We took our driver pages down

Mamba Smith is the founder of Queen City Garage, which publishes Grand National Today, a NASCAR news site, and produces The Grand National Show.

If you go to a driver's page on Grand National Today right now, you'll find the driver's name and the stories we've written about them. You won't find a profile.

There used to be one. We took them down.

Why

They weren't good enough. That's the reason.

They read thin, and they didn't look right. A driver's page is the closest thing a racing site has to a handshake with that driver's fans, and ours were a limp one. I'd rather have nothing up than that.

So the write-ups came off. Every driver still has a page, and every story we've done on them is still on it. The team pages and the track guides are still up. It's only the driver profiles that are gone.

The size of the job

This is not a small thing to redo.

We cover NASCAR's three national series: Cup at the top, then the NASCAR O'Reilly Auto Parts Series, then the Truck Series. So far this season 185 drivers have scored points in them: 54 in Cup, 53 in the O'Reilly Series and 78 in Trucks. We'd written profiles for 54 of the 185.

And to me, the ones we skipped matter most. The Cup stars have plenty of pages about them already. The kid running a part-time Truck schedule doesn't.

What a driver page is for

I think of a driver's page as a resume.

When people look a driver up, they're asking simple things. Who do they drive for. What number. Which series. Where are they in the points. What have they done this year. If the page doesn't answer those in the first few lines, it isn't doing its job, and no amount of nice writing underneath fixes that.

Then comes the part I care about, which is the ladder: the path a driver climbs from local tracks to the top series. Where did they come from. What did they win on the way up. Where are they likely headed. That's the difference between a list of facts and a page that tells you who the driver is.

How we're doing it this time

Last time we built a lot of pages at once. This time we're building one.

One driver. Real photos. Real numbers, pulled from the official points sheets, so the page stays in step with the standings. We'll look at that one page until it's right, and only then build the second.

We make this site with an AI doing most of the assembly, and it could turn out all 185 of these quickly. That's exactly how you end up with pages nobody's proud of. Fast isn't the hard part. Knowing what good looks like is, and that has to be settled on one page before it's copied onto all of them.

When

I'm not putting a date on it. I'd rather tell you they're down and why than leave something up that I wouldn't want a driver to see.

When the first one is ready, it'll go up.