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Remember the 'Good ol' Days,' and the 'Good ol' Boys'? Could Junior Johnson and Dale Earnhardt make it in today's NASCAR?
Celebrating victory at North Wilkesboro Speedway: Big Bill France (L) congratulating Junior Johnson (Photo: Getty Images for NASCAR)
By Mike Mulhern
mikemulhern.net
WATKINS GLEN, N.Y.
Where are the good ol' boys anymore?
Why is stock car racing, with its classic working-class audience, being run – by drivers on the track, and by officials off the track – by so many vastly overpaid corporate types who probably haven't seen any mud under their fingernails in years?
Maybe that's one problem with NASCAR racing today – how many fans like you can relate to a sport run by millionaire executives managing millionaire athletes making $ 7 million, $8 million, $9 million or more, all flying million-dollar planes and living in chauffeur-driven million-dollar motorcoaches?
Give me a break.
I remember when Dale Earnhardt was hauling his beat up sportsman car up and down the road and bumming Cup rides from Ed Negre. It took him years to crack the big time. He paid his dues before buying Sunday Money. I remember when Richard Petty and Dale Inman drove the car-hauler from track to track themselves. And the Wood brother too...and Richard Childress...
How many of today's NASCAR drivers and officials can really relate to the men and women, us working-class stiffs, who ultimately pay their salaries?
This sport's fans deserve better.
Remember when Richard Petty, at his height, would sit for hours on the pit wall after a hard day's race and sign autographs for anyone and everyone who wanted one?
After the race these days drivers and executives sprint for their corporate jets or private helicopters to make a fast getaway.
Maybe it's not the action on the track that is driving fans away, but the 'gouge' and the dour attitude of the people who wear the 'face' of this sport. Are any of these guys really having fun at this...except when taking that fat check to the bank?
Where did this arrogant, pompous, imperial attitude come from anyway? Where's the enthusiasm, the joy, the passion...not to mention that good 'ol school camaraderie.
It's more fun to go the Home Depot or Lowe's and talk with those guys than to deal with some of these guys.
The action on the track this season is great, best in years.
But to say, as Jeff Burton sometimes does, 'these are the good ol' days' belies the simple question of 'where are the good ol' boys'?
Remember when the stands were packed for NASCAR at the Brickyard? Time to recapture that magic. (Photo: Getty Images for NASCAR)
This sport needs a better 'face,' and certainly needs officials with more pizzazz. Why does every NASCAR executive look so pained and august?
Consider the fans themselves and then consider, to paraphrase what someone said a few years ago 'If it wasn't for us, y'all wouldn't have a job.'
Without fans, there is no need for NASCAR or its drivers.
And after watching how television's so-called journalists – some of whom appear little more than house shills – handled last week's controversies over those 'secret' NASCAR penalties on drivers for speaking their peace and how they've handled other controversies, like the vast swathes of empty seats at Indianapolis Motor Speedway and elsewhere, and the generally sluggish TV ratings the past year, well, we shouldn't expect much illuminating analysis from that bunch on what changes might be in the sport's best interests. (Here are some interesting comments from readers of the Daly Planet NASCAR TV blog about all that: http://bit.ly/9mXc5c )
Another thing NASCAR needs: a rule that every team owner must be at the track at least one day every race weekend, and not just hidden up in some fancy suite but out sweating things out in the garage and on pit road.
No more absentee owners...No more owners we never see or hear from.
Where is George Gillett? He owns four Cup teams.
Where is Dietrich Mateschitz. He owns two Cup teams.
Are absentee car owners good for the sport? George Gillett owns four NASCAR Cup teams...but has anybody seen him at any events this season? And what about Teresa Earnhardt? Why doesn't NASCAR have a rule that team owners have to show up at each race? (Photo: Getty Images for NASCAR)
Following that, here's a modest proposal, taking Indianapolis two weeks ago as an example...and following up on some talk with Speed TV's Ray Dunlap.
(Dunlap, one of the most knowledgeable and articulate TV men in this sport, sometimes seems about the only man at that Fox affiliate who is not just another NASCAR fan-boy. And who made Speed the 'official' house-organ of Daytona anyway? Have Fox' David Hill and Ed Goren simply given up on all this and turned over their responsibilities to the NASCAR Media Group?)
-- First, stop dividing this sport's markets.
Make each Sprint Cup weekend a full-boat package: Trucks, Nationwide and Cup.
No more of this Milwaukee/Road America Nationwide on Saturday, Cup at Sonoma on Sunday.
No more of this Trucks in Nashville, but Cup at the Glen.
