Sacrificing Myself For Your Edutainment

If we switch over to the Metric System, NASCAR will have to rename all of its races

That really is about the only reason left.  And it's not very good.  

Let me start off today's blag with two very important notes.  First of all, I ended up needing to do a greater amount of research into NASCAR than I ever wanted, but I made sure to do it in a Private browser window so there would be no history and no judging.  Secondly, here is a map of the countries in the world who use the Imperial measurement system versus those using Metric:

I'm not sure what those other two countries are, and I couldn't be bothered to look it up.  It seems largely irrelevant.  The World uses Metric, and for most items, it makes tremendously more sense.  We should bite the bullet and switch over.

One of the last holdouts would seem to be NASCAR.  This is based on an exhaustive study I did in which I thought this bit would be funny.  Also, it turned out to be a crap argument anyway, but more on that in a second.  See, NASCAR names many of their events after a Shameless Corporate Sponsor, followed by the length of the race, as measured in miles (an Imperial unit).  Thus, giving rise to events like "Daytona 500" and "Gobowling.com 400."  I'm not making that up.  I had assumed that NASCAR made these races with nice, round numbers and thus would want to forestall the switch to metric rather than renaming these to the "Daytona 804" and "Gobowling.com 643."  As it turns out, it's not as if these race lengths have any integrity anyway.  Sure, most of them are even numbers, but there are also ridiculous races like "Aaron's 499" and "Cheez-It 355 at The Glen."  Nope...not making those up, either.  So sure, now it's the "Aaron's 803" and "Cheez-It 571 at The Glen," but those really aren't any worse.  

So let's forget this argument.  

You could easily make the case to simply adjust the length of the races to once again be a nice, round number for the sake of marketing.  There are already 600-mile races.  Adding a mere 21 miles gives you an even 1000km...and "Shameless Corporate Sponsor 1000" sounds pretty cool, as race names go.  800 km is just shy of 500 miles, so it's close enough.  You could even keep the "500" races, which are now only 310 miles, 10 miles longer than the shortest NASCAR race I could find on Wikipedia, the "Osram Sylvania 300."  Nope...still not making these up.  So I tried to come up with a reason that this argument could be invalidated...and it didn't take me long to think..."track length!"  I figured that all of these races are set up specifically with the individual race tracks to be a very specific length due to a very specific length of the race track.  Well, as it turns out, this argument is for naught as well.  A majority of the 3 race tracks I looked up were set up to be 2.5 miles long...which coincidentally turns out to be almost exactly 4km.  So, you could still have a perfectly distanced race with the existing tracks.  Well, on top of that...track length is nonsense anyway.  The track at the Talladega Superspeedway is not an even 2.5miles (4.02km)...it's 2.66miles (4.28km).  So we can safely throw out any argument I've made in the last few minutes here.  Math and Science have proven that NASCAR is not a valid reason to keep using the Imperial measurement system.  Let's switch over to Metric now, shall we?  Except for temperature...I like Fahrenheit.