NASCAR: A month without racing

It has officially been one month since NASCAR saw any real-life racing, with the most recent race taking place at Phoenix Raceway on Sunday, March 8.

Entering the 2020 NASCAR season, if I’d have told you there would be no racing for a full month after the checkered flag flew at Phoenix Raceway, you would have believed me. Everybody would have believed me.

But here we are now, with this exact scenario having played out. Yet a more unprecedented set of events couldn’t have possibly happened to make this the case.

The four-turn, 1.022-mile (1.645-kilometer) oval in Avondale, Arizona replaced Homestead-Miami Speedway as the site of the season finale, ending the latter’s 18-year run as the championship decider. The Championship 4 is scheduled to take place on Sunday, November 8, seven months from today.

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But here we are on Wednesday, April 8, not Tuesday, December 8, and it has been a month since the checkered flag flew at Phoenix Raceway. And there has been no action since.

Yet we are not in any sort of offseason.

Days after Team Penske’s Joey Logano held off Stewart-Haas Racing’s Kevin Harvick, the Cup Series was ready to contest its scheduled event at Atlanta Motor Speedway. In fact, all three of NASCAR’s top series were at the track, ready to compete that weekend.

But the global crisis and spread of the coronavirus had officially been declared a pandemic, and NASCAR had announced that there would not be any fans in attendance for these races.

Looking back now, even that possibility seems foreign.

NASCAR proceeded to postpone that event, and now all races through the first weekend in May have been postponed. That includes seven Cup Series races, six Xfinity Series races and five Truck Series races.

NASCAR postponements: TRACKER

None of them have been rescheduled, and there is serious doubt about action actually resuming in 31 days on Saturday, May 9 at Martinsville Speedway as planned. If that actually takes place, we would be at the halfway mark, as Logano’s win at Phoenix Raceway came 31 days ago.

Hopefully this unexpected stoppage in action will end as soon as possible. In the meantime, do your part to stay safe and healthy and to ensure that those around you are doing the same. For more information about COVID-19, visit the CDC’s website or the website for your state’s Department of Health.