It’s time for NASCAR to designate its four major races

I see they are teeing it up at Augusta National again, which means I will be watching golf on TV for the first of four times in 2016.

Aren’t these major tournaments great? They serve as a de facto guide for the casual fan, for when they should watch niche sports on TV. Golf has four. Tennis has four. Horse racing has three, plus the Breeders’ Cup, if you need a horse racing fix in November.

Stock car racing should have a set of majors, too.

If NASCAR had designated major races as in golf and tennis and horse racing, the casual fan would know which races he is supposed to watch. This would give NASCAR’s plummeting TV ratings an occasional boost. It also would free up the casual fan to mow his lawn when they are racing in Delaware or New Hampshire or some place like that. This would make Casual Fan’s spouse very happy, with an end result of far fewer divorces in places such as Kentucky.

Plus, if you had major races, it would give the drivers something to shoot for, a la Tiger Woods in golf. Jack Nicklaus won 18 majors, and Tiger won 14 just like that, but now Tiger is stuck on 14. To get to 18, he’s going to have to get healthy in a hurry or ride shotgun with Jimmie Johnson.

So if NASCAR were to have major races, what would they be?

Daytona, of course. The Coca-Cola 600 outside of Charlotte for sure. Probably the Southern 500 at Darlington. For the tradition, and so the cars can run those retro paint schemes.

Those would be the Masters, the U.S. Open and the British Open of stock car racing.

But what about the PGA Championship of NASCAR? What would be the fourth major race?

The Brickyard 400 at Indianapolis? Talladega? Texas? The road course race at Watkins Glen?

Maybe it would have been the Brickyard when they first started racing there, when the crowd was huge.

My vote for the fourth stock car racing major would be one of the stops at Bristol, Tennessee. NASCAR on a short track is awesome. It’s better than the PGA Championship, unless the PGA would be at that course on Puget Sound where freight trains rumble alongside the fairway on the back nine, in which case it would be a tie.

COOL COMMUTE

This might not be the most awesome thing Kyle Busch has done this year. But unless he cures the common cold, it’s probably going to wind up in the top three.

Check out the reaction of this fan who was wearing one of Busch’s souvenir caps when a certain lead foot from Las Vegas pulled alongside in traffic after winning Sunday’s NASCAR race in Martinsville, Virginia.

This is another great example of a video that went viral despite having nothing to do with a cat. It also showed that Kyle Busch can be a pretty cool guy, especially after he wins two of those huge grandfather clocks on one weekend.

GREEN-WHITE-CHECKERED

• Two years ago when Bernie Ecclestone, the cash-grabbing czar of Formula One, first started a rumor about having a deal to run a race in Las Vegas, local tourism officials said there was nothing to it. Ecclestone put out a similar rumor last week: “Vegas say they are ready to go, and it would be on the Strip for sure” was his quote. Local tourism officials (at least the one I spoke to) shot it down again. Now Ecclestone says if there’s an F-1 race in Las Vegas, “it would be a couple of years, I suppose.” In a related note, a boy cried wolf. The sheep on the backstretch and on pit road ignored him.

• Bucking the trend of stagnate and plummeting TV ratings in NASCAR, last week’s DENSO Spark Plugs NHRA Nationals at Las Vegas Motor Speedway was the most-watched NHRA event in 14 years. The NHRA said final eliminations attracted 1.3 million viewers, which is great for drag racing. Part of the increase was attributed to NHRA switching TV partners during the offseason from ESPN to Fox Sports 1, which bends over backward and a little sideways, too, to promote its motor sports programming. The other part of it was people always tune in to see if John Force can keep the candles lit.

• The SPEARS Southwest Tour series returns to the Bullring at LVMS on Saturday night, topping a local stock car racing card that includes a bunch of other series and eight feature races. The Southwest Tour offers tricked-out late-model stock cars with fiberglass bodies and over the years has spawned the NASCAR careers of notables such as Kurt Busch and Ron Hornaday Jr. The series no longer is sanctioned by NASCAR, but I’m told the Southwest Tour cars still are pretty tricked out. Racing starts at 5:30 p.m. Saturday. For tickets, go to lvms.com or call 1-800-644-4444.

Las Vegas Review-Journal sports columnist Ron Kantowski can be reached at rkantowski@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0352. His motor sports notebook runs on Friday. Follow on Twitter: @ronkantowski