Miss the Hall of Fame inductions? Yeah, so did everybody

The NASCAR Hall of Fame enshrined five new inductees Friday evening, but hardly anybody actually saw it happen.

That’s because SPEED was preoccupied with the Barrett-Jackson car auctions Friday night and decided to put the Hall of Fame inductions on tape delay. That means the only people actually able to see the ceremonies live were the people actually in attendance.

What makes the situation worse is the inductions are not only on tape delay, but SPEED decided to not show the ceremonies until 6 p.m. ET Sunday, a full two days after the actual event and right in the middle of the NFL Championship games. Are you kidding me?

I understand television is a business, and SPEED makes money by showing the Barrett-Jackson auctions, but come on. This is the event where the legends of NASCAR are honored, and it’s going to be shown on a two-day tape delay.

SPEED will showcase another 11 hours of the Barrett-Jackson car auctions Saturday and maybe programming contracts didn’t allow that to change, but the audience Saturday morning would even likely be larger than what SPEED will get with the Sunday afternoon timeslot.

One of the supposed problems with NASCAR is that the Chase coincides with the start of the NFL season, which hurts the television ratings during the most important time of the NASCAR season.

Now SPEED decided to once again go head-to-head with the NFL in late January, as well. There is no doubt the induction ceremonies will get mercilessly spanked in the television ratings. Even the most diehard NASCAR fans will find it tough to skip football to watch a ceremony.

I guess I thought NASCAR had outgrown the days when its events didn’t make live television. Instead, this weekend NASCAR returned to the ABC Wide World of Sports days when snippets of the races were the only NASCAR racing fans got to see on a given weekend.

I understand NASCAR wanted to make the Hall of Fame inductions part of a preseason “NASCAR Acceleration” weekend to get fans in the Charlotte area pumped up for the season, but not airing the induction ceremonies live flies in the face of NASCAR’s overriding goal for the last decade: expand its fan base.

If this was how NASCAR approached its decisions, we’d probably still have two races at Rockingham and Darlington and would not have races in Chicago or Kansas.

The Hall of Fame induction ceremonies are also an evening that celebrates the history of the sport, and it is important for fans to either learn about that history, or relive the excitement of those days. That’s what the Hall of Fame is all about.

SPEED does a great job with the Hall of Fame biographies on each inductee, but there were a ton of programs the network could have shown this weekend. Shoot, last weekend it spent 21 hours showing mostly singe car testing runs at Daytona.

NASCAR doesn’t own SPEED and therefore has little control of how the network chooses to cover the sport. However, SPEED, which has branded itself the official network of the NASCAR Hall of Fame, should have found a better way to handle the Hall of Fame’s biggest event.

Hopefully inductees Dale Inman, Cale Yarborough, Darrell Waltrip, Glen Wood and the family of Richie Evans had one of the best evenings of their lives. Too bad hardly any NASCAR fans were able to watch the legends of their favorite sport honored.