A continuing series.
The complaint above was an oft-muttered lament by Bickerstaff’s father, who died decades ago. Things have only gotten worse of course and get worser still.
Consider the video above. An elementary truth about driving cars is one doesn’t drive in the rain with bald tires. One would thing the management of NASCAR would be well aware of that truth. One would be wrong.
From Road & Track:
Over the past few years, NASCAR has developed kind of a strange habit. It has become increasingly comfortable waiting to throw a caution for dangerously wet conditions, leading to wrecks that could be attributed entirely to the wet surface at Texas Motor Speedway in 2020, Circuit of the Americas in 2021, and, most notably, New Hampshire Motor Speedway in 2021. Despite all this, NASCAR chose to keep a flat-out pack race at Daytona going as rain approached with less than 30 laps in today’s race. When the field hit a damp track, the predictable happened.
Indeed it did, resulting in an awful lot of wrecked cars. Not that long ago, believe it or not, when a racetrack got wet a timeout was called. The drivers would come to a halt and the drivers’s crews would rush to swap the racing slicks on each car for “rain tires,” with grooves carved into them just like civilian tires. Racing would then resume from the exact spot where each car had stopped.
It shouldn’t be a terribly difficult decision to make, calling a timeout in an auto race when it starts to rain. One might say it requires few brains indeed, but few hardly equals none, does it?
The Taos Tatler 