Times may be tough, but NASCAR's Brian France offers an "aggressive" approach, hinting at changes for 2011, in Cup and Nationwide...but nixes Indycars

  The boss speaks, and offers hints of changes coming (Photo: Getty Images for NASCAR)
  

   By Mike Mulhern
   mikemulhern.net

   DAYTONA BEACH, Fla.
   Brian France delivered a pep talk to his media troops here Friday morning, and so to the sport's somewhat beleaguered fan base. And the stock car racing  boss, while saying he was generally pleased with the trends the sport is showing, pointed to several new twists he and his men were considering for 2011.
   But he offered more hints and concepts than hard changes. He offered more a philosophical mood than anything solid:
  "When things are tough, and we all feel like we're in a storm, it's not as easy as it used to be. You get a chance to be more self-critical.
   "The industry comes together a little bit differently because we're all trying to get through to the other side.
   "Take this year:  Certainly we have a tendency over many years to at some points in time over-regulate the sport...we obviously dialed that back."
    On the other hand, France says he is going to crank up the volume by "getting more aggressive at marketing the sport. There won't be any doubt about that as the next two, three, four years go on. Because we need to, and it's important."
    Out on the track, in this season of 'Boys, have at it,' France says "there's not any silver bullet we can use to emulate a perfect racing scenario every weekend. But by and large, we're pretty happy where we're at."

    His specific points:

   -- The Sprint Cup championship chase may well be changed up a bit for 2011, with "some high-impact changes."
   "We're looking at the chase format very, very carefully. We want to make sure it's giving us the biggest impact moments it was designed to do. Everything to us means pushing the winning envelope. We're happy with the chase; (but) if we can enhance it in a pretty significant way, we may do that. The chase is an evolution. So we'll tweak that.
   "The big design is to have playoff-type moments, that only can be created when there's a lot on the line at any one moment. That's the essence of Game Sevens."

   -- The economy:
    "The economy is what it is; it's still difficult. It doesn't appear to have improved much for our fan base or a lot of our corporate customers.
    "The economy certainly plays a role, because we ask our fans to stay longer, drive further, buy hotel rooms, to come to our events.
      "That's the bad news. The good news is we've got 400 different sponsors within the sport, most of them renewing their sponsorships. The car manufacturers, despite a very difficult climate, have made a lot of improvements in their own business models and are more stable. They are reinvesting in NASCAR for the long-term.
   "In some of our big states we were very successful in traditionally, like Michigan and here in Florida, have been some of the hardest hit.
   "There are 14 million to 15 million people a weekend tuning us in."

   -- The Nationwide series will likely be changed up to create better opportunities for new team owners and new drivers, with incentives of some sort, but without barring headlining Cup drivers. France says "the concentration of power...we would prefer not to see is, because it's a barrier to entry for new owners and new drivers.
    "You're likely to see us make some changes in the Nationwide Series, because there's such a concentration of Cup drivers --  which we like, on one hand, but we want to make sure that that division is our version of college football.
    "We like Cup drivers racing in Nationwide. We just need to make sure the stage is not crowded out so much so that we can't give opportunities to Nationwide young regulars who need that experience.
    "The Sprint Cup drivers agree with us. The owners agree with us. We have got to have the rules and the requirements for the Nationwide series much more tilted to new drivers -- giving them a greater opportunity. That would include new owners too."
  
    -- France poured cold water on Indy-car chief Randy Bernard's enthusiasm for some Indy-car/NASCAR Cup double headers: "We won't be doing doubleheaders with the Sprint Cup levels. That won't be possible because of scheduling issues. We don't have any interest in doing that either."
 
   -- Fox sports boss David Hill has complained about NASCAR losing ground in the 18-34 male demographic, down about 30 percent from last year, and last year down about 20 percent from the year before.
   "We've got some work to do," France says. "Any demographic we lose ground on is something we worry about. The 18-35 demographic is very important to us.
    "The core fan is a little bit older than that; you want to satisfy your core fan, but you have to do the things to make you as attractive as possible. That's 'social media' to us, which is going to be one of the great opportunities to reach that young demographic."

    -- Technology and marketing: France hinted that he would try to open the sport up for new technology, without being specific: "We're going to be an amazing place to validate, and help these companies market these new technologies...which will be great for our teams and our tracks because they'll have a different sponsorship and commercial base to work off of."

  -- The proposed new 2011 Cup weekends at Kansas Speedway and Kentucky Speedway: "The deadline has come and gone, and we have heard from the public companies and the track operators as to some of their wishes. We are digesting that now and working with them.
    "We typically put our schedule out around Labor Day. It's my hope we'll meet that goal.
     "There are now new requests from SMI (for Kentucky) and ISC (for Kansas).  We'll have to see how it all fits into the greater schedule.
    "It starts with what's best for the fan base in a market, in a region...Then there's the size of markets that obviously matters.
    "But in the end it's got to work for the track operator. If it's not financially working as well as it could work somewhere else, it's not working for the fans as well either."
   The issue here is France doesn't want to expand the 38-week Cup schedule, so adding a date to those two tracks would require the two track owners, Bruton Smith's Speedway Motorsports and the France family's International Speedway Corp., move a date from one of their current tracks. Neither side has shown any interest in revealing which two tracks might be the losers.

   -- Green: While France reiterated his push for 'green' in the sport, any change to ethanol/gasoline may not come in 2011. "It's certainly an option that is interesting. But....it will be important for us to evolve the fuel source over time. We'll do that with Sunoco, trying to respect and value their set of rights."
   Sunoco apparently doesn't have much interest in an ethanol-gasoline racing gas mix and would have to sub out that project to another company.
  
   The bottom line from France in all this: "If we pull a lever, unfortunately you might have unintended consequences downstream.
   "We're trying to have a group of people that are smart and serious about looking way down the road, so we get all this stuff right.
    "We won't get it all right, but we'll try to do as best as we can."

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