On Tuesday, the guys from Jalopnik ran a cool story that investigated the thousands and thousands of FCC complaints filed by NASCAR fans watching races on TV. It really is a great read and gives you some insight into what people are thinking, construing, and doing while watching a typical NASCAR race. I won’t spoil the plot for you, but lots of people complained about ads for products to get men’s junk working properly, ads with chicks eating hamburgers too sexily, an offensive shirt they saw on someone in the background, and even a secret organization being run by Brian France hell bent on wrecking the world. I’m serious about the last one.

While I don’t necessarily agree with the above complaints they at least make some sense (especially the Brian France secret organization one!) with regard to people who view the world in a specific way. There’s one section of these complaints though, the numerous ones that center around hearing a drive or crew chief/crew member swear, that really gets me up on the chip. Why? Because all we ever hear about regarding modern drivers is that they all say the same things. They don’t care enough. They don’t speak their minds. Then, when you do hear someone speaking honestly as they do during a race, the FCC complaints roll in. The fact is people want some nice fantasy land version of “reality” from race car drivers that doesn’t and never will exist. The reality of professional racing is that it is dirty, salty, kind of ugly up close, and capable of wiping out any premeditated notions you have of people from seeing them on any form of media instantly.

This isn’t a new thing. Reporters covering major league sports looked past the off field antics of players for years to preserve some sort of hero status among their followers. Take Mickey Mantle for example. Decades after his playing days, the stories of his drunken antics and debauchery began to leak out and they were covered widely in different books and films made since then. During his playing days, Mantle was known as a nice guy with a broad smile who looked good doing Maypo commercials. Truth is, he was a man who pretty much drank himself to death and famously brought his mistress AND his wife to his 1969 retirement ceremony. At the time, it wasn’t reported on. Practice was for sports reporters to report on what they saw players do on the fields, not them vomiting on a sidewalk from drinking themselves into a stupor. The public got the reality they wanted and everyone was happy (except Mantle’s liver). Had TMZ existed during his playing days, Mantle would have been outed and who knows what would have happened next.

It boggles my mind to think that people can sit on their couch and believe that a conversation between a racer and a crew chief would go something like this –

Racer: Hey, my car isn’t handling so swell. 

Crew Chielf: Nuts! Let’s see if me and the fellows can come up with a plan to fix it. 

Racer: Please do…post haste! The other gents seem to be pulling away from us!

Crew Chief: Fiddlesticks!

Someone sitting there watching a race really heard the F-word and was shocked by that during an unannounced wire-tap of a team radio? I bet half of the people who filed complaints went to work the next day and told someone about how boring today’s drivers are. The whole thing just strikes me as insane and immensely frustrating. You can’t complain about something that you know you don’t really want.

My initiation into this scene came when I started working with IHRA almost a decade ago. I’d see guys get out of their cars and literally melt down. They’d go completely ape-bleep, scream, yell, throw stuff, threaten the crew and the crew chief, and basically do everything but shank someone with a hastily made knife. Then, they’d hop in front of the TV camera or visit me on the microphone and thank the fans, thank their crew, and vow to go get ’em next week. Of course the TV cameras wouldn’t be aimed at the guy when he was going Chernobyl and I was told that they never would be because “people don’t want to see that.” The person who informed me of this was a television guy who had absolutely zero interest in drag racing and was just “doing his job”. At the time I thought he was an idiot and people would be frothing at the mouth to see such raw emotion and to get a clear indication of just how strong the drive for these guys to win is . Now, I bet there would be a slew of FCC complaints about how offended people were about the anger displayed by the racer.

While I have come to know a couple truly pious people in the ranks of professional racing, the majority of racers both past and present aren’t going to qualify for sainthood anytime soon, yet there seems to be a large portion of the fan population that thinks their personal favorite racer is next on the list for canonization. Smokey Yunick tried to mate with every female that walked by and happily admitted so in his book. Hell, he got it on with a nurse while he was hospitalized! Other guys were fighters, drinkers, transporters or distributors of controlled substances, etc. All of these same personality traits exist today.

Actual “real” racing coverage would generate so many complaints from “fans” that the FCC HQ would start to glow red like a set of headers on a Formula One car. From the language, to the attitudes, to the way people simply interact with one another, an actual look at how “sausage is made” racing style would be great to watch the one time it ever aired in history. John Q Fan would have a nervous breakdown. It wouldn’t be kid friendly. The squeaky clean images of many drivers would implode after the first radio exchange. It would be the most compelling and awesome thing in history….and something that no one actually wants to see, apparently.

The “reality” we get fed now is but a husk of what is actually happening and even that is too much for many people. Don’t hold you breath for the situation to get any better. Perhaps writing an FCC letter to complain about a lack of profanity would help.