AT&T sued by poor man's Formula 1

Reasons for the oval

NASCAR does have one or two road races. They used to have more. Several of the drivers prefer road races, and some of them place consistently higher on the road tracks than at the low-banked oval, high-banked oval, and nearly circular tracks (yes, NASCAR has all three...).

The main reasons for the oval tracks are twofold: patience is in short supply in America, and with an oval you don't have to wait for your driver to make it back around before you can see him. The cars are visible all the way around. Also, the sponsors like the cars to nearly always be visible on TV. If a camera zooms in on a couple of cars jockeying for position, that's one thing. If they're covering one curve or chicane while the rest of the billboards... err, cars are out of view, that's another. The cameras are supposed to be showing off all the decals on all the cars.

The oval tracks do take less skill in some ways than the road tracks. However, NASCAR is very much about skillful pit stops, car setup (gears, suspension, air pressure in the tires, etc.), tire and gas management, driver endurance, and avoiding accidents. If you think it's not a sport, try driving around on top of 70 degree (Centigrade) asphalt in 50 degree ambient air at 273 kph for 804 km in any direction, avoiding similar traffic, managing your gas and tires to have better traction with fewer stops, and staying behind someone you want to pass until just the right moment because he's taking the brunt of the drag off of you.

It's not the same type of sport as Formula 1, and it may even be a poor man's motorsport as the headline says (although if you believe that, you've probably never watched monster trucks, mud boggers, tractor pulls, or swamp buggy races). To say it's not a sport at all discounts a great deal of athleticism, skill, and planning that goes into it. I'd put it somewhere above "poor man's sport" and below "world-class high-performance racing" that is Formula 1.

Racing in the US consists of much more than NASCAR, BTW. There's NHRA and IHRA drag racing, IMSA, Indy, ARCA, the Mustang Series, the Trans-Am series, sprint cars, aero-assisted sprint cars, bomber stocks, motocross, bike road races, bike drag racing, flat boats, hydrofoils, mud boggers, swamp buggies, salt flat time trials, prop plane races, rally cars, rally bikes, monster truck races (these are different from car crushing competitions), and more. And that's just some of the motorized racing.

If you think turning left is easy, try drag racing, where the trick is to accelerate in a straight line. However, it's either bracket racing in which you must do so faster than the other guy but not too fast, or where you're pushing the limits of monstrous cars that go over 310 MPH within a mile.

Yah! You tell 'em!

Our waste of an obscene amount of money and oil is much better than your waste of an obscene amount of money and oil because yours goes in a loop while ours goes in a differently-shaped loop!

At least Motocross gets more than 5 miles per gallon, has vehicles you can use elsewhere, and has things like jumps. And if you must burn fuel quickly, drag racing is short enough and you end up a different place than when you started.

David Webb Herbie won F1 before NASCAR

You said: "Come on, Herbie won a NASCAR race! ... and driven by a girl!"

Herbie won the Monte Carlo Grand Prix before he won the NASCAR event.

You also seem to have a low opinion of women.

So sad.

Left turn

So, if they had a NASCAR race in Englnad, would the drivers have to turn right all the time?

The World

"You know the world surely - those annoying bits of land to the left and right, and south of you?"

Where're the Canadians jumping all over this one?

Another point....

Question: what advancements has NASCAR ever given us? OK, not just automotive, but in ANY field? New and exciting ways to advertise tobacco and alcohol products, I guess...but what else?

F1 has given us: active suspension, variable valve timing, electronic fuel injection, broader applications of composite materials (carbon fiber, kevlar, etc.), traction control, greater understanding of aerodynamics...the list could go on and on and on.

NASCAR racing has given us: uh...um...

They still use carbuerators and live axles! What the hell, man? I remember 20 years ago when there was a great article about this HUGE advancement that was going to change pit-stops forever...someone came up with the idea of using tubes of rubber glue-like weather-stripping to attach the lug nuts to the wheels so they could put the tires on faster. Whoopee! That's sure changed MY life for the better...way more than traction-control and variable valve timing ever could!

Bottom line: to each their own. If you like NASCAR racing, more power to ya (make sure it's limited by a restrictor plate, though). I, for one, like F1 and WRC and LeMans and SpeedGT and...you get the idea. Don't ask for comparisons between NASCAR and any other form of racing...just like WWE will always lose in comparison to real sports, NASCAR will lose in comparison to real racing.

What about WRC, (Rally)?

