Maybe it's Me

Maybe it's just me, perhaps I've become a snob.  Maybe watching F1 over the last several years has skewed my expectations of  what I'm likely to see when watching a broadcast of a motor sport event.  Then again, maybe the announcers at NASCAR's Daytona 500 were idiots.

I don't make a point of watching NASCAR, but the Daytona 500 was delayed by a day this last week and was run and aired on Monday night.  How do I know this?  Because it pre-empted House and the DVR recorded NASCAR instead.  So I got to listen to my lovely wife complain about how the universe sucks for two or three minutes.  A few minutes late she says, "Holy crap! Tim you have to see this!"  I drag myself into the family room in time to see Juan Pablo Montoya careen in to the back of a truck filled with jet fuel and explode.  Holy crap is right!

They then proceed to show the wreck from a different angle.  As Montoya heads around the corner and into the straight he's about 150 yards in back of the truck and there is a puff of smoke from the back of his car and a few sparks.  The car then starts to swerve, and a second later there are a lot of sparks.  He then heads straight into the back of the truck and a fireball ensues.

The sharp-as-a-tack announcers say, "Did you see that?!  He just swerved right into the back of that truck!" They go on to speculate why he would have done such a thing.  "Did he lose control of the car?"  Now the first statement is disturbing enough, but I can't even begin to comment on the genius which is "Did he lose control of the car?"

One of the announcers says "Well there were some sparks that came from the car that might have meant he blew a tire."  OK, finally the are talking about the small issue of sparks just after the puff of smoke and before the swerving, but no.  He was talking about the huge plume of sparks from when the car began to slide sideways.

I don't mean to imply that F1 is better here, I mean to state it outright.  I watched that clip once and saw something go wrong at the back of the car before the initial swerve.  Had that been Steve Matchett he would have caught that, pointed it out and told us immediately that there was a 95% certainty it was "X" that went wrong on the back of the car.  Then he would have offered up the two or three other failures that could have caused it but why he thinks it was "X".

These NASCAR announcers rambled on about the sparks concluding that something must have happened to the car.  You think!?  Fortunately, the only injury caused by the accident was to me slapping my forehead in astonishment of how dense these guys were.