I Am Not Sure Where to Begin or What to Say

The last 36 hours seem like a dream.

A dream is the only place where I could have imagined the world shutting down around me with events cancelling and offices closing by the second at one point.

Part of me thought I would wake up and find everything humming along as usual. School buses loading up with children, traffic at red lights with that one aggressive driver because he is ten minutes late, people streaming into their place of work but thinking about the event later in the day, the dinner out with a loved one, picking up the kids to go to hockey practice or going to see a band play in a 18,000-seat arena.

It had to be a dream. A vivid dream. I have had these countless times before where I wake in a panic because it felt real. It is a range of dreams from being late for work, the crippling disappointment of missing an event that you had planned to attend for weeks, being stuck in an airport because of weather, running through the woods, all plausible things in everyday life that the subconscious can conjure and it could have been what actually happened.

But I spring up in bed and, while wrapping my head around it, slowly come back to the real world and relax. The minor horror did not happen. I get to live another day and if there is anything to take away from the dream it is to not make the mistakes of the subconscious creation. It is to be attentive in decision-making, listen to others, communicate hopes and fears and be flexible.

When going to bed last night and thinking about all that happened it felt like a dream but this was not the subconscious. This is the real world where schools, work, sports, concerts and even religious gatherings are not taking place because of the COVID-19 virus. People are taking off. Some places are closed for two weeks. Some are closed indefinitely. Life continues but this is unlike anything else I have experienced before and I am sure I am not the only one feeling that way.

Over the last two months, the COVID-19 virus has been in the news. You could not avoid it and from a sporting perspective it brought up serious ramifications. Italy's top soccer league Serie A played games behind closed doors. Events across Asia were cancelled. Further delays, postponement and cancellations seemed inevitable.

I will be honest. I am a simple man. I read the news. I see what it says. I understand what is going on. But I was not sure what to say about this or if I should have said anything at all. Bringing this to motorsports, this hobby of mine that I write about, when the Chinese Grand Prix was cancelled and Formula E's Sanya ePrix was cancelled I probably could have written something a month ago.

But I am not meant to be writing about global pandemics. I am just a guy who writes about motorsports for fun. It is a hobby and a relief. It is a dump space for my mind. It is a chance for a silly idea to live. I try the best I can to be informed when writing about something. There was a time when I was younger and I would write from a knee-jerk reaction. I have matured and like to think I have improved. It is ok to have a reaction but when writing I try to see every side of a discussion and understand it even if I do not agree with it.

When MotoGP cancelled its Qatar race I wanted to write something about this because it seemed inevitable every series was going to face it, even those in the United States. You have all these other sports leagues from around the world taking precautionary measures and just because it is motorsports doesn't mean it would not be affected.

I didn't write about it. Part of it was because I knew it wasn't going to help. I know my place in the world. Just because I write something doesn't mean it was going to change society. I knew there would be people that agreed with it and disagreed with it and I felt adding something into the world that was divisive wasn't going to help. There was enough of that out there. The world didn't need my two cents on it.

I felt like the only thing I could do was give a simple update of every race that was cancelled or postponed at the top of Monday's Musings From the Weekend because that is what it is there for and it is a hard fact. A race was cancelled, end of statement. There was no more to it than the truth.

Now we are at a different place, especially in the United States. The NBA season is suspended. The NHL season is suspended. The NCAA Tournament is cancelled. Nearly everything is on hiatus. Formula One was set to go for the Australian Grand Prix and then pulled the plug with the crowd literally at the gates for Friday practice.

A week ago and two weeks ago I felt we had to talk about it because it didn't seem like it was going away. Now we have to talk about it because it is here and we have to deal with it in real time.

I am a positive person. I think we are going to be fine but I think we need to take two weeks or three weeks off to get this figured out. We need to take a pause for a little bit, assess where we are at and what the next steps are. Things are going to be fine but we need to take a break. We need to sacrifice a little bit today for a better tomorrow.

Now we get to the hard part and the part you may not like to hear...

NASCAR and IndyCar are still planning on racing this weekend.

That sounds great but it is not ideal.

There is no reason to think NASCAR and/or IndyCar are immune from this virus. They are not. No one is and just because a person does not have the virus or is not carrying the virus does not mean he or she will not be. Sending a person out into the world, sending him or her to an airport or a car rental service or hotel only adds the possibility of coming in contact with the virus. Then that person is going to leave Atlanta or St. Petersburg and return to Charlotte or Indianapolis and bring it to a group of people that might not have been exposed.

Everyone else is taking a timeout and it would make sense if NASCAR and IndyCar did the same. Each are free to go on and they are going on behind closed to doors but that doesn't seem like it will be enough.

This is where I burst your bubble...

Just because NASCAR and IndyCar are going to be the only games in the country does not mean ratings are going to be through the roof. The NASCAR race is not going to have 30 million people watching. This is not going to be the 1979 Daytona 500 all over again. People are not all of a sudden going to become NASCAR fans or IndyCar fans because that is all that is on in terms of live sports.

The ratings might be up marginally, like 3%, and if you think a 3% increase is something to do a backflip over, remember that the fatality rate of COVID-19 is currently at 3.6% worldwide at time of writing Friday morning (4,722 reported deaths from 128,343 confirmed cases. Plug that into your phone calculator. See for yourself).

A few more people might watch but when basketball and hockey and soccer and baseball and everything else returns people are going back to watching that. People are not going to feel any loyalty to NASCAR or IndyCar because either decided to run a race while other sports went on hiatus due to this virus.

Also, people have a handful of streaming services and on-demand options and can watch a stupid number of television shows and movies. These people are not going to be flipping through the channels and could stumble upon either race. People are going to go on with their lives and not come in contact with either race.

This is where I hope you kept reading...

This sucks. No one is happy about this and it feels weird. It should feel weird.

Life has been turned upside down unlike anything any of us have ever experienced. There is no clear timetable when we are going to feel normal again. We just have to wait. It is all about patience and it is going to be tough. I am still going to promote optimism but be smart. You can say everything will be fine but if you do not act accordingly that cancels out the optimism.

There has been part of me that is thinking about the future and how we are going to look back on this time.

We are still in it and we are not sure how it will play out but it is going to be weird looking through an almanac or Wikipedia and when it comes to 2020 seeing for a bunch of sports league "suspended" in the champion column. It feels like this will be the lost year where all these great events will not happen and the most recent time period that this one could be similar in that extent is World War II.

It is going to be weird running the 12 Hours of Sebring in November. Long Beach has been cancelled. There is some hope a replacement weekend could be found but that is not a guarantee or a concern now. Formula One has cancelled Bahrain and Vietnam.

We also need to take into consideration something might happen to the Indianapolis 500 and 24 Hours of Le Mans. Both have had hiatuses before. Indianapolis had it for both World Wars and Le Mans for the second World War. It is not unprecedented but it has been 65-plus years. It is something most of us have only ever read about and never had to live.

We are going to be fine. Life will eventually resume. It could be a while but there will be a 2021 and a 2022 and we will make it to 2030 and beyond. The Indianapolis 500 will happen again. There is going to be an NCAA tournament in the future. We will see the Stanley Cup hoisted and taken for a lap. It is going to be tough but we will make it.

Stay positive and be smart. Everything will work out.