Ponytail Challenge - Pt. 1 of 36

Yes, I am going to cover the Nascar season this year at Rojonekku, for no real reason than I've had these wonderful ideas of how to make Nascar awesome again for a few years now, and just sitting on them and sitting on them, with no outlet for these wonderful fixes other than my own brain. So I'm just gonna get it out there now for you all in the world to see. If there is any sense to this world, I will be declared President of Nascar by my 50th birthday, they'll have dirt track races again as part of their stupid championship, and it will be a semi-sport of real men once again, instead of these whimper-voiced landscaping company presidents that seem to drive every other car.
Now understand, the day Junior Johnson stopped being relevant to Nascar is the day it probably lost its way. A circled race between shit-talking bootleggers is something real, while a parade of subliminal advertisements with a lulling white noise background and halfwit commentators is about as painfully post-modern as we get in America, on our last 9 decades towards demise. But I grew up with Nascar as background noise, even had a dog named Buddy after Buddy Baker at one point in my young life (he got run over by my mom), and I still try to go to my local dirt track a couple times a year, especially when they are running the Virginia Sprint series. Them bitches git.
Here is the basic problem with Nascar, and my basic fix. There are all sorts of minor tweaks and turns I'll add to the mix throughout the year, but this is the basic 101 of it all: Nascar's points system, even with the so-called Chase for the Cup, is stupid and not entertaining and boring. My fix is simple, and manly as well. You have 43 drivers qualify for the championship by qualifying for the Daytona 500. If you finish last in the Daytona 500, you are eliminated from contention. And that's how it works every race - the dude still on the list of potential champions who finishes the farthest back (or qualifies the worst, or whatever... there are a series of tiebreakers that happen at the beginning since there's a slew of drivers who do the Daytona gig but don't bother with the next five races) gets marked off the list. If you win a race, you get a pass to escape elimination one time for each win. And if you are in contention for the title, you do not shave nor cut your hair. Thus, as the season wears on, you have championship/playoff beards and long hair growing, much like hockey tradition, but has been picked up in other sports. This works multiple ways, in that first of all it's very easy to see who is still in contention to be Nascar champion for the year. It also gives the image of wild longhaired bearded real men, who don't fuck around. No more of this Jeff Gordon hybrid crap. Real men, who look like they would stab people with pool cues. And you call it the Ponytail Challenge.
This is important, even though Nascar fat cats would probably cringe at it, thinking they are some sort of awesome corporate affair nowadays. But let's face it, the Nascar demographic is a working class type who will sit there watching some very slow-paced action, contrary to the speeds. Nascar racing is very much like golf in that it just kinda keeps on going and going and then all of a sudden something might happen but then it just goes back to going and going until it's finally over at some point.
So with my system, in a nutshell, everybody who was not J.J. Yeley in today's race (Yeley finished 43rd... dead last) is still possibly the 2011 Nascar Champion. For the next 29 races, one more name gets crossed off the list. After 30 races, you are left with 13 people, so for those last six races, you double up, eliminating two drivers per week. That leaves you, on the last race, with three dudes in contention to be champion. Shit, you've got five in the next-to-last race. And all of them with longhair and beards. (This of course means you can incorporate the proper sponsors with post-race haircuts, or charity, or whatever. Really, this system markets itself.)
Today's race I zoned in and out of. I am a holiday Nascar fan - Daytona, whatever race is on Memorial Day, whatever one is on Labor Day Sunday, maybe Talladega if I remember - the basic bigger races. Plus, if I can catch them, the smaller tracks like Bristol and Martinsville. Those are far more enjoyable than the super speedways for me, especially Bristol. The fact they keep shaving off those small southern track races for big speedways in weird ass places like Seattle or Chicago or whatever, I don't know, it seems self-defeating. You are throwing termites into your own foundation.
