Why NASCAR's bold return could be make or break

On Thursday, NASCAR released a statement that it planned to end its coronavirus-enforced hiatus on 17 May with a Cup Series race at Darlington. It also unveiled plans to cram a run of races within its top three categories into a 10-day schedule to make up for the dearth in racing over the past couple of months.

Since the outbreak of COVID-19, sports journalists across the country have spent the last three months publishing event postponements, cancellations and governing bodies' tentative plans to resume their respective championships and leagues in the latter half of a fraught 2020.

Even this week, Formula 1 unveiled a speculative strategy to perhaps resume racing at the start of July, and perhaps cram in between 15 and 18 races in the latter half of the year.

NASCAR, true to its reputation as a bold, brash and brazen discipline of racing, has decided to dispense with the delicate nature that the current global pandemic has been treated with. There are no more formalities - the definitive plan is to go racing in the state of South Carolina.

In a schedule circulated by NASCAR, proceedings are expected to continue with a Cup race on 17 May - returning from a six-week layoff following March's Phoenix round - before the second-tier Xfinity Series enters the fray with a race on the following Tuesday.

The Cup field will tackle Darlington again on the 20 May - the Wednesday - before hot-footing across the border to North Carolina to race on the 24 May at Charlotte. In the subsequent days, there's an Xfinity race, a Truck Series race, and a second Cup race to conclude the 10 of days allotted to getting racing back underway.

Those races will be held behind closed doors, and NASCAR executive vice president Steve O'Donnell has assured that "NASCAR will return in an environment that will ensure the safety of our competitors, officials and all those in the local community".

In the event that there's no disruption and that NASCAR can officially get underway once more, the commonly parochial and southern US-centric racing series will suddenly draw a huge influx of international attention - and not just from those involved in motorsport. In addition, one can expect the organisers of hundreds of international sporting events to have their eyes firmly transfixed on the preparation, running and fallout of NASCAR's return to racing.

Let's look at all of this in context. The United States is, whether it likes it or not, the current epicentre of the COVID-19 pandemic. As much as the country's president Donald Trump would like to purse his lips, extrude them into a trumpet-like beak and wrap his dry, idiosyncratic Queens drawl around spurious platitudes to placate his voters, insisting that the US is currently winning its fight against the virus, cold hard figures suggest otherwise.

The number of reported cases have waxed and waned over the preceding weeks, but it can't be escaped that the US experienced a nationwide increase of 26,000 cases on Wednesday. This adds to its total of 1.1 million known cases across the country, with its death toll bordering on 62,500. That's a quarter of the world's total deaths, and the US does not have a quarter of the world's population - it has four percent. In other words, it's a disproportionate amount.

Whatever NASCAR does now could shape the way that the entirety of international sport goes about its business in the next few months

With the possibility of passing on coronavirus prevalent every time people make contact, social distancing measures have been at the forefront of international governments' crisis policies and the United States - for the most part - is no different. Under the watchful eye of Dr. Anthony Fauci, who has appeared with Trump at multiple pandemic briefings and been commonly regarded as America's voice of reason, it has at least made some kind of attempt to navigate the choppy waters of a global pandemic.

But if Fauci is the taciturn helmsman, hardened by the experience of the cruel seas, Trump threatens to push the country's efforts overboard with ludicrous statements, querying the merits of pumping the human body full of ultraviolet light and Dettol to "knock it out".

With the US's relief efforts lurching between an immunologist's wisdom and Trump's, ahem, alternative methods of ending a pandemic, those waters will continue to remain choppy for some time.

Fauci also addressed concerns that a second "wave" of coronavirus infections could coincide with flu season, and suggested that "if by that time we have put into place all of the countermeasures that you need to address this, we should do reasonably well. If we don't do that successfully, we could be in for a bad fall and a bad winter".

In the context of the current US health situation, NASCAR's decision to buck the trend and reopen its doors for business are, at the very least, a little gauche. Social distancing means physically distancing yourself from other people, but later this month there will be hundreds of NASCAR team personnel working closely together to build, engineer and race a fleet of stock cars.

Sure, legions of fans will be kept away from the bleachers, but there's still a great deal of risk involved. Need we even recount the issues F1 faced when a single McLaren team member tested positive for coronavirus? Quite rightly, the event was cancelled and those who had been in contact with that team member were quarantined for a fortnight to quell the spread.