At one point the 'diversification' of NASCAR's national touring series seemed a good idea – every track/market that can't get the full Sprint Cup ticket can at least get something of a taste of NASCAR. But that model may not work anymore.
Consider Indianapolis, where the big track is filled with generally boring and fairly meaningless action on Friday and Saturday, leading up to Sunday's Cup race (on a track that is, unfortunately, simply not that conducive to good racing, because it's too fast and too flat). The best action Indy weekend is typically up the road at Raceway Park. But how much of those two audiences crossover? Isn't NASCAR in a sense dividing its potential crowds?
-- Second, begin some major economic and technical repairs on the faltering Nationwide series.
Now NASCAR is reported to be considering – at long last – a Nationwide race at the big track in Indy, Saturday during Cup weekend. (And run another Nationwide race at Raceway Park on another weekend.) But why run the Nationwide cars on the big oval too? Why not change things up and run them on the Formula 1 road course?
Sure, not that road course racing is all that great, but if NASCAR would throw some Grand-Am twists into the package, it might work.
Certainly everyone who is involved in NASCAR racing has to be worried about the future of the Nationwide tour, particularly with the looming – ill-timed, in fact -- changeover to another version of the car-of-tomorrow. And everyone realizes now how expensive the car-of-tomorrow project was even for the well-heeled Cup owners. How many Cup team owners did that project help run out of town?
Perhaps NASCAR should require all Cup owners, if they want to run more than one Cup team, to field a Nationwide team too....and with a 'development' or 'diversity' driver, not some Sunday Cup star.
-- Third, this should be the template for a NASCAR weekend:
Thursday afternoon, two hours of 'testing' with data-acquisition-rigged cars;
Friday afternoon, short qualifying heats, just like Daytona's twin 150s during SpeedWeeks, only shorter. And pay points for winning, say a 50-point bonus, and a 25-point bonus for second, to make sure nobody dogs it.
Saturday a Truck-Nationwide double-header, maybe throw in some Grand-Am events, and why not the occasional Indy-car race too? (NASCAR CEO Brian France may insist he's got 'no interest' in such NASCAR-IRL double-headers, but what about sister Lesa France Kennedy, who has to fill all those grandstand seats at the family's tracks? Maybe she should weigh in here. Those last few International Speedway Corp. reports to Wall Street haven't been all that rosy.)
And Sunday the Sprint Cup feature.
A full race weekend package for fans.
It is about the fans, isn't it?
Focus.
That's what NASCAR needs. Tighter focus on each Cup weekend.
The idea of two-day, Saturday-Sunday, race packages? Hey, that might be great if you've got a private plane and can fly in Saturday morning and fly home Sunday night.
But what about the family that wants to make a vacation of it?
Give the fans the full package:
One point to consider: those 'stand-alone' events for Trucks and Nationwide typically don't do very well at all. Without a couple of NASCAR Cup headliners, the stands likely wouldn't be very full at all.
If NASCAR execs think they can't successfully run two Cup events in Los Angeles, there is something wrong with NASCAR's business model (Photo: Getty Images for NASCAR)
Another thing to consider, while debating the 2011 Cup schedule:
Apparently there is talk about dropping a California Auto Club Speedway race, the February event, to make room for a second Kansas City Cup date.
Bad move.
Wrong-headed reasoning.
Forget for a moment the specious argument that Kansas might deserve – business-wise – a second Cup weekend.
Dropping an event in the Los Angeles market would be a monumental business mistake.
Yes, Fontana might not be the best location for a track.
Yes, the Fontana market itself might be less than enthusiastic about NASCAR.
Yes, downtown LA is nearly an hour away.
But if the second-largest market in the United States can't support two such sporting events, with rather modest grandstand seating of 92,000 really, then there is something seriously wrong here.
Certainly NASCAR executives should be able to figure out how to package a California-Las Vegas spring weekend.
And what to do about Homestead-Miami and the season finale? Keep the final race of the season in Miami...and do a better job of marketing it.
That second race needed at Las Vegas? It should be in the chase, logically as the lead-off. That track, Goodyear says, is one of the toughest on the tour. Market it like that, and with pizzazz.
Bottom line: the sport of NASCAR, and its executives and team owners, have become held hostage to TV.
Maybe the money is good – but then 65 percent of the billions go to the track owners, of which there are primarily two, the France family and Bruton Smith, and 10 percent goes straight to NASCAR itself, and the other 25 percent is divvied up among the 43 or so teams (according to some secret formula not fully revealed).
Or at least that's the percentage breakdown for TV monies traditionally. In this age where NASCAR executives feel free to make secret rules and enforce secret penalties, who knows where the money really goes.
Certainly not to the fans.
