Maybe It's The Quarantine Talking, But NASCAR's Esports Takeover Is Hilarious Fun
Furnished content.
As we all live through this bad but real life knockoff of a season of The Walking Dead, we've talked about how professional sports leagues are dealing with forced shutdowns. With auto-racing leading the way, several leagues and/or broadcast stations have turned to broadcasting athletes playing video game versions of their sports since they cannot broadcast the real thing. This has been done over varying mediums and to varying degrees of professionalism, but it's quite clear that there is a thirst during what is nearly a national shutdown for something like the live sports the country regularly enjoys.And maybe I've been confined to one space for too long, but NASCAR's version of all of this, broadcast on Fox Sports, is getting genuinely entertaining. Not only as intended, either, but also due to the wild variance with how serious those involved are taking all of this. Let's start with the NASCAR driver who failed to take it as seriously as those around him would have liked.
The eNASCAR iRacing Pro invitational Series event, where NASCAR drivers are racing each other on the internet because they can’t currently do it in real life, is already giving us some spicy sports action. During Sunday's race, which was televised, Bubba Wallace quit in the middle of a race after tangling with a rival in the most video game way imaginable.
NASCAR driver Bubba Wallace was intentionally bumped in this past weekend's iRacing event, ragequit the game on national television and stream, and then got dropped by his sponsor after the race for doing soesports are definitely sports now pic.twitter.com/XvCAq8eJnW— Rod 'keydaddy' Breslau (@Slasher) April 6, 2020
GTK where you stand. Bye bye Bubba. We're interested in drivers, not quitters.— Blue-Emu (@BlueEmu1) April 5, 2020
In the same event, as The Guardian reports, driver Erik Jones missed qualifying because of connection issues, and “seven-time NASCAR champion Jimmie Johnson fired his spotter less than 20 laps into the race after falsely being told he was clear of another car, only to crash.”If that isn't entertaining on some kind of level then you just don't like sports or video games or weird and interesting events that feel like the future. If all sports is esports now and that means pro athletes getting hammered by sponsors for rage-quitting games on national television, then I'm all for it!
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