I also sat outside and listened to part of it on the radio while sitting beside my pigpen, which was highly enjoyable. Nascar is one of those things that is better on radio than TV I think. Especially when you have someone like that Jeffrey Hammonds dude commentating. What is wrong with that guy? It's like his head got squeezed and his face is too big or something. I would say he looks half-retarded but that wouldn't be fair to the handicapped. And why do those dudes all wear suits? Who the fuck goes to a Nascar race in a suit? And what type of image are you fronting by having your TV people wearing suits? Really, 2011 Nascar is so ridiculously misguided, it's pathetic. They think they have been accepted.
The race was whatever, as I'm not too into the boring two-car race that super speedways are. I kinda wanted Dale Jr. to win, just because I feel bad for the dude sometimes, being a rich young millionaire who somehow is still a complete fucking failure in life, like the ultimate boss's son sleeping in the warehouse because he can get away with it. But then he was wrecked out like half of everybody else. And at the end, that Trevor Bayne kid was in the front. Who? Exactly. Trevor Bayne sounds like a guy who often had friends say he was with when actually they were cheating on their ol' ladies. "Where the fuck were you last night until 4 in the morning?" "Damn girl, why you so mad? Me and Chuck went over to Trevor Bayne's and was shooting pool in his basement. You can call Chuck and see." Or coming home from a cookout, fighting in the car while the kids pretend to be asleep in the back seat, "This always happens when you and fuckin' Trevor Bayne start hangin' around each other. You know that fool ain't had no sense ever since Kaitlyn kicked him out!" And the dude just kinda focuses on the road so as to not drunk drive too obviously, eventually cutting up the radio since it's a CCR song. That's Trevor Bayne to me.
Except he's a 20-year-old Nascar wonderkid. And the thing with racing wonderkids is they don't naturally just develop into wonderkids at that age. While local tracks around the country have old fuckers who've been racing for years, scratching at dollars and quarters to chase local points titles, there's always some teenager who started racing cars about seven years before he had a driver's license, who had an uncle or father or somebody just straight pouring money into it. That was Denny Hamlin at Southside Speedway in Richmond, Virginia. That's the Jeff Gordon hybrid model for success. And that seems like it could be Trevor Bayne, being he's 20 years old and already won a Daytona 500.
Except I looked the kid up on the interwebz, and he dropped out of high school to get a G.E.D. after his sophomore year. He's from east Tennessee (notorious pit of despair). And he drives for the Woods Brothers.
The Woods Brothers are an old school ownership team for Nascar, who barely survive in today's corporate environment. They are from my beloved Southside Virginia, and have scraped and struggled to maintain a competitive car, sometimes even without a sponsor, driving a blank slate of a car on TV. Hell, Bayne's car today lacked all the intricate little sub-sponsor stickers that all the other cars had. So them even being there at the end was a success, and probably bankrolled another half the season for them. At the end when it was paired up draft driving and stupid Carl Edwards was creeping on a come up, I thought to myself, "Fuck, why did I waste my time watching this crap?" thinking the monkey-faced back-flipper in the #99 would win, being he's one of Nascar's darlings (I think... I'm out of the loop, thankfully). But then my man Trevor Bayne slung down in his way and caught the push to the finish line. That shit was awesome. Like I could watch every fucking minute of every race for the rest of the year, and that's gonna be the only good thing that happens all year long.
So in my system, the young Bayne gets a free pass to be the last one in a future race, and every one else in the race except for J.J. Yeley is still in contention going into next week's race, which I think they said was in Phoenix. Most likely, I won't pay attention again that much, but I'm gonna try to remember to do a Monday update after races, and we'll track this ponytail challenge Nascar system on Rojonekku. But being I don't care about Nascar enough to watch it again for three months, most likely I'll just give you the simple update and then ramble about something barely related. But hey, that's better than boring you with a bunch of actual Nascar nonsense like it's important or something. And frankly, nobody pays me to do anything, so it's all of my own volition.
But congratulations to Trevor Bayne, you degenerate redneck fuck, and to southside Virginia's Woods brothers. You made Nascar interesting to me for about 37 minutes longer than it usually is most years.