NASCAR TRADITION TAKES A HIT WITH EASTER NIGHT RACE AT RICHMOND
- For most of the past 76 years (the history of NASCAR), Easter weekend has been spent away from the track.
- The weekend's race at Richmond marks the third consecutive year of racing on Easter.
- The 1989 spring Richmond race was snowed out and postponed exactly a month, to Easter Sunday. That was the last Easter race date for NASCAR since the current three-year run.
The late Anne B. France never worried about spring football.
Nor did France sweat the Olympics affecting her family’s new stock car racing enterprise in the late 1940s. One of her concerns, though, was that this young company called NASCAR shouldn’t be open for business on Easter Sunday.
Too bad those following her haven’t always been as perceptive. If so, this weekend’s 400-lap, 300-mile Cup Series race at Richmond (Va.) Raceway wouldn’t be scheduled for 7 p.m. on Easter Sunday.
Blame that on FOX/ESPN for pushing racing aside in favor of the United Football League. That new league opens with two Saturday afternoon games on FOX and two Sunday afternoon games on ESPN/FOX. That Sunday telecast and the two-weekend break while NBC televises the July 26-Aug. 11 Olympics are why Richmond has such an unorthodox date.
Blame might be a strong word when it comes to TV. After all, the networks pay a bundle in rights fees so maybe it's okay if they have more than a little say-so in scheduling matters.
Generally, the schedule-makers in Daytona Beach have 52 weekends for 36 points races and two exhibitions. Because of the NBC/Olympic agreement, they have only 50 this year. Without that break, teams might have had Easter weekend off as they have for most of the last 76 years. As it is, they open with 22 consecutive events—including the May 19 All-Star race—have two weekends off, then go 14 more weekends, ending Nov. 10 with the Championship Weekend near Phoenix.
More often than not, stock car racing has tried to avoid Easter races. Credit that to Mrs. France, wife of NASCAR founder the late Bill France Sr., and mother of the late Bill France Jr. and his brother, current company executive Jim France. It was her belief that Easter should be reserved for families to attend religious services, then gathering for lunch.
Mostly, she got her way. NASCAR didn’t schedule Easter races in the 1950s and only a few in the 1960s, mostly because of weather-related backlogs. As dates became more valuable and new tracks came on line wanting races, Mrs. France’s effort to keep Easter an open date began going away.
NASCAR raced on Easter only once in the 1970s. That weather-postp0ned 500-miler at Atlanta was bittersweet for winner Bobby Allison, a devout Catholic. “Today is the first Easter I’ve ever raced, and I’d just as soon not have to ever race on Easter again,” he said. “Since I was committed here last weekend (when rain forced a delay), I felt obligated to be back. But I’d rather have been home with my family, observing Easter as a family should.”
One of the sport’s most popular drivers, Allison never faced that problem again. There wasn’t another Easter Cup race for 19 years, well after life-threatening injuries from a Pocono crash ended his Hall of Fame career. The 1989 spring Richmond race was snowed out and postponed exactly a month, to Easter Sunday. The late Paul Sawyer’s family ran the track then, but had no say-so about the makeup date.
“We weren’t thrilled with it, but we had to play the cards we were dealt,” said Bill Sawyer, Paul’s son and current owner-operator of Virginia Motor Speedway near Tappahannock, Va. “Daddy always said Easter and Mother’s Day were the only dates you didn’t want. In our case, we didn’t sell even one more ticket for the March date than we had for the February date. It was either race on Easter Sunday or lose the date and face the consequences.”
It would be 33 years before NASCAR returned to Easter. The 2022 and 2023 dirt-track races at Bristol were on Easter Sunday nights, a weak concession to fans who wanted to observe Easter before going racing. FOX televised those races in what company vice president Bill Wagner said was a growing trend toward televising major events on holidays.
“We thought, ‘you know, there’s been such a movement of putting great sporting events on holidays,’ ” he told Sports Business Journal at the time. “Over the last few years, take Thanksgiving-NFL; take Christmas-NBA; and most recently, Christmas-NFL. We felt there was an opportunity to create the next great holiday tradition with putting the Bristol dirt race on Easter night. It was our commitment to making sure Easter could be observed in a meaningful way, that Fox was willing to commit resources to have some sort of televised celebration.”
As for Richmond and this weekend’s Sunday night race:
Raceway president Lori Waran said the track will have an inter-denominational service on Sunday afternoon featuring members of the NASCAR community. “No, no, no, we’re definitely not overlooking Easter,” she emphasized. “Our service at 3 o’clock is free and open to the public out in our amphitheater, where we can accommodate 6,000 people, even those without race tickets. We’ll have messages from Joe Gibbs and Corey LaJoie and other racers, and music from Michael Tait.”
Not surprisingly, she found positives in the scheduling. “Our fans have been asking for night racing to come back and we’re so proud and excited to do that for them,” she said. “We’re going to own prime-time sports programming that night, which is an excellent opportunity for our region, the Commonwealth, and our sport.”
Yeah, maybe… but it’s still Easter Sunday night. Wouldn’t that “excellent opportunity” have been just as “excellent” on Saturday afternoon or Saturday night? Or—and here’s a too-late-to-consider idea—simply push the Phoenix season-ender a week later, to Nov. 17?
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