ASA Most Popular Driver Award
By: Steve Bechtel
Who do you think is the more popular stock car driver? NASCAR star Dale Earnhardt Jr. or Colt James?
I know what my answer is but in this case it would depend on who you talk to. Unless you are a diehard racing fan you may not even know who Colt James is. He’s a young up and coming driver from Texas that ran in the ASA Late Model Challenge Series during the 2007 season. He finished 3rd in points behind champion Travis Dassow and local driver Eddie Hoffman. He is the current vote leader in their most popular driver award.
When I first heard ASA was allowing fans to vote who the series most popular driver was and the way they were doing it I initially thought it was a great idea. They picked 10 drivers to start with and each week the lowest vote getter would get booted from the contest, similar to the way the popular American Idol television show does it. Over a 9 week period fans could go to the ASA website and vote for their favorite driver. Great idea getting the fans involved. Not to mention a smart way to get viewers to keep coming back to the series website during a normal slow period in the off season.
So I like many others punched up the ASA website on my browser and saw the choices. A few weeks of the contest had gone by and only 6 drivers remained. The only Chicago area driver was Eddie Hoffman so I highlighted the circle, hit click and saw the results. Eddie was in 2nd place to Colt James….by about 150,000 votes. Not 150 votes, but 150,000 votes. Could that be right? I hit the back button of my browser to see if I could vote again and I could. That told me fans could vote as many times as they wanted. Other most popular driver contests have lets fans vote more then one time but it was capped off at once a day and you had to enter an e-mail address. It was pretty obvious the results for this contest wouldn’t be so scientific. So I hit the back button again and clicked on Eddie. Every time I went back and clicked again he gained 15-40 votes. This was in a matter of seconds. I was shocked. I mean I figured I was the only guy up at midnight on a Saturday voting in this contest. Turns out hundreds of people were and they were all Eddie Hoffman fans. What are the odds? In a matter of minutes he gained over 1,000 votes on Colt James. Now who says Chicago doesn't have the most supportive racing fans out there?
Another thing I forgot to mention is James had 1,764,179 votes as of midnight on Saturday. The votes get reset to zero every Monday. So James averaged almost 300,000 votes a day since then. Not bad when you consider Dale Earnhardt Jr. won the year long NASCAR Most Popular Driver award with a paltry 1.4 million votes over the course of many months. The total of all the votes in the NASCAR contest was 3.8 million. Those votes were comprised from over 75 different drivers. If you add in Jeff Choquette who is 3rd in the ASA voting (with 1.3 million votes) the top 3 vote getters in a 6 day span in the ASA contest generated 4.8 million votes while all of NASCAR could only muster 3.8 million over a 4 month span. Who knew the ASA Late Model Series was so popular?
No need to beat a dead horse, I’m sure people know I’m writing this tongue in cheek. When asked about the contest Sandy Varney said it was supposed to be fun for the fans to decide who won. I agree it’s nice to involve fans but when you have a bunch of people manipulating the system with software programs that keep voting even when a human isn’t around I’m not exactly sure who that’s fun for. The loyal fans who probably would have came to the site every day and voted to support their driver now knows their vote really don’t make a difference so why bother. Before I go to bed I think I’m going to vote a few times for the underdog. Jesse Saunders looks to be the next driver voted off the island with his 25,000 votes compared to 5th place Brandon Johnson who has 800,000 votes this week. It’s a shame Saunders doesn’t know any computer hackers that could have helped him win.
UPDATE: I wrote this story late Saturday night close to midnight. I'm posting it on the website about 6 P.M. the next day. The die-hard fans have been busy all day. Colt James has added another 100,000 votes to his total in the last 18 hours. Eddie Hoffman (with the help of my 5 votes) has gained 115,000 votes. Even Jesse Saunders who only had 25,000 votes in 6 days gained almost 15,000 votes overnight.
Votes get reset to zero Monday and we start all over again.
