Well MoeZee, I think you´re right in most of your opinions and statements about them. From my point of view there isn´t the slightest doubt that Nascar-Racing is a very serious kind of Motorsport which has to be respected as a full blood type of professional racing. Sure: there are some very special skills necessary and required from the drivers, skills which any other "regular" race-driver won´t have to face very often in their careers. Same thing about the US-open wheeler Top-Classes (Indy-Car, Champ-Car or whatever they´re called today).
Probably we europeans are (mostly) used to a bit more common type of "traveling fast" on our narrow and twisty roads instead of very wide highway with eight or more lanes, on which nearly everybody travels at the same speed for endless miles. I´d speculate that therefore we prefer watching professional drivers doing the same on demanding tracks in technically advanced vehicles. But that´s only my guess.

Look: in the late 90s and early 2000s we had a silhouette Racing-Series called "V8-Star" which should have become a kind of european-type-NASCAR, whith standardized Chassis and Engines (huge V8 with 90°-Crankshafts like they´re typical for american engines), even the plastic Bodies were roughly identical, only the Badges differed. Altough the Series was heavily supported by TV-Stations, Industry and the sporting government, the participating teams and drivers were well known professionals and the competition on the tracks was very close and exciting, the Series flopped totally, because "no-one" wanted to see them! Even the US-Champ-Car-Series tried to come over, Germany did build a brandnew and large Tri-Oval called "EuroSpeedway Lausitz", but again: the press did everything possible to hype this project, Germanys main TV-Channel broadcastet live the first appearance of the fastest racings-series of the world on our continent in the 21st Century calling it "the beginning of a whole new and fantastic era"... but the grandstands and tribunes didn´t fill up like they´d hopped and then the great Alex Zanardi had his terribe Crash, loosing both legs live on TV and that was the end of oval-racing in our region!

But you´ve mentioned a point which I have to argue about: you´ve listed some great US-Racetracks and guessed that without NASCAR they would probably stayed unknown to us europeans or asians (for example). Maybe you´re right somehow, when NASCAR had been the first major series to hold a race on those tracks, I can´t tell you if that´s true, I simply don´t know. But what I do know is, that the vast majority of the international Racing-Fans did watch (or read about it in car-related Magazines) Formula 1 at Watkins Glen, IMSA GTP at Sonoma aka Infineon Raceway or World-Sportscar-Championship/Group C at Riverside (just to mention a few examples) rather more than the NASCAR-Races on these Tracks. Please don´t get me wrong: This doesn´t mean that those Series provide the "better" type of racing in general. No. I only wanted to tell you, that it´s very likely that those great tracks would also have become internationally highly regarded in the racing-world, even without NASCAR!


Sincerely yours



Nobby