CONCORD, N.C. — Another year in racing has come and gone.
This column concludes my 35th year as a motorsports writer and my 42nd as a journalist. Many of those have been spent writing for these pages, and it’s been a wild, wild ride.
The sport has changed wholesale since I started back in 1988, some of it good and some of it not. It’s still the greatest show around, don’t get me wrong. It’s just different. One of the big things I saw this year was a significant uptick in competition. Sure, there are some series where a single team or driver dominated, and that has been the case since the sport began.
In NASCAR, there was no Petty, Waltrip, Earnhardt, Gordon or Johnson who won a significant portion of the Cup Series races.
That’s good. Competition is important.
The drama in NASCAR this year centered around the Next Gen car in the Cup Series and the teething pains it has had. I’m not sure that taking the teams out of building their own cars is an idea that can last, but we’ll see how it goes in year two. The biggest thing is safety and NASCAR is taking steps to make the new equipment safer for drivers. That should be the first, last and only thing going forward until it’s fixed.
The continued rise of Indy car racing is a welcome reminder that the sport is well and truly over the chaos of the mid-1990s, while putting on great shows on a variety of venues. I’ve never been the biggest fan of street races, but the new Nashville round complements the spectacle that the Long Beach Grand Prix has always presented, and the St. Petersburg GP is a stellar event to kick off the season.
The Indianapolis 500 has been back for a few years now and it shows signs of becoming “The Race” it once was. That’s huge and a welcome sight for this devotee of The Greatest Spectacle in Racing. Kudos to Roger Penske for making it happen.
One of the things I most enjoyed this season was the IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship. This whole series was a barnburner from start to finish and the season-ending Petit Le Mans was wild from green flag to checkered. It was 10 hours of chaos filled with spikes of insane action, and worth the time spent watching.
Imagine a 10-hour endurance race with all the hallmarks of the Saturday finale at the Knoxville Nationals, a green-white-checkered finish in the Daytona 500 and the final segment of the NASCAR Championship 4 at Phoenix.
It made for a compelling afternoon and evening in front of the TV.
One of the better regional series in the South, the CARS Racing Tour, put on several shows that were more than worth the money to watch. Chief among them was the Racetrack Revival 200 at North Wilkesboro (N.C.) Speedway.
The venerable track made a splash with its return, packing 20,000-plus fans into the facility for a 125-lap CARS Tour Late Model Stock Car event. It helped that Dale Earnhardt Jr. fired up the time machine for a return to 1997, when he ran a Sun Drop-sponsored late model out of his own stable to third place at the finish.
His appearance in — and support of — the return to North Wilkesboro was met with an outpouring of excitement from fans starved for such a spectacle, and the success of the event translated into bigger and better things for one of NASCAR’s original tracks.
I bet Enoch and Gwyn Staley and the family would have been proud of what occurred that night.
In terms of successful seasons for motorsports since I’ve been involved, 2022 stands out for these reasons: It was fast, it was compelling and the racing was just out of this world all over the map. That’s as good as it gets from here at Wide Open World Headquarters.
Enjoy the holidays and I’m looking forward to another banner year in 2023.