents, but it seems like NASCAR might have some kind of plan to follow.  I bet the hard part was the fact that the rain kept coming and going, on again, off again.  It would clear up just enough to make us think we could race, and then the clouds would say “Psych! Just kidding!” and they’d drop their load on us again.  But that’s what they make radar for…you can actually see the rain coming…and you can see how far away it is, and you can even calculate how long before it gets there…and I’ll be darned, but I didn’t see a single window in there that was 3 ½ or 4 hours long, the length of an average Cup race.  So I don’t know…it was just a little weird.  

Ah well, we’re going to move on now…but I’m going to be messed up all week. My brain says since the race was today, it must be Sunday, so tomorrow will be Monday and all week I’ll be catching myself on that one. It’s funny how we get programmed to expect certain things on certain days…but even when it’s out of our control and we have to watch on a different day…our minds are still hollering….there’s no Monday in NASCAR!