: The point is FOR ME that every oval track looks VERY much like another and
: if I remember well you have about 20 races per year in NASACR and about 10
: of them on ovals, so the thing is :
: Isn't it a bit the same to watch a nascar race on an oval track somewhere
: and the next oval race 15 days later somewhere else.
: Please don't tell me too much about "each oval is different because the
: banking is different or because the tarmac doesn't have the same texture"
I grew up with Nascar in the days of Petty, Yarborough, Pearson etc., back
when we just saw Daytona on TV. To me, Nascar was flat out racing on a
big, fast, *** oval. Lots of spills, thrills and close finishes. I
still seem to remember Petty and Pearson tangling and spinning out on the
last lap, then one of them (Pearson I think) managing to drag his lump of
shit across the line first. The attraction is partly a childhood
familiarity then.
I lost interest through the 80s and early 90s, and my F1 interest picked
up. Again, I had childhood memories of Hunt, Scheckter etc. racing at
Monaco, the only race we saw. F1 took over and introduced me to racing
sims.
Papyrus's Nascar 1 brought me back to the big, thundery cars. I still
find it rather dull to watch a race on TV, actually, but quite fun to race
on the computer. The control required is significant, and the
satisfaction of a clean pass (or not so clean) is as high as in the F1
sims.
: On TV it all looks very much the same for me when I get the possibility to
: look at it, in F1 or any other circuit race every corner is different, VERY
: different and therefore it requires (I think) more skill from the driver,
: and more strengh (in terms of physical condition).
The current dumbing down of F1 tracks has reduced many of them to the same
type of corners. Once you get the braking points, they're very
similar. There are only a handful of difficult corners, or at least
unique ones, like Eau Rouge. There are several unique corners in the
Nascar series. But in broad terms, I would divide the ovals into short
and long for me in terms of what it takes to drive them. To drive them
*really* well, you need to see the subtle differences between them all.
: Also one bad thing about nascar (I think) is that sometimes the "bad guy"
: wins by pushing the "good guy" out, since I work in motorsports myself,
: doing some truck racing (real trucks in Europe, not pickups like the nascar
Senna and Prost? Schumacher and Hill? Schumacher and Villeneuve?
Stephen
