The NASCAR Sprint Cup series is a marathon for its teams, drivers, and its fans. This is a 36 week affair where races are featured on four different TV network throughout the season, and we could really count that as five if we were to count the Speed Channel’s coverage of practice and qualifying each week. Through 2009 NASCAR’s TV number have been down, and many blame the wide range of race starting times for part of that decline. Races in 2009 and past season have started at different hours and have so much pre-race coverage many fans simply get bored with the coverage and turn the channel.

An interesting story, I am a huge NASCAR fan and was running late last February to the place where I was going to watch the Daytona 500. With a wife, and a kid, and friends to pick up I just lost track of the time and surrendered myself to missing the opening laps of the race. By the time I got to the location, the driers still were not in their cars. In fact I was more than forty minutes late and the race was still nowhere near being ready to start.

That simply isn’t good enough. In most other sports if the TV broadcast begins at 1 PM the action has started by 1:15pm. With that in mind NASCAR will have uniform start times for races in 2010. All races at location within the eastern and central time zones will start at 1 PM eastern. All races in the from the West Coast will begin at 3 PM eastern. All night races will begin at 7:30 PM Eastern. NASCAR is also working to insure that the green flag drops on each of these races 15-20 minutes past the posted starting times.

The only exception is the longest race on the NASCAR schedule the Coke 600, that will race will keep its starting time at 5:45 PM eastern.