The Great Daytona Finish That No One Watched

The last lap of Sunday’s Daytona 500, the fifty-eighth running of NASCAR’s crown jewel event, was about as good as organisers could have asked or hoped for. On a picture-perfect Sunday afternoon in Florida, in front of a newly-renovated grandstand, jam-packed with more than one hundred thousand fans, Virginia’s Denny Hamlin, driving a Joe Gibbs Racing Toyota Camry, crossed the line mere inches in front of New Jersey’s Martin Truex Jr., the closest finish that the venerable race has ever seen.

Hamlin’s win came after a bold move in turn three/four and a ridiculously exciting race through the Daytona tri-oval to the chequered flag – it’s a horribly over-used cliché, but the fact was that everyone at the track, not to mention those watching on television were on their feet at the finish – which featured everything that’s great about stock car racing.

NASCAR’s governing body in Daytona Beach, couldn’t have drawn up the end result better if they’d tried. Okay, well, maybe Brian France and co. might’ve had perpetual fan favourite Dale Earnhardt Jr. narrowly beating out the driver most at the sport’s headquarters want to see competitive and winning races – one Danica Patrick – but, still, it felt like a banner day for stock car racing, capped by Toyota winning it’s first Daytona 500.

It’s not a stretch to say that, NASCAR had a perfect lead-up to race day, and was capped off perfectly on race day. Speedweeks went perfectly. Positivity abounded. After an entertaining Sprint Unlimited invite-only race last Saturday wee, through Daytona 500 pole qualifying (young gun Chase Elliott claimed top spot) and two fairly entertaining Duel at Daytona qualifying races to decide the rest of the forty-car field (one of which was won by Earnhardt Jr., and the other by defending series champion Kyle Busch) the sport approached it’s biggest day with plenty of confidence.

Then there was the finish itself, which had motorsports fans the world over talking. My Twitter timeline blew up on Monday morning, Australian time, as Hamlin barely pipped Truex Jr. at the line. The Daytona finish was bigger news than anything in the world of Formula One, V8 Supercars or MotoGP.

Jubilation on Sunday night as replays of the finish went all over the world must have turned to despair twelve or so hours later, when France and his colleagues at the NASCAR headquarters were made aware of the television ratings for the biggest race of the year. You figure a finish like the one we saw would lead to giant viewership numbers, right? Well, you’d be wrong.

Disastrously for NASCAR, it is expected that, by the time the final ratings numbers are collated, the 2016 2016 Daytona 500 was the second-lowest iteration of the race since 1978, the first year that the race, in it’s entirety, was screened live. The 6.1 overnight rating was down 16% from a year ago and a whopping 39% from 2015.

So, what happened?

Let’s start at the top: the previous 497.5 miles of racing weren’t as spectacular as the final tour of the 2.5-mile superspeedway. Plate racing, like we see at Daytona and Talladega, is much-maligned by fans, but in the recent boom days of the sport that commenced at the turn of the century and saw popularity surge for a good seven or eight years, plate races have been hard to look away from. You need only look back to, say, 2003 or 2004, and witness the white-knuckle, pass-happy races that thrilled hundreds of thousands at the sport’s biggest and fastest tracks.

You can make a case that the introduction of the new Car of the Future concept in it’s various recent iterations since 2007 has wrecked the racing. I mean, we just haven’t seen the same sort of close racing with the old cars since the new platform has begun. When I first got into the sport in 2002, the racing was hard-fought, and you barely went a few weeks without seeing some ridiculously close finish – Darlington in the spring of 2003 for example, or Atlanta two years later, when Johnson and Edwards banged doors en route to the stripe – but these days, close finishes are an exception rather than the rule. The racing, for the most part, has become bland on bland racetracks, where suspect debris cautions seem the only way to close up a pack.

A decided change from the Earnhardt’s, Allison’s, Petty’s, Yarborough’s and Wallace’s of the old NASCAR to the Johnson’s, Hamlin’s, Gordon’s and Kahne’s of the sport’s new era hasn’t sat well with old fans. They enjoyed listening to drivers tell it like it was in victory lane and elsewhere.

Now, the refreshing straight talk that you heard twenty years ago has been replaced by sponsor reference after sponsor reference. That’s definitely alienated a large, traditional fan base who grew up with drivers speaking their mind. These days, drivers are afraid to say anything even mildly controversial, lest they upset their sponsors. When did David Pearson ever really worry about that?

Rightly or wrongly, there’s a perception that the sport has sold out it’s traditional southern roots. Bastions of the sport like Rockingham and North Wilkesboro are gone, Darlington has just one race as does Atlanta, two venues that used to pack in fans, and were chock-full of memories. Moving races from those famous tracks to uninspiring 1.5-mile tri-oval venues like Kansas or Kentucky, where racing is bland and where there is no link to the old days so revered by fans.

