Challenging the “Challenge” with other games

My head is spinning. I just tried to read all the rules of the NASCAR In-Season Challenge. I think I’ll go outside (on a very hot day) and just tighten the lug nuts on my car, something I understand a lot better than the Challenge.

(Our cover photo, which came from NBC via YouTube, by the way, is an effort to link NASCAR, through its basketball-related car owners, to the In-Season Challenge, 2025’s fan interest gimmick that seems “borrowed” from college basketball’s March Madness.)

I kind of feel like I’m walking in the park, and I pass some people who are playing some kind of game – one about which I’m totally ignorant – and as I pass by, they try to make me stop, because there’s a really important moment coming up in the game. I don’t know the game itself, so how can I appreciate this special moment?

Of course, I do know NASCAR, at least most of it. Some of it, like the Charter System, driver development programs, and the current rule book, I wish I didn’t know, but that’s another story. I also know that NASCAR thinks people aren’t interested in the stretch of summer races, and this is a way they’ve devised to cook up some temporary interest before we get to the Playoffs.

I get that, although I think that, if we didn’t have the same group every week, running the same cars with the same imposed parity, maybe people wouldn’t find it boring.

Hey, I could complain about that all day, but nobody’s listening, so instead, I’ll try to be helpful. If mimicking March Madness might get the fans fired up, what else might work?

Let’s think about that.

How about NASCARopoly? The board and the tracks are already roughly the same shape. We can skip Community Chest cards, because the Charter System already covers that, but Chance cards might make it interesting, if you had to draw one with every pit stop:

• Lose five seconds on your pit stop when a tire changer trips over an air hose.
• Lose more than you want to think about when two tires fall off after your stop.
• Win second prize in a beauty contest, converted to having Michael Waltrip come back to the broadcast booth to award you the Lucky Dog when you make up a lost lap.

If you can buy hotels and put them on other teams’ pit stalls, that might create some excitement. The other driver would have to pay you to complete the pit stop, paying more with each hotel. Of course, if your hotel fails NASCAR’s laser template enforcer, your car goes to jail.

Clue might work. You remember that game, with all the suspects and murder weapons. If you put the third and fourth turns of a track inside a tunnel, and eight cars enter but only seven come out, you have to decide if it was the #19 with a tap to the left rear or maybe the #88 with a bump draft. There might also be a way to incorporate GoodYear explaining why it wasn’t the tire’s faul.

PacMan. Oh, wait, we’ve already got Carson Hocevar. (Carson, I love you, man, but I couldn’t resist that. Chomp.)

Remember playing Horse at the playground basketball hoops? Would it work if you tapped the wall coming out of three at 183mph, and your paired opponent then had to do the same? You could even offer different scores, as a nobody-cares-anyway substitute for stage points.

Please note that I’m not including any of the really complicated computer games (Dungeons & Dragons and the even more complex), because we need to simplify things, and if we want overly complicated, we already have the NASCAR rule book.

I think I’m running out of ideas – no need to applaud – but I will bring one back from about 115 years ago. In my research on racing history in my hometown of Richmond, Va., I learned that the first race there was held at the State Fair of Virginia in 1907. Another was held the next year, but after that, they apparently felt they needed something different, so for 1909 they brought in automobile polo.

I have no idea how it worked, and it didn’t become an annual feature, but when you’re looking for ideas, you take what’s available.

My ideas likely wouldn’t be considered, because NASCAR doesn’t want to do anything that would hurt the integrity of the sport. That also would eliminate the possibility of a so-called “bag race,” in which the driver is blindfolded (bag over the head in the old days; duct tape over the helmet visor today), and a passenger tells said driver how to successfully go forward. We tried that at the Eastern Museum of Motor Racing’s restored Latimore Valley Fairgrounds track with awesome results, until the insurance company intervened.

So we might be stuck with the In-Season Challenge. NASCAR seems to be fervently hoping we bet on this activity, a problem for those like me who don’t get excited about throwing their money away via gambling. Still, I guess I’ll try to follow it, even if I have no clue why I should. There are pieces of my brain that still love the sport, even if the Challenge will cause them to continue their shrinkage.

Wait! I’ve got this idea for the opening tip-off.

Frank’s Loose Lug Nuts

If you’re like me, and a contrived “tournament” during five NASCAR races doesn’t light your fire, go to YouTube and watch an old Darlington or Daytona race, which are more likely than most others to have been filmed back then. The 1955 Southern 500 film I saw is only a six minute highlight summary, but longer editions are available for many races. I remember seeing a post-race hour-long film of one Southern 500 in the early ‘60s, shown in a popular event room by a civic club. That’s when NASCAR was something special, a feeling the current brass has pretty much destroyed.

Frank Buhrman