While NASCAR’s ratings could have been better in my opinion for the second Darlington race and the first Charlotte race, I do think that they’ve hit a home run in their return to their season following a 70 day hiatus due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Nothing that we knew of NASCAR in March is around today.

No fans, limited media, 16 members of personnel per car, no practice, no qualifying, inverted fields, weeknight races, one-day shows, this is all new. As we’re through the first wave of the scheduling, it’s clear that they came out on top of this.

Everything went off without a hitch and the drivers are even raving about how things have been conducted.

“NASCAR in my opinion has hit gold with this format, Brad Keselowski said on Thursday night following the Alsco 500 at the Charlotte Motor Speedway. “The limited practice, show up and race and the time window benefits both east and west coast. No qualifying, inversion is really good because it mixes the field up and creates some good storylines there.”

This praise comes almost two weeks after Keselowski said that NASCAR’s return and how smooth it went was a “Christmas Miracle.”

He’s right too. I mean, Thursday’s race was half the distance of Sunday’s, had an invert when Sunday’s had qualifying, and the shorter race was infinitely more action packed than 600 miles worth this past weekend.

Denny Hamlin agreed, saying the weeknight races are similar in lengths to stick and ball sports.

“I mean, I think it’s right around the length of an NBA or football game, somewhere in that range,” Hamlin said who’s earned a top two finish in both weeknight races run. “NBA is about two and a half hours, football is three plus.  I mean, I think it’s good.  Obviously we’re really getting stung by the weather right now.  All these races have got delays and stoppages in the middle of it, so it makes it really, really tough.  It makes the nights and days really long.  But certainly you can look back on my quotes from two years ago; heck with tradition; you’ve got to advance with the times.  I think that keeping people’s attention span for three hours is a good thing.  It’s a very good thing.  These cars are different now than what they used to be.  It used to be a battle of machine, you’re going to wear out your tires and your brakes and whatnot.  They just don’t wear out anymore, so essentially it just becomes a long race after that.

“I certainly like the change, and on a weeknight time slot that we have, it’s got to be tightened up anyway, so I think this was a good taste of it, and they’ll gather the data and figure out what’s best for them in the future.  Maybe it’s keeping them long, I’m not sure.  Let the people that know a lot more about it speak on it.”

NASCARs President Steve Phelps spoke earlier this week about how some of these changes may become part of the new norm.

“There are some things that we’ll look at both this year and the offseason,” said Phelps on Tuesday. “Typically, we practice three times. Do we need to practice three times? I don’t know. That is something we, as an industry, will determine.

“Having cars on racetracks, is that something that’s important with respect to a practice? Or isn’t it? Or frankly, do you have a better show when you don’t practice? And those are some of the things we need to look at.”

Phelps cautioned though that he didn’t want to oversaturate the schedule with a bunch of weeknight races, but did leave the door open for more in the future still.

“Do I think we’ll have some one-day shows where you come in and race on a Wednesday night? Yeah, I think we’ll probably see some of that moving forward.”

That’s all good. We don’t need to be going to most tracks twice a year — I’m looking at you Kansas, Michigan, Dover and others.Hamlin, said though that the condensed schedules are tough on the guys back at the shop and that with social distancing measures being in place too, that it’s hard to get adjustments to your race cars between races.

“I think it’s going to take when we start to get the schedule spread back out a little bit more before you’re probably able to make some big changes, and still, you’re not able to make huge changes because the cars are essentially locked in with all the new kind of ordinances on new parts and whatnot,” Hamlin continued. “So you’ve kind of got what you’ve got.  You will make some developments and you will find some things in aerodynamics through the year, but I think that you’d better have your stuff together come early to mid-August.”

The schedule should start to spread out a bit now. We have one weeknight race scheduled in this next phase and no return trips to tracks. Even the third phase is taking shape and I don’t see a lot of midweek races then either.

The writing is on the wall for NASCAR to have to venture back outside of the southeast during this next phase whenever it is announced. They would have visited almost every track down there during this process. Plus, the race weekend at the Pocono Raceway at the end of June appears to have been given the green lightto run without race fans anyways. That means the first race weekend of the third phase would be two races on the 2.5-mile Pennsylvania race track. From there, Indianapolis is up and all signs are pointing to the Brickyard 400 weekend not only being able to be ran, but also doing so in front of race fans too. 

More: What Next Phase Of NASCAR’s Scheduling May Look Like

“As quickly as we can get back to racing with fans, we’ll do that,” said Phelps continued. “But it needs to be safe. We need to make sure our fans are safe and feel safe to come back. There will be protocols put in place that will be different than they were before this pandemic.”

That would take care of three races in two weekends. If they want to keep the weeknight theme, they could keep Kentucky Speedway in July, but move it up from a Saturday night to a Wednesday night affair since the 1.5-mile track is just a couple of hours south of Indianapolis. While the teams are up here, why not run both within a few days of each other. Plus, the Indy and Pocono cars will likely be the same and the backup cars could be the Kentucky car. 

So far, NASCAR is the model for getting things resuming again. We’ve had four different Cup races with four different winners. Things are working.