Follow me on
Leaving LA....
When it's right in Southern California, it's really nice, here with the San Gabriel Mountains as backdrop. And if NASCAR really is planning to drop one of its Sprint Cup dates in the LA market....well, it looks like NASCAR needs a better strategic game plan for Southern California. Simply folding up the tents and leaving town doesn't look like good marketing. (Photo: Getty Images for NASCAR)
By Mike Mulhern
mikemulhern.net
WATKINS GLEN, N.Y.
NASCAR's decision to pull the plug on one of its only two Sprint Cup weekends in Los Angeles, at California's Auto Club Speedway, is mindboggling...and more.
Les Richter, the legendary NASCAR Mr. Fix-it and long-time Mr. Riverside, is probably rolling over in his grave.
And Shav Glick too, the veteran Los Angeles Times journalist and NASCAR's long-time West Coast man who did so much to promote the sport in Southern California.
Richter was NASCAR's point man for the California Speedway project, working his butt off to make it happen for Bill France Jr. and Roger Penske and the sport, which was absent from this key American market for 10 years.
Nostalgia aside, leaving LA like this is just flat wrong, for a number of reasons:
Yes, there will still be one Cup weekend in Southern California....but for years the sport considered the market important enough to host three each season. (Note: NASCAR hasn't confirmed the decision yet.)
Yes, Fontana, where the two-mile D-shaped oval was built on the site of the old Kaiser Steel mill that Arnold Schwarzenegger made so famous in the Terminator movie, might not be Hollywood exactly, or Beverly Hills. And maybe the sport of stock car racing is more a San Diego type thing than pure LA (but then San Diego is just an hour away, and a straight shot up I-15).
Yes, crowds have been off lately, for reason we will quickly discuss here, with solutions.
Yes, even the NFL (which opens its own tour this week with a number of pre-season games) can't seem to get much going in the LA market (the Raiders and Rams split in 1994).
And yes, staunch hard-core stock car fans may still hold a grudge against NASCAR for moving the classic Southern 500 from Darlington, S.C., to Southern California back in 2004....
But Los Angeles is the biggest U.S. market that NASCAR plays in, and it's been playing in this market – the second biggest market in the country -- since 1958.
It is extremely important for stock car teams and sponsors to have a significant presence in Southern California...regardless of the size of the Sunday crowds.
And leaving LA like this – just packing up that second Cup date and flat quitting (retrenching might be a nicer term) -- sends the wrong signal to NASCAR's sponsors and potential sponsors. This is not a positive for the sport; it is a negative.
If there's a problem, NASCAR should simply fix it. Of course good engineering says to first define the problem. So just what is the problem here at LA's Auto Club Speedway? (Photo: Getty Images for NASCAR)
-- First, simply leaving LA doesn't fix the problem.
And the problem really is simple physics and engineering – NASCAR's stockers are going too darned fast, something like 208 mph, into quite flat 14-degree turns.
That's why the racing has been generally single-file, with cars spaced typically 20 car lengths apart.
Solution: slow the cars about 20 mph, and increase the banking to something like 20 degrees or more.
A basic business principle is to give the customer a good product at a decent price. That should be applied to California Speedway. It hasn't been, on the technical side.
Consider that California is a virtual copy of classic two-mile Michigan International Speedway and now idle-Texas World Speedway in College Station. However Michigan's banking is a reasonable 18 degrees, and Texas' banking is a flat-awesome 23 degrees. Put some soft wall around TWS, and there could be some great racing.
Raising the banking at California and slowing the speeds has been discussed almost from the time the track opened in 1997.
But NASCAR and the track owners have resisted. (Track boss Gillian Zucker herself has pushed for such change, only to be rebuffed.)
So what do we have now? A track that has a reputation for boring, single-file, follow-the-leader racing.
Just packing up that Cup weekend and shipping it to Kansas City won't solve that.
It will take some bulldozers and engine dyno work.
Or maybe just make California a restrictor-plate track, a smaller Talladega, as Michael Waltrip has suggested.
That's cheap and easy. (Drivers certainly couldn't complain about that, not with those secret $50,000 fines dangling over theirs heads if they dare say something NASCAR executives don't like. BTW, isn't it time for NASCAR to apologize for that and try to make amends....with the fans who have, from even a cursory reading of internet sites, been generally outraged?)
Matt Kenseth (L, after winning last year's California 500) and track pres Gillian Zucker (far right) (Photo: Getty Images for NASCAR)
-- So, second, simply leaving LA like this, cutting back to one mid-March race, won't change the track's image among its client demographic for boring action.
