The Case Against Parity

I used to believe that parity in racing was a good thing. That is, until I talked one day to a former Eagle track champion. He said, "we talk about 11 winners in 11 weeks - but does that mean they're all good? Or are they just average?" Of course, I won't say who because it may come off as disparaging.

But they could be all good, they could be all mediocre. Doesn't really matter.

I've railed on before about too many classes and how racing has become too niched and too egalitarian. Sub classes of subclasses pollute the track with half-filled features...or in the worst case: packed fields so evenly matched that picking the winner could just be a matter of random chance.

The champ followed up: "what this place (Eagle) needs is a bad guy." You can't manufacture bad, you can't claim "bad" (no amount of skull graphic wraps and black will work). It has to be bestowed upon you.

What this sport needs and lacks is a real feud. The man in black against the rest of the world. "The Intimidator" or his nemesis Jeff Gordon. Schumacher versus Hakkinen. And that's just history in my world. Racing lore is packed with stories of rivalry.

But the stories are from the past... We haven't just lost a man in black...the sport has lost a lot of its color. And again, no fluorescent-colored wraps or loud graphics gives that back. Feuds now are between one guy and the guy who claimed him. Maybe it was the guy who took him out. It's lost on the rest of us.

Color was seeing one J.J. Riggins pull in front of the stands after a win at Midwest Speedway to a chorus of boos and middle-finger salutes. It was people wearing 'Anybody but Riggins' T-shirts, ironically supplied (in secret) by the villain himself.  It was a grandstand that rocked so hard the video camera replay shook as Don Maxwell battled Riggins for the lead coming out of turn four.

The color, the feuds, the villainy and heroism came from winning. One guy was dominant. One guy was always up front. Maybe there were heroic challengers who often won one for the 'good guys,' but there was always a black hat among them. 

Maybe that's not what the fans want anymore (though the WWE seems to run with it). But unlike the WWE, that kind of dominance is hard to manufacture in classes so tightly regulated, so cost conscious and egalitarian that part-time racers all have the same gear and all have the same (lack of) experience. There are no differentiators.

These 'spec' classes are the worst. The playing field is leveled down with laser-like precision. It's not a good thing.

Vanilla. And not the good kind. More like ice-milk vanilla (lowercase v).

Sometimes I think the sprint cars were the last bastion of that - at least on a night to night basis there was a guy who was just head and shoulders above the rest. There's good racing, and there's just the guy who's leading on the last lap (NASCAR's worst problem). I think we have too much of the latter.

But I think I'm the last of a dying breed. Maybe it isn't about that anymore. Maybe the generation that's just 'happy to be there' Facebooking, Instagramming and tweeting about how much fun they're having is what it's about. Maybe it's always been that way.

It's just not my scene, man.

Perhaps I'm as outdated as that last phrase.

-Jason