NASCAR Takes the Blame for Martinsville Backlash With an Honest Confession

Three short-track races down, and the conversation surrounding NASCAR’s short-track package has gone from bad to worse, and now concerning. With Martinsville failing to capture its usual magic, top officials are now scrambling for solutions in a determination to “get to a better place,” as the season puts a pause on the short track blues till the All-Star at North Wilkesboro almost four weeks later.

NASCAR admits Short Track Package needs fixing after Martinsville

From Denny Hamlin on his podcast to The Athletic’s Jeff Gluck’s poll assessing fan reactions towards the week’s Cup race, approximately 68.1% of the NACAR community did not seem to think the Cook Out 400 was “a good race”. Even last week’s Richmond spectacle was widely deemed as somewhat ‘uninteresting’ within common fan sentiments, that is, until the final restart.

Martinsville’s most recent display forced NASCAR’s VP of Officiating and TechnicaI Inspection, Mr. Elton Sawyer to talk about the current situation at hand. He told SiriusXM NASCAR Radio in recent disclosures, “I promise you we are working as hard as we can with Goodyear and we need to work harder. That’s the bottom line. We need to work harder to come to a place, where as I said a couple of weeks ago, we need to figure out how to bottle up what we learned at Bristol and also what we learned the first 30 laps at Richmond last week on how that race unfolded…”

Assuring the fans of improvements in the face of a constantly evolving NASCAR landscape, Sawyer said, “We’re not resting on anything that we did yesterday. Today, we’re going to be digging on this again and working on solutions and trying to get to a better place.”

As Jeff Gluck states in his ‘Top 5’ column on The Athletic, this should indeed, “be viewed as a full-blown crisis.” Nevertheless, with aerodynamic changes to constant evolution alongside the latest technologies, what is going wrong for the sport’s premier sanctioning body on racetracks under a mile?

Many issues plague the current short-track scenario

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The excitement around controversial last-laps, short track restarts, and mystery tire issues might have helped the sport emerge into a global viewership experience. However, it seems like all of that was short-lived, as Martinsville was witness. The broadcast spectrum too has been continuously disappointing.

From David Ragan’s graphics blunder at Daytona to another one of those in the most recent race, where a breakdown of the previous winners at Martinsville displayed the wrong names of every race-winner in the last two years except Ryan Blaney’s victory in the fall race in October.

As it so happens, the numbers also project a decrease in viewership from last year. SBJ’s Adam Stern recently revealed that last year’s Martinsville race received around 27,000 more eyes than this year’s race at 2.19 million. Even Steve Letarte and Jeff Burton discussed this issue plaguing short tracks, in discussions on NBC’s YouTube channel.

Burton explained the shifting dynamics of sports in general best when he urged people to “go to the track” where it is more competitive in person, although he does admit that it is not the same tight short-track racing “we saw 10 years ago.” As NASCAR steps up its efforts for the zillionth time, changes will surely come. How soon? Only time will tell.

Read More: Fans’ FOX Disdain Reaches New Heights After Martinsville Late-Race Multicar Wreck Highlights Broadcast “Shams”