The California track has two problems, one technical, one of image.
What NASCAR and track owners should do (it's the same family, remember) is fix the problems.
Why would cutting back to one Cup event automatically pack the 92,000-seat grandstands? That game plan is a slap in the face to Southern Californians.
-- And third, look at the situation this way: if, in a market of some 25 million people, NASCAR can't find some way to put 92,000 butts in those seats twice a year, there is something significantly wrong with this sport.
Let's say that again slowly: 25 million people.
Aside from the technical problems with the track itself, there have been some scheduling goof-ups over the years....like when NASCAR scheduled Friday Trucks events for a 6 p.m. PT start, so it could get a good TV slot, 9 p.m. ET.
Think about that again for a moment: 6 p.m. PT Friday evening, at the track at the junction of Interstate 10 and Interstate 15, the area's two major arteries, invariably jammed.
Traffic?
Just a little. Two of the busiest highways in the state.
No wonder the stands were typically almost empty. Would you want to drive through California rush hour traffic like that?
Another example of the sport kowtowing to TV....or TV dictating to the sport, or whatever the reason.
And Trucks probably put on the best shows at that track. (Of course now, with the economy, the Truck tour teams can't afford to make that West Coast run, so the Fontana has been dropped from the calendar....and the Truck series opens with just three events in the season's first three months. Rather hard for a division to build any momentum with that much time off.)
-- Fourth, consider the weather.
It never rains in Southern California? Nice song...but wrong. The rainy season in Southern California runs from November to the end of April. Remember that rain-soaked Sunday February 24th back in 2008, a race that was finally finished Monday, in front of a crowd of about 25,000?
The temperatures? For the five Labor Day weekend 500s at California Speedway, the official airport highs were 101 degrees, 93 degrees, 104 degrees, 110 degrees, and 90 degrees. Finally NASCAR realized the problem and moved that race to October last year, where it played to a much more pleasant 70 degrees.
But now it appears NASCAR's Sprint Cup tour will be playing that weekend in Kansas City instead.
KC is a great town. Great restaurants, nice ambience, cool jazz....and a nice track.
But it's not LA.
Perhaps the moral of this whole story should be 'never lower your expectations....or you will likely meet your goal from the wrong side.'
The people of Southern California deserve a better game plan than this one.
Or maybe Bruton Smith should just buy the place and make it work.
Hey, with just one Cup date now, California Speedway is a bargain at half-price....
[Note: You can use Twitter as an easy headline service for mikemulhern.net stories, with our instant Tweets to your mobile as soon as our newest NASCAR story is filed. And mikemulhern.net is mobile-friendly for viewing. You can also use the orange RSS feed button as a quickie headline service on your laptop or home computer for mikemulhern.net stories, by creating a Live Bookmark RSS feed on your web browser's toolbar. Or you can create a Google Alert for mikemulhernnet.]
Maybe the celebrity thing has been overplayed, but maybe getting Jack Nicholson in the NASCAR garage might not be such a bad marketing gambit (Photo: Getty Images for NASCAR)
© 2010-2011 www.mikemulhern.net All rights reserved.
Web site by www.webdesigncarolinas.com
I kind of resent the dropping
I kind of resent the dropping of any West Coast race. I would love to see a second date at LVMS. I think NASCAR forgets how many of us are on the "wrong" side of the country. It is not feasible for us to be able to hit too many races as it is. I always go to Fontana, Vegas, Sonoma and Phoenix. I am lucky tho, and most my expenses are paid. Not the case for the average fan. Southern loyalty is one thing....but cutting even one Western reachable race feels like alienation to many fans.
@Churchofthegreatoval: Until
@Churchofthegreatoval: Until you've been to Charlotte during race week, you ain't seen no real racin'...Every NASCAR fan needs to attend at least two races in their lifetime. The Daytona 500 & The Coke-Cola 600. Plan for it. Make it a vacay. You won't regret it. And now w/the HOF and race shops all over the place and CMS itself is incredible.
My top-10 see-before-you-die
My top-10 see-before-you-die NASCAR races:
Daytona 500
both Talladega 500s
the Bristol night race in August
both Richmonds under-the-lights
Darlington at night
the Charlotte 600
Texas in November
and Atlanta at night
And I'd throw in -- Sonoma,
And I'd throw in
-- Sonoma, the way they've been running there the last few years, plus the ambience....
