Gadgetory

you probably don't watch NASCAR and even if you do you're probably fed up with it NASCAR's been changing the rules the cars and drivers for the past decade to try and get people to care again and yet NASCAR ratings are at an all-time low NASCAR is desperate and the people who run the series want you to start watching so badly that they went out and changed one of the most sacred things about what makes NASCAR NASCAR it changed how the races work this is a huge change it's like when Coke came out with new coke and everybody freaked out until they changed it back and if it works the races might be more exciting and competitive and you might not change the channel and if it doesn't work well yep I'm flying through the air this is not good so here's what NASCAR did before races were anywhere from about 90 laps to about 500 laps depending on the size of the track those distances aren't changing but this year every race has been split into three segments there's two shorter ones to start and one longer one at the end so now instead of the Daytona 500 you're basically going to have the Daytona 150 150 200 NASCAR hopes that this change is going to encourage drivers to be more aggressive earlier on in the race before the change you could basically hang back in the pack and hope to strategize to win at the end of the race after the change you're still gonna have to win that last segment to win the race but the better you do in the earlier segments the more points you'll get towards the championship the end of the season but the other reason for this change is you the viewer NASCAR races can be long boring affair so long sometimes that it's even hard to figure out where and when the good racing is happening there's more than one reason for this decline to the on track competition arise in popularity of other sports the way the cars don't look like Road cars anymore but the biggest are a struggle to bring in new fans and a general drop and attention span and a drop in attention stand is what could really kill the sport you see NASCAR is really expensive and the way the sport maintains itself financially is through sponsors and advertisements the longer a viewer stays on one program the better chance that brands message will pay off so even if you have a million viewers if those viewers are only watching for a few minutes advertisers are not going to find it very beneficial for them to advertise and so they pull out we saw this this past year when Sprint decided not to stick around as the title sponsor for NASCAR what's really sly about NASCAR's format change though is that it opens up a ton of new opportunities to sell ads against that programming NASCAR already ropes in sponsors for little things like the pass of the race and now it essentially has three times the number of those opportunities perhaps the biggest problem with NASCAR's format change is that it just makes everything so much more confusing NASCAR does still have a really robust culture around the series and it's dragging that culture into the digital age the sport has a good sense of how and when to use snapchat many drivers are on Twitter Facebook or Instagram and they use those services to engage with fans not just advertise is the series even puts full race replays up on YouTube for free NASCAR's problem is in the execution it's why the series has spent the last 15 years trying to change every little rule and even the cars themselves to try to get people to start watching again NASCAR started as a novelty it was a way for bootleggers to prove who have the fastest car but now with the automotive industry switching towards electric vehicles NASCAR is going to have a chance to become a novelty again changing the race format doesn't need to save NASCAR this year it just needs to buy them a little more time we're rolling along to Darlington South Carolina to the track we're fast highway servicing covers the mile and a half oval on which they run the southern 500