 You probably don't watch NASCAR. And even if you do, you're probably fed up with it. NASCAR's been changing the rules, the cars, and drivers for the past decade to try and get people to care again. And yet, NASCAR ratings are at an all-time low. NASCAR is desperate, and the people who run the series want you to start watching so badly that they went out and changed one of the most sacred things about what makes NASCAR, NASCAR. They changed how the races work. This is a huge change. It's like when Coke came out with New Coke and everybody freaked out until they changed it back. And if it works, the races might be more exciting and competitive, and you might not change the channel. And if it doesn't work? Well... Yep, I'm flying through the air. This is not good. So here's what NASCAR did. Before, races were anywhere from about 90 laps to about 500 laps, depending on the size of the track. Those distances aren't changing, but this year every race has been split into three segments. There's two shorter ones to start and one longer one at the end. So now, instead of the Daytona 500, you're basically going to have the Daytona 150-150-200. NASCAR hopes that this change is going to encourage drivers to be more aggressive earlier on in the race. Before the change, you could basically hang back in the pack and hope to strategize to win at the end of the race. After the change, you're still going to have to win that last segment to win the race, but the better you do in the earlier segments, the more points you'll get towards the championship at the end of the season. But the other reason for this change is you, the viewer. NASCAR races can be long, boring affairs. So long sometimes that it's even hard to figure out where and when the good racing is happening. There's more than one reason for this decline, too. The on-track competition, rise in popularity of other sports, the way the cars don't look like road cars anymore. But the biggest are a struggle to bring in new fans and a general drop in attention span. And a drop in attention span is what could really kill the sport. You see, NASCAR is really expensive, and the way the sport maintains itself financially is through sponsors and advertisements. The longer a viewer stays on one program, the better chance that brand's message will pay off. So even if you have a million viewers, if those viewers are only watching for a few minutes, advertisers are not going to find it very beneficial for them to advertise, and so they pull out. We saw this this past year when Sprint decided not to stick around as the title sponsor for NASCAR. What's really sly about NASCAR's format change, though, is that it opens up a ton of new opportunities to sell ads against that programming. NASCAR already ropes in sponsors for little things like the pass of the race, and now it essentially has three times the number of those opportunities. Perhaps the biggest problem with NASCAR's format change is that it just makes everything so much more confusing. NASCAR does still have a really robust culture around the series, and it's dragging that culture into the digital age. The sport has a good sense of how and when to use Snapchat. Many drivers are on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram, and they use those services to engage with fans, not just advertise. The series even puts full race replays up on YouTube for free. NASCAR's problem is in the execution. It's why the series has spent the last 15 years trying to change every little rule, and even the cars themselves, to try to get people to start watching again. NASCAR started as a novelty. It was a way for bootleggers to prove who had the fastest car. But now, with the automotive industry switching towards electric vehicles, NASCAR's going to have a chance to become a novelty again. Changing the race format doesn't need to save NASCAR this year. It just needs to buy them a little more time. We're rolling along to Darlington, South Carolina, to the track where fast highway surfacing covers the mile and a half oval on which they run the Southern 500.