NASCAR Needs to Reassert Control of Race Start Times July 28, 2021 There was a time when NASCAR was arguably the No. 2 sport in the United States behind football. The NFL has been the 800-pound gorilla for the better part of 40 years, but in the 1990s and 2000s, NASCAR was able to dictate when and where it did its thing, and the broadcast partners bowed down to them in order to have the rights to broadcast their events and rake in the millions of dollars in advertising. Fast forward 20 years, and the script has been completely flipped. We have already seen the ridiculous scheduling of races at tracks without lights starting events at 3:30 in the afternoon. The slightest rain delay ends up in a scenario where the race is cut short or rescheduled until Monday, when it will air on an obscure cable channel that fewer than two million households receive. People who are longtime race fans cannot understand the logic of such a decision because they know that it actually rains in the afternoon on most days in the summer.