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This week is a big one in the NASCAR calendar. It’s NASCAR Champions Week in Nashville culminating in the 2023 NASCAR Awards Ceremony on Thursday evening. It’s the final celebration of the 2023 season, but, is something missing from Champions Week?
NASCAR Champions Week is more like a weekend in the middle of the week. According to championsweek.nascar.com, there are only three events listed.
From 11 am-5 pm, the “NASCAR House” will be set up at Fifth and Broadway featuring plenty of fan activities and multiple driver Q&As throughout the day including every Cup Series Playoff driver. However, from 2:30-3:30 pm, Broadway will be the place for the NASCAR Champions parade. On November 30th, the Awards Ceremony will happen, but, that is closed off to fans.
Obviously, the two events that fans do have access to are pretty cool. However, they are both in the middle of the day on a weekday. It’s tough for the average NASCAR fan in the area to take off work to go to what truly is a one-day show on Tuesday. Compare that to an old event NASCAR had, Burnouts on Broadway, which was at night and very popular amongst fans.
In terms of drivers on stage, there was also a very popular event called “After the Lap”, which featured every NASCAR Playoff driver from the previous year, not just groups of four. This branded itself as the “Driver tell-all” from the previous season, and it had some pretty incredible moments. One of which included Jeff Gordon break dancing on stage.
The events that are there are cool, but there are not many. The events that are there are during the day, so few fans can attend. That is not like it once was during older Champions Week festivities.
The actual awards ceremony being closed off to fans is completely understandable. However, allowing the event to be streamed online is a must for those who are interested. Well, the event is being streamed, but not on live television.
While MRN via Sirius XM NASCAR Radio doing a radio broadcast of the event live is a good thing, fans would prefer being able to see the event live. Peacock will stream it, but it will be on tape delay on Sunday at 7 pm ET. The video streaming is a curious move.
Peacock is not a TV channel, so neither NASCAR nor NBC is pushing programming out of a channel’s time slot. A streaming service should be able to handle multiple live events at a time, and Peacock does this with sports all the time.
While Sunday night may be a better time for NASCAR fans to sit down and watch it, it’s still on tape delay. This can be worked around by keeping an archive of the broadcast on Peacock for anyone who wants to watch it on their own time. While it would be great to have this on live cable or network TV, the NASCAR Awards Ceremony is not going to be a major ratings winner, so, Peacock is the best to get.
Nashville is the current location for the NASCAR Champions Week. Generally, Nashville has welcomed NASCAR with open arms during that week. It first hosted the event in 2019, and, the local support for the event likely played a large part in Nashville getting a Cup Series date on the schedule.
However, 2023 is the fifth year of the event in Nashville. Now that NASCAR has been relegated to hosting every event a fan can access in the middle of a weekday, it may be worthwhile to ask whether or not Nashville should still host the event. It may still be a great place for it, but, maybe they could change it up for variety’s sake.
Maybe Charlotte, North Carolina could be a place for it. The NASCAR Hall of Fame is there after all. Daytona Beach, Florida is another candidate since it is the place where NASCAR was born. Maybe those places can host the event as well, maybe even in rotation with each other and a place like Nashville.
NASCAR Champions Week may not have all of the events it once had. It also does not have much major media coverage. Is that what is missing from NASCAR’s Champions Week?