NASCAR's Brian France (R) makes the rules, but sister Lesa France Kennedy (L), head of the family's ISC track empire, and perhaps the most powerful female sports executive in America, has to fill all those seats. Are they both really on the same page in all this? (Photo: Getty Images for NASCAR)
And TV of course has a decidedly different demographic than this sport itself has had traditionally.
TV, and its sponsors, have long favored the 18-34 and 18-49 demographic....though it is not at all clear any more that those groups have any right to be so favored.
NASCAR officials have done a great job of getting the action on the track in fine fiddle.
But there's more to all this than just a great product. It's got to be marketed and promoted just right.
NASCAR's marketers have certainly been using the shotguns to get the sport out there into the broad stream of American life.
But at the moment there are a few loose ends still to be tied up.
And it's time for NASCAR and its men – and women -- to be thinking outside of the box.
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And don't even get us started again on those 80 stock car racing legends somehow missing from NASCAR's new Hall of Fame in Charlotte. Will Bud Moore get in while he's still alive and kicking? Junior Johnson (R) and HoF boss Winston Kelly checking out one of Jack Roush's many legendary recreations (Photo: Getty Images for NASCAR)
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Numerous points worth
Numerous points worth discussion are with the usual Mike Mulhern aplomb raised and once again warrant what I hope is a good analytical response.
1 - The severance of the sport's working-class atmosphere with the overload of pompous multimillionaires is indeed a grossly overlooked angle in the sport's decline in popularity. There is virtually no corner of the sport that hasn't been affected, between car owners, drivers, and track owners - when NHIS was owned by the Bahres there was a relationship between owner and paying customer that's disappearing with SMI ownership of the track. As for car owners, two men did more to price the sport out of all reason than anyone - Rick Hendrick and Jack Roush; they can be charming individuals but the ruthlessness of their drive in the sport has done a lot to screw up the economics as well as severe the relationship between team owners and drivers and the larger fanbase.
When Alan Kulwicki won the title, that truly rejuvinated working-class love of the sport. When Richard Petty's team began winning again, that also brought a boost. The dearth of "small" team success has been a huge detriment to the sport - it's impossible to relate to the likes of Rick Hendrick and Jack Roush, and even Joe Gibbs, though still seen as a unique case given his NFL success, has become so much bigger as a race team that some of the charm of his early success can't be found now.
2 - That the Truck and Busch/Nationwide series are no longer capable of standing on their own is certainly true, but the problem can't be solved by increasing the reason that degraded them as series - Winston Cup participation. People forget that the two series were becoming decent stand-alone series when Winston Cup participation was less prevalent - this was especially true of the Trucks. NASCAR's bid to boost ratings etc. for the two series by putting them into more WC weekends provided at best a short-term bounce but it's been a long-term failure, with virtually no sustained development of long-term star power or new faces.
It would seem that instead of locking more BGN/Truck races onto WC weekends, the two series should be broken away from WC and run more as stand-alone series. I don't buy that "dividing the sport's markets" is happening when the three series race stand-alone events; if anything it helps BGN and Trucks establish some kind of stand-alone power.
I do like the idea of package deals for WC and stand-alone BGN/Truck races.
when fox' david hill finally
when fox' david hill finally gets brave enough to fire up the 'pit bulls' show again, i want you at the desk right beside me. you've got a lot of david poole in you -- i may disagree on a lot of points, but you make your case very eloquently.
1. the big car owners have their pluses and minuses in all this. let's accentuate their positives, and why not go with the idea of letting them have as many cup teams as they'd like as long as they add nationwide/or/truck teams for each additional one?
2. what happened to the alan kulwicki scenario that brian france and the rest of us would dearly love to see again? that HAS to be a major focus for nascar. everyone loves the 'underdog.'
3. truck and nationwide are dying on the vine, and we all see that. will there even be full fields this weekend? how many S&Ps? The stand-alone idea is a good one, but in this economy, it's just not working. maybe 2-3 years down the road, but not right now. we've got to do something to save those two series....
and, hey, mon, you haven't even addressed my NASCAR/IRL double header idea.
thanks again for your erudite contributions. i for one would vote DW and those dinosaurs off the tube and promote you to one of the TV chairs....
oh, btw, you think i'm tough
oh, btw, you think i'm tough on these guys, i just found this item: http://bit.ly/bV3mlC
ouch!
40 yearsago I read about
40 yearsago I read about NASCAR in Sports Car Graphic. 30 years ago, I could watch some races on network tv. Cable 20 years ago broadcast all the races. Despite years of awareness Nascar is , to me, the least interesting series.
