Did NASCAR lose fans? Or gain fans? Who’s to say?
Recently, NASCAR announced that they “didn’t want to get involved in politics” in regards to the Brandon Brown car sponsorship, and were backpedaling on approval of the car design, which included the letters ‘LGB’.
For the uninitiated, LGB stands for Let’s Go Brandon, a euphemism for the chant that lit the sporting world on fire in 2021, notably ‘F*ck Joe Biden’. That chant started at a NASCAR event where winner Brandon Brown was being interviewed, and the interviewer misheard or misquoted the fans as saying ‘Let’s Go Brandon’, versus the actual FJB. Since then, the chant has been heard everywhere from college sporting events, pro sporting events, and has even found success on shirts, hats, and bumper stickers, making it so far as the halls of Congress, where one politician wore a face mask sporting ‘Let’s Go Brandon’.
However, NASCAR has indeed been involved in politics and social justice in regards to Black Lives Matter and the Confederate Flag debate, allowing driver Bubba Wallace to drive a car with a prominent Black Lives Matter logo across the hood, as well as banning Confederate Flags from certain areas of tracks or campgrounds. Let us also not forget the infamous “noose” debacle, where Wallace allegedly found a noose in a race garage, for it to actually turn out to be a rope that is used to raise and lower the garage doors that was shaped in a remotely noose-like fashion, and had been in the garage since 2019.
