The accessibility of the drivers is one of the reasons I was attracted to NASCAR … well, besides the speed, the engineering, the speed, the short-track dustups, the speed.

By making its marquee stars accessible, NASCAR has enabled its fans to connect with them on a human level. It might seem hokey, but it works.

Fans have access to in-race radio and can eavesdrop on the conversations between drivers and crew chiefs. There are in-car cameras. Media seems to have the run of the garage area and pits during the race to get immediate reactions. 

There is no “cooling off” period for the drivers as there is in other sports, whereby athletes hide behind closed doors for 10-15 minutes to let the emotions dissipate and become as bland as unbuttered toast.

In NASCAR, the microphones, cameras and notepads are right there to report drivers’ raw reactions and emotions, and that resonates with fans. Professional bicycle racing takes it one step further by allowing fans to mingle among the team cars (cycling’s locker rooms), but that’s a topic for my other blog.

Of course, at times, the bursts of emotion can get unseamy and downright embarrassing, but it’s real, unedited, human emotion. I’ve called Tony Stewart the Brett Hull of NASCAR, because Stewart is prone to speak his mind as Hullie often did back in my previous life as a hockey writer. I listened to Stewart rip on Goodyear tires right after he left his car at the Atlanta race, and I was cracking up. Twas one of the best rants of all time. (Stewart kept it up later in the postrace news conference, so a cooling-off period probably wouldn’t have filtered him anyway.)

Even though Goodyear, NASCAR, Joe Gibbs and Home Depot may have blanched at Stewart’s outspokenness, he was just saying what all the other drivers were saying, just more directly and with more emotion.

That’s the beauty of NASCAR. The interviews after crashes, the interviews at the infield care center, the in-car radio, etc.  are all opportunities to see drivers being human.

The genesis of this post was an item about this very topic in the Sporting News NASCAR notebook today. It resonated with me that veteran NASCAR driver Jeff Burton said it would be a bad idea for NASCAR to adopt ”a cooling off” period ala the NBA, MLB, NFL and NHL. (Of the stick and ball sports, the NHL is by far the best for accessibility; the NFL is the worst, but then again the NFL would rather fans not connect with players, most of whom are treated as commodities).

“I think that the emotions of our sport are what make this sport work,” the Sporting News quoted Burton as saying. “ If drivers (and) crew members can’t show their emotions, then why watch? I think that the fans deserve to hear the story. I think the fans deserve to see the emotion, and I think they deserve to see the raw emotion. . . .

“I love the fact for our sport that something happens on the track, and a guy comes out of the infield care center, there’s a microphone there. I think that’s awesome. I think that’s how it ought to be.”

Amen to that.

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