Fi is and has always been #1. I like British touring cars, German touring cars, AMls, Auusie supers, Rolex and Indy cars in that order. These series (except Indy)all race road courses and have rules againt blocking and unnecessary contact that are enforced. They all let the drivers drive and race and have a graet product.
The best racing on TV right now is the Continental Tire series. They have different types of car running heads up - no spec stuff here. Front engine V8's with rwd get passed by rear everything 6 cyl. Porches: what could be more interesting? There are lots of makes, and technologies. 4wd ;yes. Turbos; yes. Heavy cars: yes. Light cars: yes.The impressive thing is how well this philosophy works. They run all mixed up.
So for me what does NASCAR need. Road courses. Cars 1000lb lighter. 6 cylider boxers and 4 cyl turbos. Driving not mugging.
I'll watch, but I'll turn to a better race every time.
John McManus
good point on blocking. i
good point on blocking. i think even tony stewart would agree on that. like chip ganassi says, a driver gets to make one move to block or whatever, but the second move he gets penalized. kudos to indy's randy bernard for pulling the trigger.
now F1, i like that stuff as much as anyone (and just what has red bull figured out for qualifying?), but i dont know if i want to get carried away there, because bernie e has his own problems (i was at indy for that tire fiasco). but i do like your idea about changing up some of the tech stuff; robert yates was calling for that years ago, and i have never figured out why nascar ignored him. cars are too fast at indy, too fast at california, too fast at michigan.
and as for better racing, one major problem nascar has is there is no incentive for drivers to do anything the first two or three hours of these races except to ride. put some points out there for leading laps, or something. we lose viewers right from the start every sunday.
It's not just the absentee
It's not just the absentee owners who should be held accountable...how many times to we see Brian France at the races? Is he ever in the garage area, talking to drivers and team owners? Does he even care about anything other than having photo op's with the "D" list celebrities that usually confess they've never been to a stock car race, and wouldn't be there now if they didn't have a movie to hype?
And where did Tony Stewart get the idea is is up to the media to promote the sport? I thought you were supposed to report on it. Unless they start paying you to do so.
With all the rules and spec cars, where is the joy of racing? What happened to the innovative crew chief's trying to find wiggle room in the rules?
good points, all. and
good points, all.
and methinks we should all be looking in the mirror in assessing this sport, me included -- which is why i've gotten up on my horse and started riding it a little harder the last two weeks. when nascar threw out those 'secret' penalties (for which it has still not apologized or rescinded)..when Kevin Harick, the Cup tour points leader, when asked about the credibility issue here, responded flippantly 'good point...don't care.'...when nascar almost pointedly ignored rjreynolds' ralph seagraves and jerry long (the man who helped bring espn into this sport back in 1980) in that charlotte hall of fame thing....when tony stewart had the nerve to blame the media for nascar's ills....well, sorry, i just blew my cool. moving the southern 500 to los angeles...the car-of-tomorrow being shoved down everyone's throats....tv flacks babbling incoherently....well, i blame myself in part for not hitting harder on all these points.
I have a scenerio that I
I have a scenerio that I beleive would help alleviate the problems NASCAR is having, with CUP driver winning all the Nationwide races, start and parkers, and the perceived need for a championship chase.
My idea would be to get rid of the old Nationwide and Sprint series, and make them divisions, the previous years odd number standing finshers, would be in one division, the even number finishers would be in the other. They would race at different venues for the first 26 races, alternating racing on Saturday and Sunday. The top 20 in each division would finish the year racing for the championship. There would be plenty of opportunities for trackes to hold multilpe events, plus venues that havent had the opportunity to host the likes of Jeff Gordon or Dale Earnhardt Jr. would now have it.
Actually that sounds a lot
Actually that sounds a lot like the AmericanLeague/NationalLeague concept that RJR's T. Wayne Robertson first broached to me a few years back. it's a variant of the NFL's highly successful double-header game: one show at 1 pm, a second show a 4 pm, from a different venue. I've been toying around with that very concept the last few weeks....primarily because these Cup races are just too darned long. who wants to watch four hour shows preceded by an hour rain delay.....send half the guys to Iowa for a 200-mile Cup race, the other half to Pocono for a 250-mile Cup race. Two Sunday winners, and if the first race is boring, hang on, we've got another one coming at ya. i've even toyed with the idea -- don't laugh -- about taking, say Pocono, and turn that 500 mile thing into two 250-milers. every team has two cars; run the first race, get a winner; line up the backup cars and run a second 250. we need to get innovative. the corollary of 'if it aint broke, dont fix it,' is 'fix it.'
IMHO ;) (despite what lance armstrong says about smiley faces and all that lol).
