Hey, dudes: Let's make NASCAR 'Greener.' Brian France needs your suggestions

What do you think NASCAR CEO Brian France and his men should be doing to help stock car racing 'get green.'

NOTHING!!!!!!!

And, part two: in this new era of 35 mpg, and 'green, green, green,' and hybrid-engine street cars, alternative fuels, and such, how can NASCAR remain relevant to this new America?

THEY ARE RELEVANT!!! PEOPLE DO NOT WANT TO DRIVE GO-CARTS!!!!!!!

Mike-seriously. Have you ever walked around the parking lot at a race? I made a special effort to note this at Speedweeks last year. I stayed at the Ramada Inn for six nights, so I had plenty of time to kill. The overwhelming majority of vehicles were by American manufacturers, and most of them were trucks or SUVs. Other than for political reasons, people DO NOT want to drive a glorified golf cart around. If gas isn’t artificially inflated to $4.00 a gallon, and the economy isn’t destroyed by an ultra liberal media in conjunction with a Socialist presidential candidate, people want to drive safe, decent sized, cars, trucks and SUVs. There is no gas or oil shortage, and there is NO manmade global warming. People who take these issues to heart are not going to be race fans no matter what you do. They would think we are all cavemen with an IQ of 50 even if everyone rode their bicycles to the track to watch a parade of Prius pilots rocket around.

Race fans do not want to see hybrid cars on the track, be it a pace car, but very much less in competition. Put a damn Corvette at the front of pace laps and leave that other junk to the tree-huggers’ convention. If anything, the fans would like to see faster, louder, more powerful cars. Put 43 drivers in 1971 Mercury’s and Dodges and watch the grandstands be SRO. These things they are driving today are ridiculous already. Keep the safety components and make the bodies look like a 1984 car, not a damn egg like these jokes that Honda and Toyota are making. All this aero crap would go away, and the racing would be excellent.

Then we get Al Gore? Are you freaking kidding me? California may be the only location where he wouldn’t be completely booed out of the place. Bring him to Darlington, or even better yet, Talladega. I would pay to see that one. The person who has been most instrumental in perpetrating the biggest scam in the history of the world should not be welcomed into the world of NASCAR. If he is, and this “green” crap gains traction and is touted by NASCAR, I will NEVER EVER attend or watch another race again. It will be dead to me, and I didn’t just start paying attention a couple years ago-I went to my first race in 1974 when I was 4 years old, and have been going ever since. I’m feeling the tug of that already with the way they have spit on the very people that got them where they are today. If Richard Petty would not have been able to salvage his team, I may have hastened in that direction. I have a feeling that when the King is gone, coupled with the seemingly inevitable loss of one or two races at Martinsville, I will be his-to-reee. The way the young drivers are groomed to be politically-correct marketing robots, I mean, really, who cares? But that is off topic and for another day…

For the record, I am not some toxic waste dumping; change my oil in the creek zealot. I make my living literally improving and saving the environment. I sell and help design wastewater, sewage, and raw water pumping, conveyance, and treatment facilities for municipalities, so I do much more than my share. Much more than Mr. Al Gore does himself, in reality. Maybe I should be a Grand Marshall. I’m certainly more qualified than that jackass. I would be glad to talk to Brian France about everything I have discussed here and much more. I will be in Daytona, in the garage, if you want to set that up.

There is plenty of room in this world and in our lives for political correctness to be shoved down our throats. Please just leave our racing alone.

LazyLane

The "green" revolution is nothing of the kind. The environment is not threatened and never has been. What Al Gore and company have done is bully companies. NASCAR shouldn't let him get away with it. If they want better fuel mileage, plate the cars at all the tracks. Otherwise leave it alone.

well, LazyBrain,
NASCAR already is an anachronism; the last time any car manufacturer used a cast iron V-8 with push rods and a carburetor,...Jimmy Carter was in the White House.
Racing was,..... once upon a time, the proving ground for the best and brightest to develop new ideas, e.g., the Can Am series of the 1960's; NASCAR stock car racing has devolved into a merchandizing machine for the France family: it's American Idol on wheels with a lot of noise.
As an engineer in the pertroleum industry I'll forcast that you're about to be in for a very rude shock, gasoline is going to soon be so expensive that $4 per gallon will be viewed as the good old days when oil was relatively plentiful,...and cheap at $147 per bbl. Oil is now $40 per bbl, but May futures are already trading for about $65 bbl, and that is with a world-wide depression going on.
It is likely that we passed Peak Oil in June '08; the older oil fields are now declining at a rate that new production cannot keep up, a fact that has been exacerbated by the current George Bush financial collapse and the delay of many new projects.
We have drilled all into all of the "easy" oil, the rest of it is going to be more difficult and expensive to extract: it's how I make my living, the new projects in deep water and other unattractive places are all engineering wonders.
The big 2.5 mile track at Indianapolis was built so American car manufacturers would have a place to test their ideas; the year the bricks were put in place the US had more than 400 car companies. They evolved into a about three dozen companies by end of the 1920's and car technology rocketed ahead as huge oil fields were discovered in Texas, making gasoline cheap and the oil companies rich. Those Texas fields peaked in production in 1970 (as predicted by M. King Hubbert in 1956)and we've been increasing our consumption of imported oil ever since.
We can import ourselves into the poor house by continuing to buy more and more foreign oil and export our hard earned $, or we can start exploring some other technologies.
American LeMans Series has been running diesel cars (Audi) for a couple of years (synthetic diesel fuel at that); Zytek is going to run a hybrid car this year, which makes one think that electrics are not far behind.
To quote Henry Ford, "if in 1905 I'd asked farmers what they needed, they'd all have said 'a faster horse.'" But he build the Model T instead and it revolutionized transportation worldwide.
While you may yearn for a faster, and louder horse, what we really need is the next new Model T, only it won't run on oil products.
Racing could be the proving ground to help accelerate the introduction of the next generation vehicle and technology in transportation.
Unfortunately, it seems unlikely in the extreme that NASCAR will be that hot bed of innovation.
prof ei

Why don't they fix ( or unfix) the racing F-I-R-S-T It is awful. The trucks @ Fontana were boring! Green - please - I'm so sick of pc green junk I can barely see straight. In this ecomony ( Which Mr Obama keeps talking down) NASCAR needs to deal with the stuff in their face now. Then worry about green. Get the Trucks & Cars sponsored up!

What a laugh green - they haven't gotten to equality yet. And the rest of us were there decades ago!