-- Homestead and Las Vegas, for the unique flavor of those two parts of the world, if not for the racing itself...
-- and November Phoenix, for the late-season drama (though i still remember nascar getting chopped off TV late by ABC, so it could show America's Funniest Home Videos).
and -- i can hear the screams now from CMS -- an All-star race at Atlanta, which is typically one of the best tracks on the tour just for pure sprint racing.....
Good points Mike. I need to
Good points Mike.
I need to go to the races more myself. Especially Richmond & Bristol at night, the Talladega(s)...I wonder what Martinsville would look like under the lights...
i've tried to persuade clay
i've tried to persuade clay campbell for years to do one of those Cup races as a night race, maybe even like thursday night or friday night, one day in-and-out.
> the Bristol night race in
> the Bristol night race in August
the fact that you can buy Bristol tickets for the upcoming Bristol race show that the formula is fundamentally broken. I just looked and one can get 6 tickets together high up in the stands --- price was over $700. ridiculous.
and this certainly doesn't address the ever dwindling tv numbers, which says cost alone is not a determining factor.
I agree --- the product on the track is better than its been in a long, long time --- but I guess this is what happens when you wring the neck of the golden goose.
oh well.
--vegas
Imagine if they took a race
Imagine if they took a race from you that you were going to for 30 years, and they said you helped build the sport and made us rich, but you are no longer important to us, we are going elsewhere. talk about alienation.
I'm right there with you,
I'm right there with you, bro. I saw my first big 'Cup' race at -- don't laugh -- Bowman Gray Stadium in 1967, when half the field was in the garage for the green, because it's only a quarter-mile. And I've been covering this sport since 1972. I always thought if they wanted to cut North Wilkesboro and Rockingham and Nashville's old Fairgrounds track, they ought to run those things as a one-day in-and-out, say on Wednesday nights during the summer.
There's no question the cars
There's no question the cars need restrictor plates at Fontana, at Pocono, heck on ALL the tracks - both for safety aspect and to make the racing better. As for the California market, the middle of the state, the Bakersfield-Hanford area, is the real racing dempgraphic - a superoval in that area would make more sense.
actually i once figured the
actually i once figured the best place for a new track in southern carlifornia was somewhere near san diego, but i think the government vetoed that, so some reason.
re: plates. wonder if fuel injection can play a role in that deal?
Restrictor plates at all of
Restrictor plates at all of the tracks? LMAO!! That's the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard. This is racing, not restricting. The only reason the plates are on at two of the tracks now is because NASCAR does not want to spec a different engine at those tracks to slow the cars down via less horsepower instead of attaching the plates. Why don't we just put 55 mph governors on the cars too and race like school buses? That would be exciting. Brian France, is that you?
okay, i concede i'm not quite
okay, i concede i'm not quite sure where stp43 gets all the plate stuff. most of his analysis is downright brilliant, and i understand why plate racing is so appealing. but plates dont really solve the problem, IMHO. yes, putting plates on the cars would make Cal Speedway racing really action packed. but why not try less HP. why in the world do we need 900 HP engines, on cars this big and heavy and awkward, with tires this small? Still, at least stp43 has some ideas...which is more than we can say about the current technical administration. we've got hundreds of engineers; surely at least one of them can solve this problem.
STP 43 fan obviously didn't
STP 43 fan obviously didn't watch the bore fest at New Hampshire in 2000 when they ran plates there. Jeff Burton led the entire race....yep...all 300 laps. I swear, Nascar fans will complain about anything. Nascar takes away a date at what has been almost universally ruled the most boring track in Nascar and people still complain. Great move Nascar, Kansas City should support two dates better than Fontana.
Mike- you have some ideas but it doesn't matter. The LA fan is among the most fickle in sports. I suspect even if the racing was great, Fontana would not fill up. The NFL is a pretty smart group of people and even they can't figure out a way to make it work
Anonymous, I was at that New
Anonymous, I was at that New Hampshire 300 in 2000 and this is what I saw -
** a 23-car battle for 3rd in the opening ten laps.
** John Andretti blitz past 22 cars in the first green-flag run.
** Bobby Labonte pass Jeff Burton twice in the last 50 laps; Burton beat him back to the stripe both times.
The overall race wasn't competitive but nowhere did restrictor plates impede any ability to pass. Such has never been the case in any plate race. The fact remains restrictor plate racing is fundamentally better.
fireball, racing doesn't mean
fireball, racing doesn't mean restricting has no place - on the contrary, as has been shown with the HR races in baseball and the realization that illegal enhancers drove that race, there are performance levels in sports best avoided for the overall good of the sports in question. This is especially true of racing where, as Brock Yates wrote back in 1986-7, costs and absurd performance levels led to the wholesale banning of a slew of technological items such as turbine engines, Wankel engines, and even four-wheel drive (I know of no series, not even Indycars, that use four-wheel drive; they all use rear-wheel drive).
