And Heeere We Go Again

 

If you were at Texas Motor Speedway Sunday, or watched the PPG 375 on television, no doubt you watched a crazy thrilling race that checked off all of the boxes.

The race had it all: hundreds of on-track passes, close, intense racing, and three of the best drivers on the planet (Josef Newgarden, Pato O'Ward and Alex Palou) getting it on at the front of the field for the win, with lots of other drivers right behind them racing just as hard to try and join the party. Some are calling it the race of the year, and I can't say I disagree.

Yep, the race had everything.

With one exception -- a green flag finish.

Despite everything else that happened Sunday as IndyCar put on it's best race at Texas in years, lots of fixation is involved with the yellow brought out by Romain Grosjean's crash with about 2 1/2 miles left in the race.

And, as usually happens when a race ends under yellow -- which doesn't happen often, mind you -- the conversation comes up about taking the NASCAR approach and going with green/white/checker finishes.

As I spent the almost 14 hours driving back from Texas yesterday, I went back and forth about whether or not I wanted to write about this, because it's a tired conversation. How tired? I discussed this topic in January, as in, January of 2011.

Plus, it's never gonna happen, for a couple of reasons:

* IndyCar doesn't have to do everything NASCAR does.

* It's never gonna happen.

I'll admit it, I'm a purist. If a race is 500 miles, it's 500 miles. If it is 375 miles -- as was the race distance on Sunday -- it's 375 miles. That said, whatever happens inside that race distance is fair game, such as dropping a red flag after a late caution, within reason.

I've been a race fan since I was nine years old, but I also grew up playing and passionately following stick-and-ball sports, so I am kind of a purist. Sports are supposed to be entertaining, but at their core they are competitions. Sometimes that leads to great games, sometimes it doesn't.

I was lucky enough to get a ticket to the NCAA men's basketball championship in Houston Monday night between UConn and San Diego State. I've been watching college basketball for longer than I've been watching racing, and I definitely checked off a bucket list item by going to the game.

In the end, UConn won the game by 17 points (76-59) and even when SDSU pulled close in the second half, they were in control for the final 36 minutes of the game. I don't see anyone complaining.

Last year, the first two NBA games I went to (Suns-Heat, Bucks-Warriors), had halftime scores of 71-40 and 77-38. Again, no hand-wringing from basketball fans, because that happens sometimes. It's sports.

But we have this thing in racing where everything, especially the finish, has to be on-the-edge-of-your-seat, heart-in-your-throat shootouts to the checkered flag. For the life of me, I don't know how we got here. It seems like the idea of "that happens sometimes, it's sports", doesn't really apply to racing any longer.

What also makes the conversation tired is that it completely dismisses the last two restarts, which had some of the best racing I've seen in a while. What those guys did down the stretch was inhuman. In the post-race press conference, Jenna Fryer from the Associated Press asked this question:

What wires you guys to do something that stupid?

Here were the replies:

Pato: To win.

Palou: Yeah, but, I mean, you have no other option, so... You just put your right foot there and close a little bit one eye (smiling). You hold everything tight, that's it.

Josef: This was a real race today, which was fantastic. But I think in this sport you definitely can't think about the potential. It's just you got to go pretty flat out if you want to drive the cars at a high level. It's impossible to drive these things at the level you need to without blocking everything else out. I think that's what you get from a lot of drivers here.

That's the point here: instead of harping on missing out on what would have been about 35 seconds of racing, maybe we should focus on what did happen. These guys did some absolutely crazy things out there. Having another 35 seconds of racing wouldn't change that.

When it comes down to it, here's the biggest reason I'm against it.

It's personal to me.

Over the last few years I've met a lot of drivers. Of the 34 drivers shown on the IndyCar website, I've had one-on-one interviews with 18 of them. Seven of them I've had on my podcast, The Rumble Strip. I'm not close friends with any of them by any means, but I've gotten to know them as people and I care about them.

I understand it's dangerous, but where do we draw the line? We draw it at the G/W/C because in open wheel cars, it's unsafe. Drivers going after the win within the confines of the race distance is fine. But if you watched the movie Rush, Niki Lauda makes several references to the fact that he can deal with 20 percent of risk.

Racing within the confines of how IndyCar does it is in my own personal comfort zone of 20 percent, and I think the drivers feel that way too. But setting things up for an "exciting finish" goes beyond that to me. If you watch enough NASCAR, you know the crapshoot of G/W/C finishes. Lots of cars have been torn up during "overtime" as drivers make crazy moves to try and win the race or improve on their finish.

Guys lose their heads at the most critical part of the race. You'd love to say that IndyCar drivers wouldn't do that, but they are extremely competitive humans. Anyone who competes in anything at the professional level has a competitive fire that we can't comprehend. 

And with open wheels, what is a pretty spectacular crash in NASCAR turns into an unsafe and possibly serious accident in IndyCar. So we're going to go past the scheduled distance of the race and take that risk?

Screw. That.

Like I said, these guys are real, actual people to me, and I couldn't talk to them, interview them, or cover them with the thought in the back of my mind that, "I need to be entertained, and you must do everything you can to entertain met, whether you like it or not!".

Nope. That isn't how it works for me.

Thankfully, the powers-that-be in IndyCar feel the same way.