“This Is Stupid” – NASCAR Fans Unimpressed as New Pictures of LA Coliseum Surface

The Clash at the Coliseum, the big show-opener for the 2022 season for NASCAR is less than a month away. The event, which is being promoted heavily, is something the sport is banking heavily on, both monetarily and commercially.

Yet, the very fact that a stock car race is being held at a venue that was never intended to host such a race has received a lot of criticism right from the get-go.

And that criticism resurfaced after a TV spot of the ‘Clash’ aired. Because in that short video, a CG graphic of the Coliseum with a completed track is shown, and that track doesn’t look endearing enough for stock cars to have ‘exciting racing’ on, to put it mildly.

And here’s how a few fans reacted to this video, most of whom just commented on the short nature of the track.

Joe Crowell wrote, “Track is tiny I don’t see this working at all.”

Mark Masterson wrote, “This is STUPID. Someone will get hurt.” 

Jason Dudley wrote, “It looks ridiculous. This is going to be a failure.”

While Jeremy Warren wrote, “Damn. It looks smaller than I already thought it was.” 

And even Patrick Bateman took some time off from returning videotapes and wrote, “NASCAR WHAT ARE YOU THINKING THAT CANT WORK ITS IMPOSSIBLE.”

NASCAR believes the Clash will appeal to new and old fans

When the news of the Clash at the Coliseum was announced in September 2021, one of the key reasons for NASCAR to go into such territory was simply to “bring some new fans outside the track to sample our sport.”

California is a key market for the sport, both at the viewership as well as sponsorship level. So according to a NASCAR Executive, the Clash will “bring the racing action to our fans.”

“We know we haven’t been running in Los Angeles for the past couple of years because of the pandemic but we thought it was important to get back to the market in a special way,” NASCAR’S VP for Strategic Initiatives, Ben Kennedy said.

So it’s a tough thing to digest that while most of the focus for the exhibition event that is costing a million dollars to build a temporary track is to appeal to the fans, at the same time the fans themselves aren’t fully convinced of the whole thing.