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- SL Rez
- 2008
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- 2009
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Racing turns hard into esports while the real world is on hold
The drivers love it, everyone's playing nice, and the ratings aren't bad either.
I mentioned last week that Fox Sports will start broadcasting esports alternative for NASCAR on the iRacing platform. Interesting times.When it comes to sports, 2020 is going to be one of those asterisk years, like 1919. People years from now will scroll down the page to a note explaining that "*normal stuff was supposed to happen, but then we had a pandemic instead." The Summer Olympics are being postponed for a year, and pretty much every major sports series is on hold as organizers anxiously wait to see if public gatherings can happen once more later in the year.
Motorsports is no exception, and its prospects are bleak when you consider what collapsing sales will do to marketing budgets. But while the pandemic rages, drivers, teams, and series are coming together online to put on a show for the rest of us. Or as NASCAR's Scott Warfield puts it, to give people "a distraction for 90 minutes, two hours on a Sunday and return some sense of normality to their lives."