By adding mandatory cautions or breaks in races. So reports ESPN’s Terry Blount. The money quote:
Someone once said we’re in show business. Well, if we’re in show business, let’s deliver that show. Right now we’re not delivering it. Other sports have mandatory timeouts and TV timeouts. All that stuff creates things in those sports. We need to be creative in this sport.
Translation: Our fans have the attention span of a gnat and their intelligence level isn’t much higher. To entertain them, we need to dumb down our sport some more by adding more restarts. Why? Because they create drama. And crashes. And crashes are good for ratings.
If this doesn’t play into all of the worst stereotypes of racing in general and NASCAR in particular, I don’t know what does.
Bonus observation: If NASCAR wants to improve its product, it could start by making races shorter. Sometimes less is more.
