We’re not going to mayonnaise-coat it: NASCAR’s in a tough spot. At its peak, NASCAR commanded 3.47% of the U. S. population in weekly TV viewership, meaning that every middle school had exactly one student who was really into NASCAR and really out of any reasonable social circle. With that figure now at 0.86%, it’s possible you used to love NASCAR—and now you are just watching it on your iPad or phone don’t.
We get it. Things changed. But things have changed again.
This is a new NASCAR, and it debuts this weekend at Kansas, aptly being birthed by the mother of invention—normative institutionalism internally, masquerading as innovation externally specifically because institutional norms not only tell us to present it that way but also to be completely oblivious to our own motivations to just do whatever makes us look legitimate—on Mother’s Day Weekend.
This NASCAR has emojis. It’s on Twitter. “The Chase”—the name of a gameshow, for olds—has been replaced by “the playoffs”—the name of a National Basketball Association thing, for millennials. Everyone who had glasses back in 2003 has different frames now. Children don’t pay full price at the gate anymore because they make up for it in the craft beer they purchase once inside. By using a lower blend of Ethanol than IndyCar, its gasoline is hilariously (and seriously) greener.
And this NASCAR has new drivers. Young ones—just like you, a lonely, 46-year-old man with a negative net worth who hides it all by drinking Mountain Dew outside a White Hen Pantry in plaid shorts you bought at Kohl’s. Ellen aside, you won’t find more outstanding teenagers in one hour of television than you will in the first stage of a NASCAR race!
Consider Ryan Newman, a rookie who has already won 51 poles (a slang term used by Generation Z to describe the fastest average speed on the Snapchat mph filter, a reference to a fallen classmate who wrapped himself around one while trying to break the record on film). Newman will miss his junior prom to go racing Saturday, but he’ll still have a shot at making court—King Richard Petty’s, that is.
Then, there’s Kasey Kahne. At age 13, Kahne won last year’s Big Machine Vodka 400, kissing the bricks at Indianapolis before he’d had his own first smooch!
Daytona 500 champion Austin Dillon is another young driver on the circuit. While Dillon’s classmates are choosing between State and Tech with the help of their parents, Dillon will be deciding between two tires and four with the help of his crew chief.
Jamie McMurray was racing even when he couldn’t yet drive on public roads. Today, he’s one of the longest-tenured veterans in NASCAR at age 24—a far cry from the sport’s youngest racer, Chase Elliott, who is nine and so exceptional that he made his first millions the second he was born.
Even NASCAR’s oldest team, Wood Brothers Racing, has gotten with the program on racing being a sport marketed to old people with money who want to feel young and connect with advertisements aimed at young people who don’t have any money even if they cared which they don’t. Rutledge Wood, an evident millennial just by taking a look, will excite you because he’s younger than everyone born before him—the first person in NASCAR to ever do that.
All of NASCAR’s drivers are easy to relate with if you’re a caricature invented by the New York Times to make a point that everyone who didn’t go to college is too stupid to order sandwiches at Jersey Mike’s Wall Street Journal to lament that the “voting with our dollars” they’ve championed has caused institutions like Beef ‘O’ Brady’s to fall on hard times (and, truly, what good is a small government if it is too small to save Beef’s?). Check out Derrike Cope, whose hip tail-end-of-Gen-X-but-millennials-if-they-wear-red-pants-and-cut-their-hair-with-a-part-so-hard-SPEED-Channel-made-a-show-about-it-hell-yeah-Hard-Parts-South-Bronx-reference-high-five-gang parents gave him a unique spelling so he’d always know he was special, much like yourself.
Other drivers aged 13–24 in Saturday’s race include Landon Cassill, Brad Keselowski, Kevin Harvick, Matt Kenseth, Aric Almirola, Denny Hamlin, Ryan Blaney, Ty Dillon, Clint Bowyer, Ross Chastain, Ricky Stenhouse, Kyle Busch, Daniel Suárez, Erik Jones, Paul Menard, Joey Logano, Gray Gaulding, William Byron, Matt DiBenedetto, Michael McDowell, Chris Buescher, David Ragan, Kurt Busch, Kyle Larson, Bubba Wallace, A. J. Allmendinger, Jimmie Johnson, B. J. McLeod, Reed Sorenson, Carl Long, Corey LaJoie, Martin Truex dammit I’ve been trying so hard to avoid a “Jr.” so I don’t have to go to semicolons after typing all this shit out, and Alex Bowman. Any would be a great choice if you need a new favorite driver—especially if your last one recently retired—because they, like you, are young, 67-but-look-like-they’re-99, and still able to pay for cable because they’ll be dead in three years and then what they owe the payday lender providing cash advances to pay Spectrum to put a picture in the TV they’re financing at really reasonable and cool terms with Aaron’s isn’t their problem.
We can admit it: maybe NASCAR had a decline. But it’s back, this weekend in Kansas, and every competitor has a story because all of them are young people doing an incredible thing—driving a car—that society often thinks you have to be at least 45 to do.
Please watch.
Better yet, please start one of those . . . tech apps . . . Airbnb but for Tesla, leveraging the power of the cloud to deliver Uber-as-a-service with an elegant cryptocurrency that uses AI to mine for avocado toast . . . and then use the money to buy a controlling interest in NASCAR.
Good Lord, buy us. You’ve gotta get us out of this business.
Help.