A No-France NASCAR? A No-NASCAR Racing Circuit?
What Does the Future Hold for Us Fans?
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I’m
gazing at the clouds and seeing the shape of stock car racing’s future in their
shapes. But the shapes keep changing (clouds do that).
That
big cloud over there looks like NASCAR being sold by the France family to
International Speedway Corporation (the France family running a public
corporation instead of a private one), or maybe… no, I think it’s NASCAR being
bought by Speedway Motorsports… no, it’s
an association of car owners with that Kauffman guy leading the way.
Whichever
it is, that cloud seems to be coming apart quickly. I guess people with a
vested interest in one part of the whole sometimes have trouble running the
whole successfully. At least that’s the way the clouds look to me.
Whatever happens, I just hope the sport doesn’t
end up looking like this.
But
look at that over there; an even bigger cloud that seems to be overtaking the
big cloud I see as NASCAR, but then they split off in different ways and end up
even smaller than when they started. Now I see… that’s the one where some
outside investors buy NASCAR and decide this unruly mess of teams and owners,
tracks and owners, corporate interests, drivers and – oh, yes – FANS can be run
successfully the way you run a bank, insurance company or dollar store. That
doesn’t turn out well, either, which is why the clouds end up so much smaller.
These
clouds kind of illustrate how racing is hard to “do” right if you don’t
understand its dynamics the way only someone does who’s been a part of it for a
long time. No offense to those people who came into the sport from the NBA or
other sports backgrounds, but their arrival did seem to correspond to NASCAR’s
ascent becoming its descent.
I guess everybody has an idea about how to put
posteriors back in all those empty seats. Unfortunately, nobody’s had the RIGHT
IDEA, yet.
Hey,
over there toward the horizon, do you see where all those clouds of various
shapes are all starting to mix together? It looks like that might become a
single, big cloud… at least for a while.
Let
me read this scenario into that cloud formation: NASCAR basically
self-destructs, because its new owners don’t know squat about making all the
parts work together. International Speedway Corporation is sold off in pieces
to “increase shareholder value” after one race too many in front of nearly
empty stands. Speedway Motorsports hangs on by a thread and starts trying to
make deals with enough car owners to develop a new circuit, but the former ISC
tracks and the other “independents” (Indy, Pocono, Dover) scramble to set up
schedules using various sanctioning bodies (including what’s left of NASCAR),
holding a larger number of events each year because none has the economic
impact of a Cup race in its prime.
Friends,
clouds to blue sky; that just might be where we’re headed.
With
that scenario in mind, here’s my possible 2021 schedule for Richmond:
Saturday, March 20 – Late Model Spring
Festival – Races for local weekly classes, part of a seasonal series that also
includes Martinsville and maybe
Bristol and/or Nashville and/or a new paved short track at Charlotte.
Saturday, May 8 – Major Cup-style race
co-sanctioned by PASS, CARS, ACT and maybe SSS and/or IMCA. Looks like a Cup
weekend but with lots more entries and lower expenses all around.
There will still be races for stock-ish cars, but who’ll run the shows remains to be
determined.
Saturday, June 26 – Open-Wheel Doubleheader
featuring Modifieds from the STSS (Brett Deyo
expanded into pavement mods when NASCAR began to implode) and the USAC Silver
Crown cars (or maybe super-modifieds or a new low-buck series for Indy-type
cars).
Wednesday, July 20 – Local Late Models race
as part of a mid-summer mid-week series involving the same tracks as the Spring
Festival.
Saturday, August 14 – Either a
doubleheader featuring a new sanctioning body’s pickup truck series and a
bobtail big-rig race or a “CrashFest” with Junk Car
Demo Race, Monster Trucks, Figure-8s and a Thrill Show.
Why not? Tech is probably easier, because I’ll
bet they don’t use templates or laser measurements on these babies.
Saturday, September 11 – The downsized NASCAR
Cup Series makes its annual appearance at RIR (OOPS – forgot that it’s just “RR” now, although the new owners might
change that), perhaps with a support class.
Saturday, October 9 – Local Late Model
Fall Festival with same format (and same participating tracks) as in the
spring.
Still to be Scheduled: Electric car races and
drones. Construction of the road course will result in additions to the
schedule for 2022.
Of
course, if all of that was going to work exactly like I envision it, I’d be
Humpy Wheeler’s junior (by a few years)
partner and would be counting the money instead of counting the hours before I
start prepping for a colonoscopy. But even Humpy bombed on occasion, and the
beauty of the above schedule is that it has enough events that one or two can
fail and be replaced without sending the whole enterprise down the tubes.
And
as we move forward, different sanctioning bodies, tracks and individuals will
come up with better ideas that eventually will become the norm for the sport –
at least until the next even better idea pushes them aside. That’s the way it
can work.
You find the best path to success by being
willing to try anything.
It
used to be that way, in fact. Look back into the records, and you’ll see
several tracks (like Bristol, for example) that ran major ARCA races but
dropped them because NASCAR did better. Pocono had a 500-miler for USAC stocks;
Daytona ran an Indy-car race (as did several others), and as we saw in a recent
photo I used, Martinsville ran an event for sports cars on an oval.
Ideas
come and ideas go, and the best ones stick around. We can start that process
over and come out with a better incarnation of racing than what we have now.
This I believe.
Frank’s
Loose Lug Nuts
As
noted above, tracks used to run events other than Cup weekends before the
latter became a temporarily great way to put all your eggs in one basket. I’ve
seen Silver Crowns, Modifieds, Late Models and other attractions at Richmond
between Cup weekends; in fact, Paul Sawyer ran mid-week races a couple of times
a year back when all he had there was the old fairgrounds dirt track.
This
year Richmond will try again with late model racing in October, and I plan to
be there. I dearly hope Bristol’s short track championship events work this
weekend, too.
Somehow,
we all managed to convince ourselves that all we needed, motorsports-wise, was
NASCAR Cup racing. How wrong we were. NASCAR’s current weakness may well give
us a chance to recapture the variety of this sport, which just may be what we
and it need today.