Finally, we must look at the schedule, which features more than thirty races a year, visiting most venues twice, often to blocks of empty seats. A more compact season featuring shorter races would stop fan burnout – 300 miles is about the right distance, with some races, like the Daytona 500 and Coca-Cola 600 on Memorial Day remaining at their traditional distance, to elevate those events above others, something that IndyCar has done well in recent times.

NASCAR’s contrived Chase for the Championship might be the biggest reason fans are turning away from the sport in droves – followed closely by the string of championships won by the largely-unpopular Jimmie Johnson. The playoff idea with elimination races to set up a final four showdown works well for stick and ball sports, but I’ve never been a fan of it in motor racing. Nor, it seems, are large proportions of NASCAR’s fan base. Reverting to the traditional season-long points hunt will make a lot of people incredibly happy.

The Daytona 500 ratings will be a wake-up call for anyone connected to the sport who believed things were on the uptick. There’s still time – albeit a narrow window – to change certain things about the sport. Hopefully the powers-that-be can do something to arrest the sport’s popularity slide.

Book Review: The Rising Tide (World War Two #01) by Jeff Shaara

Renowned for his work on the Civil War in two separate trilogies and a prequel of sorts featuring Lee, Jackson and others in Mexico, Shaara turns his hand to the Second World War with the opening of a four-part series chronicling firstly the war in Europe and North Africa, and then the conclusion of the Pacific campaign.

The Rising Tide opens shortly after America has entered the war with a prologue about British tankers (similar to how Shaara opened his excellent World War One novel, To The Last Man), and then switches gears, focusing in on a group of commanding officers on both the Allied and German sides.

Dwight D. Eisenhower is a chief character in Shaara’s narrative which could be considered a little dry at times as American and British officers work their way military planning and delicate political decision-making ahead of Operation Torch, the Allied invasion of French-held North Africa. Shaara’s portrayal of Eisenhower is absolutely fantastic, perfectly capturing the American general’s frustrations and triumphs. He’s torn between battlefield concerns, political concerns and the continuing mission to make the Allied army allied.

Even better is Shaara’s storytelling from the point of view of Erwin Rommel. In books and movies about World War Two, Rommel is mostly a faceless enemy general, though admittedly a very talented one, but Shaara’s depiction goes a long way to humanising the man known as The Desert Fox.

How Rommel managed to have as much success in North Africa as he did is amazing, considering everything he had to battle: the Italians and their inferior army, a mystery ailment with the power to render him bedridden, the fact that Montgomery was proving a major thorn in his side unlike any British general before him, and the strange whims of Adolf Hitler. It’s a fascinating tale, and early on Rommel recognises – if only to himself – that Germany won’t win the war with a certifiably mad Hitler in charge. He’s not Hitler’s lackey like you might have expected him to be – like I expected him to be. Rommel was the most intriguing figure in this book, and by a long way!

One area where Shaara’s To The Last Man parted with his old formula of focusing main on generals, mostly behind the lines, was to tell the tales of ordinary soldiers, men who Shaara obviously researched thoroughly, and now gives excellent voice to. We get to experience the life of a tanker through the eyes of Floridian Jack Logan, and then that of a paratrooper, the hard-as-nails New Mexico native, Jesse Adams. This, for mine, makes The Rising Tide far a brilliantly-rounded story on the – mostly American – experiences in North Africa and Sicily.

It took a while to get going, and really didn’t hit it’s straps until the first Americans landed as part of Operation Torch, but from there, The Rising Tide picks up and flies along, proving that Shaara is a master of historical fiction. Can’t wait to read the next instalment.

Book Review: The Triumph of the Sun by Wilbur Smith

My first Wilbur Smith book was an interesting experience. I’d heard mixed reviews for his works, but had an inclination to read The Triumph of the Sun because it dealt with the siege of Khartoum, which is a fairly important moment in British military history, and not for positive reasons, either.

General ‘Chinese’ Gordon and an Egyptian contingent are trapped in the city of Khartoum on the banks of the Nile, besieged by an army led by the Mahdi, a religious fanatic determined to crush the infidel at the earliest possible opportunity. Worse than that for the British general, his prime minister isn’t immediately of any real mind to send a giant relief column to his rescue, so the town, running low on food and morale, and stricken by all sorts of sickness – not to mention thievery, which Gordon deals with brutally – must try and survive.

David Benbrook is the consul general in Khartoum, and a fairly close ally of Gordon’s. His three daughters, Rebecca, Saffron and Amber, are getting a frightening look at the modern battlefield siege. Around them, British hero Captain Penrod Ballantyne and the slightly roguish and very charming merchant, another Brit, Ryder Courtney. The two men don’t get on particularly well, and things between them deteriorate when – yep, you guessed it – they both develop feelings for Rebecca Benbrook. Every good adventure book has a love triangle, right?

Smith is obviously enamoured with the continent and the era, for his descriptions of life in the desert are second-to-none, though they tend to somewhat overshadow the propulsion of the story, in a similar manner to how Tom Clancy’s exhaustive pages on how a particular weapon works can do the same. But when you get passed that, you realise that Smith has crafted a very good adventure/war novel, coming at the siege of Khartoum from all angles, and tying all his characters together nicely.

