Race Weekend Central

Beside the Rising Tide: Short Takes & Short Tracks 

Nascar Cup Series

(Photo: Nigel Kinrade Photography)

Typically this time of year, things are quiet on the NASCAR news front as the sport and the country slowly begin emerging from the summer doldrums. As the long hot August summer afternoons give way to the earlier sunsets of September, leaves changing color and occasional morning chills punctuated by noisy flocks of Canadian geese …

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Beside the Rising Tide: After the Boys of Summer Are Gone 

Nascar Cup Series

(Photo: Nigel Kinrade Photography)

With Labor Day weekend marking the traditional (though not actual) end of the summer season, I fear other plans might have caused some of you to miss Saturday’s (Sept. 5) NASCAR Xfinity Series event at Darlington Raceway. If you did, that’s too bad, because it was arguably one of the best NASCAR-sanctioned races of this …

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Beside the Rising Tide: Taking 1 for the Team

Nascar Xfinity Series

(Photo: Nigel Kinrade Photography)

During Friday night’s NXS race at Daytona, the ugly specter of team orders once again reared its ugly head. It was no great surprise to anyone that the trio of Kaulig Racing teammates worked well together to dominate much of the race, often in positions one, two and three. Late in the race as the …

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Beside the Rising Tide: Short Takes on a Long Weekend of Racing

Nascar Cup Series

(Photo: Nigel Kinrade Photography)

There are only so many weekends in a calendar year, and COVID-19 has tossed an Ozark into the cesspool in 2020. The various racing sanctioning bodies are doing their damnedest to reschedule their events and sometimes those schedules are going to overlap. Still, I found it a bit disheartening that NASCAR scheduled not one but …

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Beside the Rising Tide: And Then There Were 3

Nascar Cup Series

(Photo: Nigel Kinrade Photography)

Where has the time gone? This time of year, I’d normally be preparing for my annual family trip to the Jersey Shore. But this year, with all the travel restrictions and the variability of what businesses can and can’t be open, when they can and can’t be open, and how many customers they can accommodate …

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Beside the Rising Tide: NASCAR’s Crap Sandwich

Nascar Cup Series

(Photo: Nigel Kinrade Photography)

Way back when, in an era when the Earth was still cooling and the war in Vietnam was still heating up, there was a less than charming saying that went, “Life is like a crap sandwich. The more bread you have, the less crap you have to eat.” Of course, the word “crap” was typically …

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Beside the Rising Tide: If You Build It…

Nascar Cup Series

(Photo: Nigel Kinrade Photography)

“If you build it, they will come.” Such was the tag line to Field of Dreams, a much-awarded movie that was a hit back in the late ’80s. Coincidentally, that was the beginning of NASCAR’s soaring popularity as well. And the mindset at NASCAR corporate headquarters and in the boardrooms of other corporations or networks looking …

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Beside the Rising Tide: Practice Makes Perfect

Nascar Cup Series

(Photo: Nigel Kinrade Photography)

Few of you need me to remind you that all of us are living in extraordinary times right now. By “extraordinary,” I don’t mean to imply this is a great time to be alive, though being alive right now still beats the alternative. Man, it’s summertime, AKA, “the sweet, sweet, summertime, summertime” of Bob Seger’s …

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Beside the Rising Tide: For NASCAR All-Star Race, 2 Out of 3 Ain’t Bad

2019 Nxs Bristol Bristol Motor Speedway From Above Nkp

(Photo: Nigel Kinrade Photography)

As our long-time friend Michael Lee Aday (aka Meatloaf) used to tell us in one of his operatic, overly bombastic, teenage testosterone-fueled hits, two out of three ain’t bad. NASCAR’s annual All-Star event has fallen out of favor with most of the race fans I communicate with regularly. If the All-Star Race was to continue on …

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Beside the Rising Tide: Ball of Confusion

Nascar Cup Series

(Photo: Nigel Kinrade Photography)

In many ways more consequential than the sport of auto racing, the world is currently a bit topsy-turvy. Yes, meteorologically speaking we have reached summer, but the living is far from easy. The COVID-19 virus has everyone on edge. One school of thought has it that the virus will magically disappear one day soon. Another …

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Beside the Rising Tide: Twin Sons of Different Mothers

Nascar Cup Series

(Photo: Nigel Kinrade Photography)

For better or worse, the first NASCAR doubleheader Cup weekend races are now in the rearview mirror, presumably closer than they might appear. Given the novelty of the idea of hosting two Cup races at the same track in a single weekend, it seemed that NASCAR and their network “partners” went out of their way …

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Beside The Rising Tide: Daytona Lowering? NASCAR Superspeedway Rule Changes Ignore Larger Problem

2020 Daytona Ncs Ryan Newman Accident Cck

(Photo: Christian Koelle)

At least partially due to the severity of Ryan Newman’s last-lap wreck in this year’s Daytona 500, NASCAR made several tweaks to the rules package run at Talladega Superspeedway this weekend. I’m an old guy. I still call Talladega and Daytona International Speedway the plate tracks. And over the years, I’ve developed a decidedly poor …

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