NASCAR: Driver Fights Are Good For The Sport

With NASCAR’s popularity decreasing year after year, is it time for the sport to embrace their “gladiator” mentality and let the drivers fight?

Saturday night’s Camping World Truck Series race provided us with the first real fight of the NASCAR season, as John Wes Townley and Spencer Gallagher got into late into the race after their second dust-up of the evening. If you for some reason haven’t seen it yet, check it out in the video below.

Normally, the truck series does not get as much main-stream media coverage as the Sprint Cup Series, or even the Xfinity Series, but, if you watched any sports news or went to any sports site this morning, you saw the fight from last night.

Our sports society embraces fighting almost as much as it does winning. When sports players fight, it often overshadows the result of the game, as everyone wants to see the fight over and over.

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In today’s sports world, fans crave instant action, which is why NASCAR has dropped in popularity in recent years. Many sports fans don’t have the attention span to watch 300+ laps, which is why NASCAR should start embracing the fights in order to gain that media attention again.

If you watched the fight last night a few times, you’ll notice something a bit strange. No NASCAR officials attempted to break up the fight right away, which was an odd move based on what we have seen in the past with NASCAR and fighting. Townley and Gallagher wrestled for over a minute, and at one point it almost seemed that they were looking for someone to break it up.

In my opinion, this was NASCAR’s way of drumming up some excitement in an attempt to win back some fans who deemed the sport too soft. With all of the rules and regulations that NASCAR is enforcing now, it’s easy to see why some older fans would stray from the product, as it has changed a ton since the Cale Yarborough and Bobby Allison fight in 1979.

If you look back in recent years, races following a big fight have been some of the most watched, as fans tuned in to see what the effects would be from the week before. NASCAR constantly proclaims their drivers as “warriors” or “gladiators”, but in the past years, fights were extremely frowned upon and often resulted in fines and suspensions.

Now I’m not advocating that drivers should be completely allowed to brawl at any time without any repercussions, but in a sport that advertises non-stop action, drivers should be allowed to voice their frustrations in person rather than doing the dirty work on the track (IE: Matt Kenseth last year). I would rather see a few punches thrown than a guy intentionally wrecking another guy while going 150 MPH.

Even though the drivers involved in last night’s fight were basically no-names to the non racing fan community, the fight was still all over social media, which is a big thing for NASCAR. Any publicity is good publicity, and I can’t even imagine the social media buzz around a fight like that involving any of NASCAR’s top drivers.

Lets make NASCAR great again and let the drivers have at it. Fights are good for the fans, the sport and everything else.

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