I'm American and it's not my thing. The thing I hate about it is the mindless groupthink marketing hype machine. Just about the only redeeming thing about it is that it IS a motorsport that is popular, and thus at least the fans presumably care a tiny bit about actual cars.
I'm personally not that addicted to watching any automotive sport, but if I do I'd say it's ALMS, SCCA road racing, and of course I have to watch the 24 Hours of LeMans.
I don't like Nascar for so many reasons, ignoring the stereotype of the fans -- the cars that don't remotely relate to the name on the hood or a car you can buy (not that even then it would be interesting), the boring oval circuits, and the level of hype around it just plain confuses me. Bleh. I've seen bits when they run road courses and I can get into that to a degree; but it's only a handfull of times per year they run a road course and I'm not a big fan so I don't catch it most of the time.
I get much more excited over cars I can somewhat relate to (even if they are racing Astons and Corvettes and Porsches and Ferraris) and actual road courses. I'm not so much into the LMP cars that LeMans runs mixed in with the GT class. Hell even though I'm not particularly into it I'm very interested in factory cup cars and spec racing.
The whole "race on Sunday, buy on Monday" thing has completely fallen apart since the days of the Plymouth Superbird. I'm not quite sure what happened since I don't follow Nascar; I'm guessing government pressure and the oil crisis killed the American musclecar and Nascar was left holding the bag with nothing, so came up with its own? I don't know. I think Nascar would be much more valuable and exciting if, instead of some homogenized thing on an oval, they raced on road courses and Ford was out there with the Mustang, Chevrolet was out there with the Camaro, Dodge was out there with the Challenger, all trying to one-up each other and push the envelope on development of the street car. Sort of like how things from the C6R LeMans cars are filtering down to street Corvettes.
My Dad won a trip to see the last race of what was then the Winston Cup in Arizona, I figured I'd tag along to see what's up. I didn't like it at all. I can talk about the crowd there too if anybody wants to confirm stereotypes; the sport I've been to most often is (US) Football; it's like you've got 10 teams' fans mixed in the stands, all getting drunk and harassing each other. Everybody fixates on a driver (though from what I see F1 seems to elicit this too).
