Personally, I am not a fan, but I will say, they annoy the right people.
I wonder what would be said by any radio host if someone referred to pro football and pro basketball players as, "a bunch of black boys who don't have the skills to drive race cars?"
I'm not a huge fan so I think I can help you out here. I'm astounded by the amazing skill they have to drive a projectile among a pack of other projectiles at speeds that would fill your drawers twice over. It's that simple for me.
The broadcast technology and some smart production teams have combined to give you sights and sounds that take a race from a bunch of multi-colored product logos going round and round to one where you almost feel like you're in the car. This is not the old Chris Economaki in the pits throwing it back to Chris Schenkel days. [Taking nothing away from either man.]
The in-cockpit views allow you to better understand what the pack going around is really like because you see the [non] distances between the cars. The wall-mounted boom allows you to hear the awesome power of the pack because it picks up the multiple whips as they fly by. When you put them together, and your brain does a fine job of it, you find yourself saying, "Holy ___! I can't park my car that close to someone on a good day. How can they be that close on all sides going 200 mph?"
So check out the next race for those features and see if you don't come away with a better understanding of the allure. Like I said, I'm not a big race fan, but I sure appreciate how and what they do.
And I don't understand the allure of many other things. When your dad was a motorhead all his life and you spend your youth at small dirt tracks in New York, the grease gets under your fingernails. Each to his own.
It's just like anything else, another good reason to drink beer.