The first robin of spring in Blob World is 43 muscled-up rolling billboards, grumbling to the green beneath the Florida sun. Its chirp is an ear-splitting testosterone blare, unleavened by sissified muffler-fication. And its natural coloration is an entire palette, reds and whites and greens and blacks and every shade of blue.
Forget that damn rodent. I know spring's coming when I crash down on my couch tomorrow afternoon, with the world outside still deep in slumber, and the Daytona 500 is on my TV.
Stock cars, going round and round and round. Harvick and Logano and Truex and the Busches, bitching about Keselowski and Bowman and Jones and Blaney. Alleged best drivers on planet Earth running into each other 15 times in the last 10 laps.
Daytona, baby. Gateway to spring, which ushers you toward summer.
Also, a fascinating look at folks who live in a time-bubble in which the Intimidator never died, Cale and the Allisons are still duking it out on the backstretch, and Richard Petty is still flogging that robin's-egg blue Plymouth while David Pearson stalks him in that No. 21 Ford.
NASCAR fans, the true diehards, don't cotton much to change, but change happens anyway. A series that was once the sole province of Detroit iron has been dominated by Toyota in recent years. They run unleaded gas in those Toyotas now, and it's not Union 76 anymore. And now NASCAR's poobahs are talking about ... hybrids.
Muscle cars with an electric component, so they can run off battery power from time to time. Just like, you know, your Toyota Prius.
As Liz Clarke of the Washington Post reports here, that's one of a raft of changes coming down the pike for NASCAR in the next few years, and the prospect makes the infield Bubbas queasy. After all, they come to Daytona and Charlotte and Bristol and Talladega for the Sound, not the technology. Mess with the Sound, and you mess with their universe.
The NASCAR suits assure the Bubbas the Sound will still be the same, but the Bubbas have heard enough of their assurances before to maintain a healthy skepticism. Not even the sport rolling out new cars next year that allegedly will closer resemble their distant street cousins can entirely appease them.
They remember the Car of Tomorrow, after all.
Which is why they cling to yesterday, even as it recedes as immutably as ever.
NSSCAR has to move to hybrids for the same reason Formula One already has, the car manufacturers want it. What the fans want is secondary
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