Hmmmmmmmmmm. I'll have to
Hmmmmmmmmmm. I'll have to digest you guy's idea and ponder it some more. I definitely like the shorter races and am not opposed to having a split leadup to the Chase, but not if it means 20 car fields for both proposed shows. You'll need at least 30 cars to make it a good show at each venue. Not sure if there are enough (good) Cup teams out there to do that yet, but Pro Cup used to do a split series concept and PASS is currently doing this with North and South Series which have combined Championship races during and/or after the regular seasons. The budgets for those series are a fraction of the Cup Series, but it can work from a functionality standpoint. The budget standpoint is the one that would have to be overcome for it to work at the Cup level. The number of races are not being reduced with this idea, only the length. Can the purses be matched ratio wise with less laps and split races? That's the million dollar question.
Mike, Finally !!! Someone
Mike, Finally !!! Someone with a set of big brass ones who's not afraid of being iced out of Nascar for telling the truth.
Last week, on that Nascar shill show on Sirius, a man called and bemoaned the fact that so many drivers have become whiners. He said he wished these guys would work selling chicken wire at Home Depot, had to feed four kids on that salary and had to survive with only two weeks vacation. He said he was tired of hearing these out of touch millionaires constantly complaining how hard their jobs are and how hard they work. So, Mike, you're right about the drivers.
I got really upset that Ramsey Poston had the gall to blame the drivers for damaging the sport. I hardly think that reading Tweets and listening to hacked off drivers who are only speaking what the fans are thinking have damaged the sport. If anyone needs to be fined for ruining Nascar, it should be France and Helton. I mean, the drivers didn't think up the stupid Chase (which most fans hate), they didn't start the Nascar Welfare System of the Top 35, the Lucky Dog and the Wave Around. The drivers didn't lose the history of Nascar by removing Rockingham and the Firecracker 500. And the drivers didn't design a car that has ruined fan brand identity and turned Nascar into nothing more than a 36 race IROC series. These fat-cat executives are the only ones who have damaged the sport to the point that it will never return to what it was.
Mike, How much longer before
Mike,
How much longer before NASCAR starts pulling media credentials from reporters who are critical of the way the sport (entertainment enterprise) is being run into the ground?
I bet it will be soon. Next year, Jayski will only have "Official NASCAR-approved" press releases and sponsor/team P.R. posts on his website.
JT
The owner's mentality has
The owner's mentality has changed and sponsorship dictates the sport now. Sponsors used to support the racing, now they RUN the racing. They dictate drivers for the teams, talented or not. Gone are the days of earning your stripes and having lots of success at lower levels before you get to the top. Now it's put them in go-carts at age 5, late models at 14, and Trucks at 16, whether they win anything or not. Then they are thrown to the wolves in Cup Series when they never should be there yet in the first place unless they have won, and lots. Only the extremely talented survive. Part of that is NASCAR's fault for killing the feeder series, but the majority of it is the owner's faults because they are trying to gobble up the next could-be prodigy racer to keep him/her away from another owner. They don't want a Jeff Gordon type to either get away or be stolen from them like Hendrick did to Bill Davis. The only way for NASCAR to fix that now is to raise the age minimums for the top 3 series (22 for Cup, 20 for Nationwide, and 19 for trucks - or 18 if they have won a feeder series championship), and build back up the feeder series and short tracks in the process. Keep the Cup drivers from running for points in any of the feeder series, limit the number of races they can run in the feeder series, and set the maximum number of Cup drivers in the field to 6 at any of the feeder series races.
Now, back to the fans. All a fan wants is to get their money's worth when they go to track on raceday or race weekend. LONGGGGGGGG races are not necessarily the answer. That was NASCAR's answer way back to make the fans think they were getting their money's worth, but the majority of the drivers today wait until the last 1/3rd or 1/4th of the race to actually race. It is a RACE, mind you, not a ride. Shorten the races as you said, Mike, add heats (preferably on race day except at Daytona), and a support series race of some kind. Run the heats beginning at 12:30, then run the feeder series, then run the big show. You get close to the same number of laps, but the racing will be better. Fans would also be exposed to the support series drivers on the same ticket. Win-win.
sponsors have always had
sponsors have always had sway, but never like this. it's because the cost of this sport is outrageous. even jeff gordon is complaining. i cant believe no one is talking about that fact that he doesnt have a sponsor for next season.
nascar needs to revive the feeder system yes, and maybe some age thing would work. i also believe that after two years or so you have to move, and can't come back down....we're watching the death of nationwide and truck and if it werent for S&Ps, they wouldnt have fields.
the tail is wagging the dog.
doubleheaders, yes! and heat races! we cant waste fridays like we are. thats absurd.
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