Well it’s that time of the year again You guessed it, the last race of the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series is almost here. This season’s finale will be on of the most intense† races of the last decade as Denny Hamlin and Kevin Harvick are both in position to overthrow Jimmie Johnson’s four-year run as the Sprint NASCAR Cup Champion.
Many of you may be asking, why should I spend three hours of my Sunday watching a bunch of cars turn left? I could be watching Ben Roethlisburger or Tom Brady lead their teams to another victory on their way to a Super Bowl Championship.
To begin, this weekend could mark the end of one of the most dominant dynasties in sports history. Jimmie Johnson is the reining four time Sprint Cup Champion and in 2009 he became the only driver in the history of NASCAR to win the Sprint Cup Championship four times in a row. Currently, Denny Hamlin, driver of the number 11 FedEx car, leads the series by a very shaky 15 points. This slim lead means that every lap will count going into the Ford 400 on Sunday at the Homestead-Miami Speedway.
For those of you who may not have watched NASCAR in the past, I ask only that you take a few moments on Sunday and flip the channel, after all, when Roethlisberger makes a wrong turn he gets sacked, when Denny Hamlin makes a wrong turn, a bunch of cars explode. Lets be honest who doesn’t want to watch some cars explode? I mean, if people didn’t like exploding cars, “Mythbusters” would have been off the air five years ago.
Now as much as I love to watch Big Ben get his bell rung, pun intended, this Sunday offers a chance to watch sports history in the making. Drivers this weekend are going to be looking to take the lead on every lap. I predict this level of intensity and competition is going to lead to some extremely aggressive driving which might just cause a season ending crash for one of the top contenders for the cup.
Now, I know many of you are still skeptical, perhaps you feel that NASCAR isn’t even a sport. After all, you make a bunch of left turns on your way to Wal-Mart every day, right?
All I ask of any skeptics is this; just try it, for America. There is nothing more American than filling really fast cars with tons of expensive gasoline just to watch them drive in a circle.
Who knows, you might just find out why hundreds of thousands of people spend hundreads of millions of dollars just to watch those left turns.