I was a little surprised when Khartoum fell in typically and expected ghastly fashion with still a good two hundred pages left, and even more surprised when the book, which, to that point, had dealt with only the time of the siege expanded and spread itself out over a number of years into the future. Months and months would lapse with seemingly each turn of the page. It felt like reading a second book (or a series of anecdotes), yet it was the same one, and I found it a little strange the way Smith had constructed the final third of what was otherwise a very engaging story, as long as you don’t mind plenty of violence and sexual situations.

Clearly, it was to ensure that the reader understood that Great Britain’s armies ended up triumphing. Lord Kitchener’s forces dealt the Mahdi a severe blow at the Battle of Omdurman, which went a long way to furthering Kitchener’s military fame, and Smith wrapped up the story soon after that – many years after it started.

The Triumph of the Sun was basically what I expected: a very descriptive story about the siege of Khartoum. I’m going to read Assegai at some stage, an African adventure set around the time of the First World War – again, because that period interests me – but the jury’s out as to whether I’ll read any more of Smith’s work.

Book Review: Without Remorse (John Clark #01) by Tom Clancy

Amongst the many and varied characters that Tom Clancy created to surround and assist his hero, Jack Ryan, the most intriguing one – at least, to me – has always been the CIA officer John Clark. We know he’s a legend, and is always there, involved in audacious operations, but, for a long time, Clancy did little in the way of elaborating on what you knew was a very interesting, murky backstory.

Then came Without Remorse, chronologically the first book in the Tom Clancy universe. Set in the waning years of the Vietnam War. Featuring great cameos from James Greer, Bob Ritter and even a young Jack Ryan, tying Kelly’s backstory into the wider Clancy universe, it tells the story of John Terrence Kelly, former Navy SEAL, a decorated warrior, who is wandering around Baltimore after the death of his pregnant wife when he picks up a hitchhiker named Pam Madden. This event changes Kelly’s life forever, and sets into motion the avalanche of events that will see him join the Central Intelligence Agency and become the lethally effective Mr Clark.

Unbeknownst to Kelly at the time, Pam was a prostitute, had escaped from a group profiteering not just from the hire of girls, but also the growing drug trade. On a drive through Baltimore, they’re ambushed. Pam is killed and Kelly sustains horrific injuries from a shotgun blast.

In the hospital, the former SEAL decides to not leave the matter of Pam’s death in the hands of the Baltimore Police Department. Instead, he takes matters into his own hands, taking out various figures in the Baltimore drug underworld, all connected to the ring that Pam was forced to work for. In the hospital, Kelly meets the beautiful young nurse Sandra O’Toole, herself dealing with the loss of someone close: her husband, Tim, in Vietnam.

At the same time, in Vietnam, a covert prison camp is discovered by satellite imagery. Unlike the infamous Hanoi Hilton facility, the men who are kept in the covert camp have officially been listed as dead by the North Vietnamese Army. Colonel Robin Zacharias, a fighter pilot with extensive knowledge of America’s defense mechanisms, and is grilled for information by a Russian colonel.

When the CIA finds out about the camp, they put together an audacious operation, and one of the admirals in charge, Dutch Maxwell, is familiar with Kelly’s work from earlier in the war, and brings Kelly back into the fold, first to plan the mission, and then to go in early. But, as is often the case in Clancy novels, there’s an American agent working for the Russians, who betrays the mission. Kelly manages to capture the Russian on his way out, and is heavily involved in the hunt for the mole.

As the Baltimore body count continues to grow, there’s a great cameo from a young Jack Ryan, whose father, Emmet, is one of the investigating detectives, who eventually connect the dots, and have Kelly as their main suspect. The CIA offer Kelly a job, his relationship with Nurse O’Toole deepens, and everything comes to a head in the last twenty pages in what can only be described as an explosive ending.

Without Remorse is one of the darker Clancy stories. Kelly is very ruthless, but his character is redeemed by the way he deliberately avoids collateral damage, and completely rules out ever shooting a cop. He’s fuelled by thoughts of revenge against the framework of the drug organisation who killed Pam, and nothing more.

Clancy expertly writes Kelly in his vengeful drug dealer-killing frame of mind, and Kelly as a meticulous operational planner for the Vietnam mission, and then his relationship with O’Toole and the two doctors, Sam and Sarah Rosen. By the end, you’re left in no doubt as to Kelly/Clark being an honourable man – just one you wouldn’t want to make an enemy out of.

One negative: there are many sub-plots around Kelly’s story, most of which weren’t critical to the plot, and Clancy does tend to go overboard with each character’s musing. His elaborate description of various technologies that tend to make me lose a little concentration. If you can put up with that – and I could – you’re in for a real treat.

Without Remorse is a stellar read, and easily in my Top 3 favourite Clancy novels.