My Review of "NASCAR: Full Speed"

NASCAR: Full Speed is the latest sports documentary series streaming exclusively on Netflix. It's about the NASCAR racing and what had happened in their 2023 season. That means it was a pretty fast turn around time for this to be airing now. I don't have too much knowledge about NASCAR so I was walking into this blindfolded. What I got was a pretty entertaining show where I admittedly got confused a few times.

There are only five one hour episodes for this series but it starts off with an introduction to a few racers. They're favored to win the competition but they've never done it. At the forefront is the very decorated racer, Denny Hamlin. His story is quite unique. He is the number one racer of his team. Yet on the business side he is part owners of an opposing racing team partly owned by Michael Jordan. Yes the basketball Michael Jordan.

Instantly, I was shocked that Michael Jordan was so involved with NASCAR and Denny could do this. I would have thought it would be an extreme conflict of interest. The show even describes how it is a conflict of interest as they talk about racing strategies where Denny could either help his own team member or the team that he partly owns. Denny being Denny, he openly admits that he would prefer to help the team he owns than the team that he's on.

He's obviously in the show because he's such a polarizing character. All of the top racers have a little spotlight shined on them. They're all at the top of their game and anyone can win the championship. This show is about the playoff elimination of the top 16 racers. Since they're all so good only a few of them get more shine then some. These are mainly focused on the racers involved with the Denny Hamlin situation.

At the midpoint of the season the show does a full reversal on the viewers. I didn't know anything about NASCAR in 2023 so it was a total shock that all of the people they were talking about in the first half of the show become irrelevant and there's a whole new cast of big players. This caused a lot of confusion for me because I barely remembered the names of the first group of people. Now I have to remember the next group. At some points I couldn't tell one racer from the next. Each one of them are a bit generic in terms of character. They're all there for the same thing and for the most part they have the same home lives.

All of these racers are kind of nerds. They're video game nerds, they play with toys and just study all the time. Most of their relationships with their significant others are proudly displayed but at times feel a bit distant and cold as the racers are so focused on their task at hand. A lot of the racers are also a bit awkward around the camera despite the fact that they're constantly in front of them before and after the races. I guess this is kind of a common athlete thing though.

One other gripe about the show is the confusing point system that they have for the elimination round. I kind of got it but there was a bit of a learning curve to understand how it worked throughout the show.

This show is definitely made for hardcore NASCAR fans but I was still able to follow most of it. A lot of it kind of got lost because there was a lot of information to absorb and such a short period to tell us viewers. They generally did a good job in telling it to us without making it boring.

Overall, I thought this was a good series. Very confusing for newcomers for me but entertaining enough that I stuck around and kept watching it. I think that if you might be interested in NASCAR this is a good first step. It may make a fan out of you. I have to give this one a 7 out of 10.