The smell of burnt rubber and high octane fuel. The rumble in your chest as the cars race by. The hundreds of decibels of sound bombarding your eardrums. All these things are what bring fans to the stands. What do we do when the season is over? There are just over 2,150 hours from now until the Clash at the LA Coliseum on February 5. How can fans be expected to make it through the offseason with no NASCAR?
Podcasts – 324.5 hours
There are plenty of podcasts available to download. Door Bumper Clear’s 2022 season runs right at 67.5 hours. Dale Jr. Download will take up about 120 hours of your time. You can spend another 46 hours listening to Stacking Pennies with Corey LaJoie. Fan-run podcasts can help fill in more time. Fast Lap Podcast with Chrissi & Deb (@FastLap_Podcast) can fill up another day or so if you start at the beginning. Behind the Wall Podcast, Twitter-famous for their Rogue Tire counter, has 13 hours of content. While GasNGo no longer has new content, the library containing each phenomenal episode will give you around 54 hours of amazing content. Best of all, coming soon, you can listen to the Pit Pass Network podcast!!!
TV shows – 30 hours
Reruns of “Race for the Championship” (available on Peacock) can kill 10 hours of your time. This series covers the Championship 16 from the 2022 season. All 6 episodes of “Race: Bubba Wallace” are available to stream on Netflix and will use up about 5 hours. “Lost Speedways” covers Dale Jr’s search for lost speedways and delves into the history behind many old tracks that have long since closed. Airing on Peacock, the entire library will currently cover 8 hours of viewing time. If you’re looking for less realness, try the “reality” series featuring Austin Dillon (once again, available on Peacock) titled “Austin Dillon’s Life in the Fast Lane”. Season One is 3.5 hours long. Only slightly less realistic, “The Crew” on Netflix is also about 3.5 hours for the season.
Movies – 30.5 hours
“Days of Thunder”, “Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby”, “Herby: Fully Loaded”, and a whole lot of other really random movies gives you almost 25 hours of viewing pleasure. This includes films such as “Stroker Ace” featuring Burt Reynolds and “Speedway” featuring Elvis Presley. If you add in the Cars franchise, that’s another 5.5 hours of quality feature films. Stretching outside of the NASCAR-focused films into general “high speed car chases” territory opens up a much larger variety of films and can eat up several more days’ worth of time.
Books – 200 hours
There are autobiographies, biographies (authorized and unauthorized), and a variety of fictional novels. The time it would take to read through all of them will depend on the reader’s average reading speed, but it should take at least a couple hundred hours. Certainly, do not overlook the latest release, “Buster’s Trip to Victory Lane” by Dale Earnhardt, Jr. This is planned to be a series with the next title “Buster Gets Back on Track”, slated for a 2023 publication date. Another new notable comes from author Sheletta Brundidge, “Brandon Spots His Sign”, an illustrated children’s book about a young Black boy with Autism. While this book isn’t about NASCAR, it does have ties to the Xfinity series as Brundidge’s book sponsored Brandon Brown at the Road America Xfinity race this summer.
“Regular” life – 1,540 hours
Although it doesn’t seem like it, life does go on in the off-season. Fans will spend over 600 hours sleeping between now and the Clash. Eating will take up another 80 hours. Various personal hygiene tasks could be another 80 hours. For those still working, 480 hours (give or take because of holidays) will be used up there. Time spent with family and friends for the holidays, shopping, cooking, cleaning, and all the other things not prioritized during racing season will use another 300 hours.
Total hours used – 2,125 hours
In summary, it’s not a total loss. We can survive this off-season. It may be difficult, but with proper time management, it can be done. What are your plans for survival? Share them in the comments.