If a member of the NASCAR paddock rocks up to Darlington with the COVID-19 pathogen recessively coursing through their system, it could produce a partially-localised spread within. And in that case, it's goodbye to racing for a few more months as other championships decide that the risk isn't worth the pay-off - not just in NASCAR, but worldwide.

But with almost two months in confinement for many, certain sections of the population are becoming restless. Countries who have shrewdly managed the spread and "flattened the curve" are slowly considering relaxing lockdowns, in an attempt to provide some kind of crossover between the tail of the coronavirus curve and a surge in those countries' economies. But there can be no rush to do so, lest there be a second wave that knocks any wind out of the tentatively-hoisted sails.

Some American states - in this case, Georgia, aren't even bothering with such apparent trivialities. Georgia's governor Brian Kemp announced that the state would be rescinding its lockdown and would allow restaurants, nail bars, salons and tattoo parlours to reopen. Hardly essential businesses, but apparently the health of a nation is secondary to a root touch-up and a manicure. Allegedly, even Trump told Kemp that it was not a particularly good idea to lift restrictions so soon.

But America, so beholden to the idea of liberty, considers the lockdown an infringement of civil rights. People need a reason to be kept inside, as if the bonus of not catching a particularly contagious and deadly strain of coronavirus wasn't enough, and the absence of sport is arguably not helping matters. In that instance, what if NASCAR's grand reopening could actually be that saviour?

There's absolutely no sense in pretending that NASCAR's plan to host a flurry of races in a week-and-a-half isn't completely ludicrous, because it is. Whichever way you seek to dissect it, we're in the middle of a global pandemic - the likes of which has not been seen in over a century. There are global lockdowns, social distancing measures, a rush to find a vaccine and a carefully orchestrated set of plans to at least bring the world into the realms of some kind of normality. So NASCAR's decision that it's going to return is a brave one.

But as the old idiom says, fortune favours the brave. And whatever NASCAR does now could shape the way that the entirety of international sport goes about its business in the next few months. As much as it could be an abject failure and set back progress by a few months, it could just as easily - if managed correctly - show the world that domestic sporting leagues could get underway in a carefully-managed environment.

NASCAR, as aforementioned, is known for being parochial. To get to NASCAR's top league, you probably will have gone through its junior leagues, then from Trucks to Xfinity to Cup. It's a hermetically sealed microclimate in which there's very little crossover with other categories. Even ex-IndyCar drivers rarely cross-pollinate with NASCAR, and you can count on one hand the quantity of ex-F1 racers to make the switch to stock cars. And by carefully managing the inputs, NASCAR can very easily put on something of a show.

A crucial element of that is having the medical staff in place. There needs to be a facility at each circuit to test people, and there must also be the medical staff free to conduct the usual obligations at a race circuit. There must also be people willing to marshal the event too, but there are so many people defiant of lockdown etiquette that there will likely be volunteers keen to help out.

If the environment in which that race is held can be kept within its own bubble, and that bubble transplanted to another race circuit, then NASCAR might just achieve its aim in the most intransigent way possible

Perhaps that sounds cynical, but given recent news stories - and this author's own experience of the flat below his hosting a barbecue in flagrant opposition to UK government guidelines - it's ultimately true.

There will be a lot of people in the US - and some even around the world - who have missed NASCAR, and will be heartened to finally watch some real-life racing return to their screens. If the environment in which that race is held can be kept within its own bubble, and that bubble transplanted to another race circuit, then NASCAR might just achieve its aim in the most intransigent way possible. And that could signal to other domestic sports leagues that, in carefully controlled circumstances, some kind of spectacle can return.

The world will never return to how it was; coronavirus will eventually be relegated to the back catalogue of seasonal viruses but will check in periodically to ravage peoples' lungs, albeit to a lesser degree to how it once did. But people want some kind of normality in times like this. Finding a safe and low-risk way to provide them with a tangible sense of escapism, like sport does for so many, would lift the mood all over.

There's a very real chance that NASCAR's urge to return could undo the best-laid plans of healthcare professionals the world over, but it will certainly shape the way that all other national and international sports, events and gatherings take place over the next few months. It might just be yet another NASCAR race, but it could be its most historic.