Rush hour

 That  was some fine mess NASCAR and Mom Nature gave us yesterday in Chicago, where it rained and then rained some more and alleged professional race drivers kept sliding off into tire barriers and rear-ending each other and generally making you wonder if they could survive a normal commute day on the Dan Ryan.

The Grant Park 165? More like Carl The Insurance Salesman Trying To Get Home To The West 'Burbs At Rush Hour 165.

"This is a joke," someone observed in my neighborhood hang, summing it up succinctly.

Me?

I wouldn't say it was a joke, exactly. But it wasn't racing, either. 

Until ...

Until, with twilight coming on hard and the race barely a third finished, NASCAR decided to put everyone on the clock.

At 7:20 p.m. Central time they gave everyone an hour until the checkers flew, and then it got interesting. Then it got down to how fast the track would dry and whether or not the leaders should come in to swap out rain tires for faster slicks, and who ultimately would make the right choice at the right time with the minutes ticking down.

In the end that was Alex Bowman, who gambled the pavement wouldn't dry out enough in an hour to make it worth switching to slicks. That handed him the win after passing Joey Hand, who also stayed out, and running out the clock before a fast-closing Tyler Reddick could reel him in.

And the guys who switched to slicks, like Reddick and Christopher Bell, the man who looked like your race winner until he ducked into the pits to swap out his wets?

They bet wrong. Made the switch too early, costing them too much track position as they skated around out there on pavement still too wet for slicks. A kiss of the wall through one tight corner cost Reddick, who finished second; Bell wound up finishing 27th after a late crash. 

The Blob's takeaway from that is NASCAR should put all its races on a clock.

So many laps, or two hours (or three to four for longer races). Whichever comes first determines the finish.

Honestly, I don't know why NASCAR doesn't do this already, given that it serves a public increasingly addicted to immediacy. Hidebound motorsports tradition likely plays a role. Marketing likely plays a bigger role for a sport whose life's blood is marketing.

 The Southern 500 you can sell all day long. But the Southern Three Hours Or Thereabouts?

Profoundly unsexy. And thus profoundly un-marketable.

Yet it was the element of the clock that saved the Grant Park 165 from itself, or so it says here. It handed some late drama to a comic-opera day, and made the closing act not just interesting but riveting: Reddick growing larger and larger in Bowman's mirrors with every lap; the clock shrinking to three minutes, two minutes, one minute as he did.

Great stuff.

Now if only the stock car boys could learn how to drive in Chicago ...