For those who do not know what happened, yesterday was the Xfinity 500 at Martinsville Speedway, which was one of the most blatantly corrupt races I've ever seen, but to give a TL;DR of the situation:
Chevrolet told several of the teams that drive its cars to make a blockade in order to guarantee that at least one of its drivers, this time William Byron, would be able to make the Championship 4 race happening this Sunday. This blatant collusion was recorded on several drivers' radios being communicated by their spotters and crew chiefs, which is bringing into question the validity of the current 'playoff' format.
It sucks, and god I wish we went back to the full season format, or at max, the 10 race Chase, because the 'playoffs' don't even boost ratings, which I'd imagine is NASCAR's goal.
What made the all star event worse was that NASCAR’s social media was hyping up the fight even as they were saying fighting is unacceptable.
I know F1 has its own problems but they treat each GP like it’s a big event. While they occasionally show the crowd a lot more emphasis is placed on the location and track. Meanwhile NASCAR tv loves to emphasize fat shirtless drunks. F1 claims they are the pinnacle of motorsports then go and act like it is. NASCAR flops between pandering to the modern diverse audience and to a caricature of what Hollywood thinks southerners are.
Your point is why I understand where people who think movies like Talladega Nights indirectly ended up hurting the sport are coming from.
That movie was one of many pop culture pieces that made NASCAR look like some brainless hick freak show, and NASCAR went down the wrong direction responding to those stereotypes. It didn't know whether it should embrace or dispel them, and alienated fans and outsiders alike when trying to appeal to people who were never going to enjoy it just for what it is.
I think the answer to that conundrum was what Steve Bannon calls "focusing on the signal, not the noise". NASCAR should have just ignored how pop culture saw the sport and just focused on maintaining the quality of the core product and marketing what I think NASCAR's strength has been the whole time:
Badass drivers doing incredible things with very powerful cars at speeds most of us can only dream of.
It also doesn’t help with all the fairly truthful NASCAR / WWE comparisons. When they go to someplace like Talladega they play up the “big one” then will show 1000 replays of the giant demo derby. NASCAR has had a few amazing finishes this season where 1st-3rd finished thousandths of a seconds apart.
When NASCAR took that car to Le Mans last year they impressed everyone with the fact that it could keep pace. Even the pit challenge impressed when they won. Instead France is like McMahon and making an embarrassment of the sport because he wants to run it his way. They should focus on what sets them apart as the selling point. It’s not just “rednecks turning left” it’s three wide full throttle 190mph+ for 500 miles and it won’t cost you an arm and a leg to go see it.
You can’t bring your own beer into F1 races