Someone mentioned nearly every kind of US motorsport and how much skill would you need on those, but somehow Rally was left unnoticed. How about moving at 160 KPH through BLIND corners, jumping hills nearly like a motocross on a car that costs some 35k (Isn´t it the cost of a Subaru Impreza, Mitsubishi Lancer, Toyota Celica and some Citroen model I don't recall now?), and no matter if you have a navigator by your side telling where and when the next turn is, you still manage to miss it? Plus you are ACTUALLY going somewhere, there is no closed circuit there, no 75 or 300 laps around the same track all the way to boredom. That´s what I call skill (guts and ultimate insanity also).

You don´t need to spend GOBS of money, or move extremely fast to prove someone´s REAL skill. Those guys like Collin McRae are the real deal on driving skills. I said skills, not brains. Michael Schumacher has got plenty of the last one, inside his helmet, or in the pits.

BTW, I heard rally cars ARE REAL STOCK CARS, straight from the assembly line to racing (except for tires, I guess), altough I doubt a normal car can jump 3 feet in the air and keep running. I guess Rally isn´t expensive, I have never seen major sponsorships behind these guys, or any race was cancelled due lack of funds. The race is so hard to finish that they will let the cars start the race one at a time, to beat the clock and the winding roads (or lack thereof) is difficulty enough.

It´s technical, it´s difficult, requires endurance from machine and pilot, doesn´t cost much (I guess), only a few demented freaks in the world have the guts to do it, yet there is nothing trashy or redneck about it. It is called WRC because it DOES HAVE races around the world, from Australia, to South America, to Africa, to North America.

In short:

It has high standards like Formula 1, without the money.

It has endurance as requirement, like 24hr GPs in Turismo.

It uses real cars, the ones that can be bought by real humans,( even if it takes 36 months).

A mistake CAN TRULY GET YOU KILLED, not just lose a race.

It only lacks head-to-head competition, that explains the low popularity. MotoGP is great at that.

Spetacular crashes won´t happen very often, but when they do, it looks a like a 737 crash site.

On an IT note (this is El Reg) no matter how much technology you put on board these cars, Rally remains dangerous. It doesn´t matter if the navigator uses a piece of paper, or GPS, the results are the same.

Stop wasting time complaining about NASCAR, it is common man entertainment, that´s it.

Poor Man's F1, my @$$

Oh, please. The reason a NASCAR team costs less to run than a F1 team is that NASCAR is actually competitive. It isn't a race to see who can spend the most money on technology, but who has the most driving skill in cars that are equally matched.

NASCAR has very specific rules on what technology can and cannot be used. They are constantly tweaking them so no one make of car gains advantage over any other. They do everything they can to present a "level playing field."

How much passing is there in F1? What is the typical margin of victory? Frequently, the 2nd place car isn't even on the same lap as the winner. That isn't racing. That's a Sunday drive in traffic. In NASCAR the winning margin is usually no more than a few car lengths, or a couple of seconds at most. There are usually a couple of dozen cars, or more, still on the leap lap at the end. The car that was in second, or third, or even farther back, at the start of the last lap has a realistic chance of winning almost every week. How often does that happen in F1? Does a F1 race have a couple of dozen cars even start the race? Do they have anywhere near 43 cars? Gee, I wonder why not? Could it be too expensive?

My girlfriend used to think it was "a bunch of dumb rednecks driving in circles", too. Then she went to a race, and watched a few on TV with me. Now she is hooked.

re: You say NASCAR is worth $91 million dollars.

Andrew ...

"You say NASCAR is worth $91 million dollars."

Not what was said. What was said is that the Daytona 500, the brand name for that one particular race, is worth $91M. Not the entire sport. The brand for the race.

Not that I care. I watch the Indy 500 - and that's pretty much it.

A comedian summed it up: "I was worried about talking bad about NASCAR, but then realized that if they started to chase me all I had to do was take a right." Or something to that effect.

That's just it....!

> NASCAR racing has given us: uh...um...

> They still use carbuerators and live axles! What the hell, man?

That's what it's all about!

Front-engine, rear drive, solid rear axles. Carbs you can adjust in your backyard. Motors you could (mostly) duplicate with catalog-ordered parts. (750hp out of a normally aspirated 358ci motor? Not too shabby). Nothing will ever sound better to me than a pushrod American V8 with a lumpy cam.

I have no idea what the performance aftermarket is like overseas - but NASCAR has brought a lot of technology to us in the US. The aftermarket for anything with a V8 motor here is huge, and always has been - that's where the results are... In what we're able to purchase as an actual motorsport enthusiast.