Villeneuve has hard core NASCAR fans worried

The news earlier this week that 1997 Formula One champion Jacques Villeneuve was joining Bill Davis Racing in anticipation of running a full-time Cup schedule next year has left some NASCAR fans feeling a bit conflicted about where their sport is heading. Take a look at a few excerpts from this article by Michael Daly that ran yesterday on the Web site catchfence.com, titled "A Coming De-Americanization of NASCAR?"

It would seem that going to F1 and open wheel championship-style race drivers is a by-product of NASCAR's recent technology revolution. One need only look at this year's rookie battle – Juan Montoya has not consistently grasped racing a stock car, but he remains miles ahead of David Ragan, who looks completely and utterly clueless.

Which begs the question — is NASCAR going to become de-Americanized? We saw it with the technology revolution of open wheel championship racing in the 1980s and then there is the proverbial dog that didn't bark — what we AREN'T seeing is as telling as what we are seeing; in this case what we aren't seeing is any particular lobby for seat-of-the-pants short trackers to race Winston Cup cars.

Now this may be just a comparative fad; right now I don't particularly see Winston Cup becoming F1 lite as far as most of its drivers go. But I also don't see it getting back to the kind of seat-of-the-pants racers that are more worth embracing than the engineering conduits that F1-style drivers too often come out as. And given what the sport has already lost in terms of soul and competitive fire, losing that kind of racer will hurt it even more.

The F1 phenomenon presents a clear conflict for NASCAR fans. On one hand, the migration of the circuit's drivers to Nextel-Cup is a clear sign that stock-car racing, because of its competitiveness, has the sort of status it once lacked in comparison to other series. A few weeks ago at Watkins Glen, Juan Pablo Montoya said as much when he told me why he made the move to NASCAR, "There's nothing more exciting than driving a car in Formula One. But the racing in the Formula-One car is not that exciting."

[Editor's Note: What a load of BS that NASCAR teams might be hiring F1 drivers because of their technical prowess. There is little technology in NASCAR. Is it just a coincidence that NASCAR is luring some of the best internationally known open wheel drivers (mostly washed up drivers who could no longer win in open wheel) as a way of increasing their popularity abroad through the fans of those drivers?]