The Coca-Cola 600 is just too long. The second of what NASCAR considers its four “crown jewels” throughout the 36-race season, it’s the Cup Series’ longest race by about 100 miles and is the only one broken into four stages, instead of three.

And it lasted for more than five hours Sunday night, ending a few minutes after midnight at Charlotte Motor Speedway. So not only was this year’s Memorial Day Weekend event (won by Brad Keselowski) a five-and-a-half-hour extravaganza thanks, in part, to a 68-minute rain delay, but because of a handful of overtime laps tacked on at the end, it was also the longest race in NASCAR Cup Series history.

607.5 miles. That’s excessive, and with the length not presenting the same challenges it once did, the logic behind it doesn’t really hold up.

More on that in a second, but first: This race is way too long for anyone beyond the absolute most diehard and longtime NASCAR fans.

Synonymous with Memorial Day Weekend, the Coke 600 is an annual event since 1960, coronavirus pandemic or not, and one that typically caps off the biggest day in the world for motor sports. Formula 1’s Monaco Grand Prix and the IndyCar Series’ Indianapolis 500 are usually held earlier in the day, respectively. (Monaco was canceled, and the Indy 500 is now scheduled for August.)

The 2018 Coca-Cola 600. (AP Photo/Mike McCarn)

The Coke 600’s distance just desperately needs to be altered so the race is not as brutally long, especially with other sports organizations, like Major League Baseball, pushing to speed up their competitions.

But the 600-mile length is tradition too, you say?

“Tradition, shmadition.” That’s what Denny Hamlin said in May 2019 when asked about keeping the race’s length, adding:

“If the race was 300 miles, you’re going to have the same, I believe, core group watch the race and possibly even more that are interested because it’s not five hours long.”

Even during Sunday night’s race, Martin Truex Jr. and his No. 19 Toyota team echoed the thoughts of the many racing and general sports fans, whose attention spans were surely dwindling, when they had this exchange over the radio halfway into a 400-lap race:

Of course, not every driver feels that way.

Kevin Harvick has said it’s different once you win it. Keselowski told USA TODAY Sports last year that NASCAR “needs one 600-mile race that connects it back and showcases that stock car automobile racing has had to pushing the limits of a vehicle, specific to performance and endurance.”

A 600-mile race may be a great way to celebrate the sport’s and event’s history, but when NASCAR is trying to expand its shrinking fan base, who’s really interested in sticking around for a five-hour saga?

Gone are the days when only a handful of cars would finish on the lead lap, and it was a question of how many cars could be engineered to withstand such an exhaustive race. At the 1960 World 600, only the winner ended on the lead lap, and 36 of the 55 cars didn’t even finish.

Compared with today, stock cars generally survive 600 miles without blowing an engine, and the iconic event can be largely uneventful, as we saw Sunday with only four caution flags because of on-track incidents. Of the 40 cars that started the race, 19 finished on the lead lap, and only three didn’t finish at all.

When asked last year about the grueling race, Kyle Busch said the sport needs the 600-miler, adding:

“Is it [tough] on the cars? No. The cars are way too sophisticated now. I bet you we could probably go 800 maybe even 1,000 miles on a race car before you’d start to see problems.”

We can confidently speak for everyone when we say: Pass.

(Chris Graythen/Getty Images)

Plus, when racing on the traditional 1.5-mile oval, Charlotte Motor Speedway’s best asset is geography, not its penchant for delivering captivating races. And the 600 has long been painful to watch, particularly when preceded by hundreds of miles in Indy and Monaco.

Now, if you think NASCAR will never, ever, in a million years redesign one of its “crown jewel” races, you’re probably among the majority. Really, it does seem impossibly unlikely. But there is some precedent here in NASCAR and at Charlotte Motor Speedway.

Forever, Daytona’s summer race was always over the weekend of July 4th, until this year when it will be the regular-season finale in August. After nearly two decades of Homestead-Miami Speedway hosting NASCAR’s championship weekend, Phoenix Raceway is taking over this season. For 40 years, The Clash, an exhibition race before the Daytona 500, was run on the 2.5-mile oval, but next season among the several updates to Daytona Speedweeks, it’ll be on the 3.56-mile road course. Breaking races into three stages — four if it’s the Coke 600, remember! — wasn’t even a thing until 2017, and NASCAR’s points and playoff systems feel like they’re regularly being overhauled.

And for nearly 60 years, the Cup Series only raced on the 1.5-mile oval before changing things up in 2018 and making the second Charlotte race of the year on a half-road course, half-oval “roval.” Inventive, revolutionary and a necessary jolt to a nine-month schedule still in need of more updates, like shortening the length of the Coke 600.

So here’s what you do: Keep the weekend of the race, obviously. Keep the spectacle of it all, and keep the “600” in the name — just make it 600 kilometers, dropping the length almost in half to about 373 miles.

“All sports adapt and change,” Hamlin said last year. “I hate it when people say, ‘Well, that’s the way it always was.’ Things are different. I’d be just as happy with a Coke 300 trophy as a Coke 600 to be honest with you.”

It doesn’t have to be the Coke 300, but it really shouldn’t be a true 600-miler anymore either.

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