NASCAR Just Got Beaten By A Dog Show

NASCAR has succeeded in one big way with its Pro Invitational iRacing Series: If you did not miss real stock-car racing before this stuff came along, you absolutely miss it now.

They held another Cup video-game race Sunday from virtual Bristol Motor Speedway. Here was the first sign this was not real: All the seats were filled. The last time an actual spring race was held at Bristol, only about one-quarter of the seats were occupied.

But, anyway. NASCAR and Fox get credit for trying to make these look and sound like real races for their real advertisers and real sponsors, but the best that can be said about the show Sunday was that it was . . . better than nothing. The outcome was in doubt (though not for very long), and it killed a couple of hours.

Then the official ratings came in Tuesday. The fake race, televised on both Fox and Fox Sports One, drew 1.179 million real viewers, for a rating of 0.71. The real race at Bristol last year, just on Fox Sports One, drew 2.806 million viewers, a rating of 1.71. OK, fake apples and real oranges.

But a week earlier, the iRacing event on Fox and Fox Sports One from the pretend Texas Motor Speedway drew 1.339 million viewers, or a rating of 0.81. That is a one-week drop of 12% in viewership and in ratings for a race from a famous track that was supposed to be more interesting than Texas.

Fox and Fox Sports One can say the show from Bristol was the third-most-watched sports show on a depleted TV schedule because of the coronavirus pandemic. No. 1, again, was the WWE’s Friday Night Smackdown on Fox, a rasslin’ show pre-recorded by a skeleton staff before no live audience.

But No. 2 was a repeat of the 2019 Beverly Hills Dog Show, shown early Sunday afternoon on NBC. The numbers for the doggies: 1.227 million viewers, 0.81 rating. So 48,000 more people watched a dog-show rerun than a live video-game auto race shown on two networks.

Don’t blame Fox, because it is not trying to pass off these video-game races as the real thing. One of its commentators Sunday was the always entertaining Clint Bowyer, who was actually driving in the race  — and got into an early clash with Bubba Wallace. “I need a beer really badly,” Bowyer said.

The race was a mess, with 12 caution periods covering 66 laps of the 150-lap race. Here was the problem: iRacing is an impressive simulation, but the real NASCAR drivers who are the best at it have video-game experience — and are way better than drivers with less experience, like Bowyer.

If anonymous video-game champions played instead of real NASCAR drivers and ex-drivers, the show might be better, but even fewer would tune in. Young drivers tend to have gone iRacing, but others are learning on the fly, even though they are really good drivers of real cars.

Bristol is a short track, at which bumping and thumping is commonplace. The field was limited to 32 cars for the iRacing race on Sunday, opening up some room on the track, but the bumping and thumping at the back of the virtual pack often set several cars into a spin.

All of that would be fine — it is just a video game, for crying out loud. The positive part about these crashes is that drivers don’t get hurt in real life, as they do in actual races. So it is pretty much all for fun, except drivers and fans know that, so there is no tense drama.

Denny Hamlin set the bar low when he said Tuesday on NBC Sports Network: “If we just get 10 people who have not been to a NASCAR race before get introduced by watching us virtually . . . and you get just few people to go to a real racetrack when we open back up, it’s definitely a win for our sport.”

Wallace wrecked twice Sunday, using up his “resets” before deciding to withdraw from the race. He drew a stern rebuke from his sponsor, on Twitter, of course. Daniel Suarez and Kyle Larson were later disqualified for trying to wreck out each other. Only three drivers led the race.

Fox will keep trying, but fans are tuning out. Sooner or later, there will be real racing again, and everyone will be thrilled to watch it after such a long pause. One fan called the poor substitute “overkill,” which is as good a description as “better than nothing.”