Photo Credit: flickr.com/old_boone

My last column talked about the offseason, and how miserable it is for race fans. While that still holds true, there’s no denying that January is a great month for racing. You have the Chili Bowl, the 24 Hours at Daytona, the Bodine Bobsled Challenge, the Polar Bear 150, the Toyota All-Star Showdown at Irwindale, the Dakar Rally, plus a few important and interesting races run here and there.

Why does it seem, then, that most of us remain so detached from racing?

Hello?! Because most of it isn’t televised!

While the Toyota All-Star Showdown and the 24 Hour Daytona race are televised, most of us are left to scrape up whatever morsels we can of the rest of them. Thankfully some radio networks pick up a few of the races, or some media outlets decide it’s worth reading about. However, it might help some of us get our racing fix if we actually had a TV to flip on to view some of these events.

With all of these goings-on, you’d think at least some type of racing news show would appear on a cable channel re-capping all of these events.

Nope! Again we are left in the cold!

While some racing shows are just now making a comeback and are highlighting everything that has happened so far, it all feels recycled. By the time TV finally catches up, the Internet has allowed fans to get up-to-the-minute news on what has happened. Even though a lot of mainstream news outlets don’t cover many of these events, race fans have learned that someone always does. And they’ve gotten good at finding what they need to know. By the time television catches up, race fans already have gotten the information they wanted in the first place.

It’s understandable that people in the media would want to take a break from traveling for a while. After all, most of them have been on the road for around 10 months and are probably looking forward to some down time.

However, I can’t imagine there isn’t a group of people somewhere who wouldn’t mind picking up the events. It doesn’t matter which network it’s on or who is broadcasting the races. Just give the fans something to watch! Let them have some coverage!

Heck, if they could get away with it I’m sure some of the race fans would host it themselves!

As I said previously, race fans are passionate about their racing, their drivers, and their sport. It’s frustrating when some of these events that are apparently a “big deal” is aired weeks after it was originally run, and in some cases not aired at all!

So, at the risk of sounding like I’m begging, I have a plea for any interested parties: Please televise these races next year! It would make it much easier on all of us and you’d get much higher ratings over the offseason!

Godspeed everyone! Racing season is almost here!