The NASCAR All-Star race was super boring, so let’s try making it better

The 2017 NASCAR All-Star Race was great for Kyle Busch and his No. 18 team, but we need ideas to make it better for the rest of us.

All-Star events in any sport are always tricky. You need to make them a spectacle for the fans and give the athletes a reason to care about them. No major North American sport has them perfected, and NASCAR certainly didn’t with what it just served up on Saturday night at Charlotte Motor Speedway.

To be fair, the track pulls out all the stops to make the Monster Energy NASCAR All-Star Race a great overall experience for fans, and there’s plenty of incentive for the drivers with $1 million on the line and no points to worry them. The method of filling the field is also excellent, rewarding excellence while still allowing for wild cards (through the Open) and fan participation (via the Fan Vote, obviously).

The problem is that the race itself was dreadful. Aside from some three-wide moments early in the final stage, there was little side by side racing up front and virtually no chance of running anyone down who pulled away from a restart. Kyle Busch earned both the money and the relief he earned from his victory, but he won them making just one pass for the lead and never had to worry about much after that.

While the 20- and 10-lap segments are great in theory, they did the All-Star Race no favors on Saturday. The stages were too short for people to run down the leader but too long to keep the smaller field bunched together for long. As a result, the lack of drama was severe.

The most obvious solution would be to move the NASCAR All-Star Race to a track where the field doesn’t get spread out so quickly. Either short tracks or superspeedways would be great for this, but there’s no way the teams would agree to the latter, and it makes too much sense for logistical reasons for the event to stay in Charlotte.

So with a change of venue out, what else can NASCAR try to make the All-Star Race less boring? Here are a few quick ideas right off the top of the head.

Keep experimenting with tires

The much-hyped “option” tires were a bust, but only because the track had too much grip overall and any speed advantage provided by the softer tires fell off way too fast. Yet they did provide an intriguing strategic element in a race otherwise too short to have any others, so perhaps NASCAR could introduce even more choices.

How about a harder tire that would be slower on the short run but wear less so a team could try to go the whole race, or at least multiple segments without changing them? Maybe doing three different tires and stating that every team has to use all of them at some point. We’re not scientists here, but there should be something that can be done in this area.

Forget the stages

In a way, the NASCAR All-Star Race was ahead of its time by introducing the concept of segments or stages before they arrived in regular season events. But now perhaps the thing to do is go the opposite way and just make the race 70 laps.

That’s still short for a Cup Series event, but it’s long enough to both make a pit stop a necessity and ensure that there’s enough time for cars with better long run speed to actually matter. In a race where finishing first is really the only thing that matters, it behooves NASCAR to make sure it’s not just a restart competition.

Or if you wanted to go the other way …

Next: 2017 Monster Energy NASCAR All-Star Race recap: Kyle Busch claims first victory in 12 tries

Mandatory overtime

Keep the stages but make the last one just two laps. Line the cars up based on their average finishing order in the previous three or however many stages so they still matter — a lot. Then just make it a two-lap shootout for all the marbles since that’s pretty much when the best racing happened this year anyway.

There are some smart people who work for NASCAR, and no doubt the teams have some ideas as well. Let’s just hope they come up with something by next year at this time, or we’re going to end up with another event with plenty of sizzle but no steak.