The restrictor plates are in use because, contrary to a myth you keep believing, NASCAR found (via the failure of the V6 experiment in BGN and also by 1992-3 testing of a 305 CID engine), there really isn't any alternative - those smaller engines did not slow the cars down to any legitimate extent. This is part of why I support the use of the plates at more tracks - not only is there no credible alternative to them, they are a simple tool that actually do what they're supposed to do.
Too many proposed solutions to a problem involve complex assumptions and big arrays of equipment (for improved safety, build a COT instead of retrofitting existing cars with at least some of the improvements offered by the COT, and so forth) rather than simple bolt-on solutions - it's as though people look to avoid simple bolt-on solutions to problems. The plates work and are an easy solution to implement - you bolt on the plate, and that's it. Not only do they restrict the HP they also allow - even require - the drivers to race open throttle ("as usual, it puts the onus back on the driver," Darrell Waltrip noted in 1988, "because you have to drive the car harder, and you have to drive the car looser because you don't have the power to pull it off the turns") and when they have to do this the racing tends to get better.
The use of restrictor plates
The use of restrictor plates is a simple solution, and that's what NASCAR most always goes for until somebody dies. They aren't going to spend any money to find what might be a better way than using restictor plates. You mentioned the testing of smaller engines - who did those tests? NASCAR is just now getting into the idea of actually using fuel injection. The trucks run unrestricted at Daytona, using tapered spacers instead, and are able to spread out more, have more throttle response, and the ability to avoid wrecks better. The wrecks with the trucks on superspeedways are more akin to inexperienced drivers than they are about getting caught up in someone else's mistake like you see in the Cup and Nationwide races. The danger with restrictor plates is that when there is a wreck there is little chance to avoid it if it happens in front of you, and drivers are less willing to let off of the accelerator with the restrictor plate in place because you have no throttle recovery to regain your speed as quickly. NASCAR continues to be unrepentive in their use, but it usually takes the worst happening to get any response out of them.
Perhaps fuel injection will help "fix" all of the issues with restrictor plates. NASCAR can then simply limit the amount of fuel to the engine that way, and hopefully that will not take away the throttle response of the cars from the drivers like the plates do. Racing is as much about working the throttle as it is about working the wheel. Restrictor plates erase half of that. When racers like Tony Stewart and others state that they are "having a hard time holding their eyes open" at restrictor plate tracks while the race is going on, then it's a problem. The boredom is not just experienced by the fans.
Larry Woody from last fall: Don’t Tamper With Talla’
This switch is akin to
This switch is akin to dumping one ugly girl for another ugly girl, except that the new chick has better entertainment options at her house. The new girl (the racing at Kansas) is just as ugly as the one you dumped, but that big screen TV (casino) is too good to pass up. Maybe Gateway can get them a couple of casinos to spur the interest of NASCAR. In an era where TV ratings mean more than butts in seats at the track, one would think NASCAR would be more concerned with the product on the track than what goes on outside of it. With this meaningless switch of venues, it's apparent that they don't because neither track produces good racing.
Come on Mulhern, more banking
Come on Mulhern, more banking would just add to the mid corner speed of the cars here. 208 would just be a fond memory with 23 degrees of banking - 208 would probably be reached on the back straight instead of just the front as it is now. CART easily saw 250 + with the hanford wing in the late 90's there and the stands there weren't packed for that either. Now Long Beach delivers a good SoCal crowd even with the mess that is IndyCar now, why? IRL wants a double header with Nascar to pump up their attendance, let's invade their event and make that a double header. If they (Indycar) agree to that, then they should be allowed to join Nascar at any event of Indycar's choosing.
agreed. which is why we need
agreed. which is why we need to cut these 900 hp engines back to something more manageable. i recall 640 hp engines at maybe 160-something at 18-degree michigan back when worked pretty well.
but, man, i like that thinking about Long Beach. I've been pushing Toyota to put NASCAR there too...if heart-of-LA fans wont come to the race, take the racing to the fans in the heart-of-LA.
Post new comment