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All I want is more short tracks and road courses, and I think the rest will take care of itself. A lot of the tracks on the current calendar (1.5 mile cookie cutters mainly) are seriously stale.

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I think the tyres play a major part, if Goodyear keeps bringing rocks to every race there won't be much improvement on the current situation.

Well, I probably watched nearly every damn Cup race live from '97-2004, at least. There were good races then, and there were bad. I've seen many older races than that, there's good ones and bad.

Whatever it is, I just can't make myself give a damn about this season. I've watched a grand total of 25 laps combined from the last two races, and I felt like I haven't missed a damn thing. Don't know why, but it just feels that way.

Definitely agree we need a softer tire and more short track/road courses.

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We've always had the 1.5 mile tracks on the schedule, and they have definitely put on some amazing races. It isn't the tracks, it's the combination of the tires and the COT.

You and me both. I didn't see a lap of the race at Texas, and I feel like I'm just watching bits and pieces of races now.

I think it was ok when you had Charlotte, Atlanta and Michigan be the only downforce tracks on the schedule so teams didn't give them any more importance than the other tracks but with more than half the schedule being those tracks now, teams have scienced out the setups to the nth degree to make every use of aerodynamics possible. You look at the attitude of the cars at these tracks in the 80s and 90s and the front would be high up in the air, bobbing around over the bumps and clearly not optimized for best downforce but that meant they could run closer to each other (which is what people refer to when talking about better racing in those days, not statistically closer racing necessarily) unlike today when they're all neatly glued to the ground and lose grip as soon as they get close to each other. How do you forget that knowledge now? You can't, so shorties and roadies are the only way to get away from that since the speeds are so low, aero will never be a big factor and it will always be more about the driver manhandling the car to get the best out of it at those places.

This post nailed it. Aerodynamics are killing the ability to run close in the corners. Combine that with cars that are very equal on both the straightaways and the corners and it's almost impossible to pass and things get spread out in a hurry.

You no longer see drivers lose the car on their own and spin it back into the wall. Now, a slight correction of the steering wheel saves the car. The cars just seem so damn stable these days, and rather slide around when handing becomes a huge issue.

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I think aero plays a part, which makes me slightly concerned about the return to sleeker bodyshapes. But why didn't the boxier COT achieve the goals of reducing aero push/loose and overall closer competition it was intended to? With the upright windshields and higher noses the expectation was for more truck or early 90's cup-style racing, but we never got that. Maybe the tyres and shock rules play a much bigger part than we realise.

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Well something that always struck me as a bit odd was they wanted aerodynamics to have less of an effect when cars were following each other. But then they gave the car a splitter which made them more aero sensitive on the front. Seemed a bit backwards to me.

I agree with everything said. I remember some good races on the 1.5 miles tracks back in the day. I used to look forward to The Winston/All Star at Charlotte. We're set up for a complete farce this season if the racing is going to stay like this.

Anyways, gotta be a combination of the hard tires and COT for sure. The COT has been around a while now but it seems the teams have finally mastered it this season. I think the Nationwide car is suffering from the same things as the Cup car now. It's taken away the excitement of seeing guys on the edge. It seems like the cars are just glued to the track with no fear of ever losing control. Sure they get loose but they snap right back into place. That's gotta be the key reason that cautions are down 44% this year. I vote for the shorter spoiler at ALL tracks not just Dega/Tona.

Even short tracks aren't safe from bad racing. Bristol and Martinsville had moments where it just wasn't fun. I watched the tape delayed broadcast of the K&N Bristol race on SPEED last week and talk about old school, I really miss those cars, slipping and sliding and really battling hard through the field. Maybe we can get back to that with a few changes and some tires that actually wear out. The trucks still seem to race a little better but of course we get plenty of letdowns.

Richmond this weekend... Last Fall it was carnage but the year before that they ran 400 laps with only three cautions (debris, single car spin, rain). Let's hope it's not a complete snoozer like that one.

A friend of mine talked to a front-running Cup driver who said the real problem even before going to the COT was not the body but these coilbind/bumpstop setups under the car that had you running on virtually solid springs and almost totally dependent on aerodynamic downforce for majority of the grip. The COT didn't reduce the downforce dependency of the chassis that was brought about by these type of setups but instead reduced the total available downforce on the car. That's like giving a man a smaller fish instead of teaching him how to fish, lol. What's worse is the COT moved the distribution of the downforce more toward the back which meant it was even worse in dirty air and all drivers complained of no front grip and unable to turn. On top of all this, the top-heavy nature of the car made it abuse tyres which meant hard tyres became the necessity at many tracks. It's a pretty sad comedy of errors really and a very tall order for the 2013 car to fix but we can hope.

At the end of the day the golden rule that the teams are always smarter than the sanctioning body applies. The more the sanction tries to tighten the rules to produce equality, the more the good teams will get clever and eek out that last little bit of performance to gain an advantage to circumvent the newest rule. The CoT, and the racing as a by product of that, are no different.

Once the teams get there brains around the new car, it'll be business as usual. Fewer 1.5 mile bore factories and fewer rules governing, nay, dictating the racing, are needed to get NASCAR back to where it was when we all made Sunday's an armchair afternoon.