Fix it, Forget it, or Let Nature Run its Course
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04/28/2016 Frank Buhrman |
PART I – The Status Quo
Let’s see . . . TV ratings continue their slide, and advance ticket sales are dropping. So I’m up there in the corporate suite, and the boss wants to know if we’re going to plop down $20 million again next year for our NASCAR sponsorship program, or do we want to take a (much cheaper) leap to Xtreme Frog Jumping.
Question is this: Do I call Brian France and ask for a job before or after I make my suggestion?
Everybody can see there’s a problem, but none of us arm-chair promoters has the millions in our pocket to say, “Try it my way, Brian. If it doesn’t work, I’ll cover the losses.” That “everybody” includes me, but I’ll give my advice, anyway.
My “givens” are these:
1. NASCAR caught the right tailwind back in the ‘90s and became the “next big thing,” riding that breeze for a decade, during which time it grew a lot faster than turns out to have been sustainable.
2. NASCAR then started losing the “next big thing” tag, and troubles mounted when the economy tanked, leading to empty seats and lost or reduced sponsorships that have put a big strain on team and track budgets.
3. Cup Series purses have been relatively stagnant for about a decade now, but additional drops in attendance (and maybe TV revenue) will make it hard to hold that line. Nevertheless, purses could drop 25%, and they’d still be more than three times what they were 20 years ago, when that faster-than-sustainable growth began. If the climb hadn’t gotten so high before the fall – if all we were told was that Cup purses were up 200% over the last 20 years, we’d be crowing about NASCAR’s success.
Unfortunately, we have infrastructure and financial expectations based on the higher growth level. My sense is that NASCAR and all of us will eventually have to accept a lowering of those standards. The Chase can’t change that, nor can heat races or caution clocks – and certainly not a franchise/charter system for team owners.
All we can do is try to make the show better for those of us who still care.
PART II – The Suggestions
I live in sprint car country, where the ruling 410 sprinter is a thing of brute beauty. Like Indy Cars at Richmond, they’re literally almost too fast to stay between the walls. But in their own world, 410 sprinters – especially the motors – are frightfully expensive; a lot of racers can’t afford them. That’s why the growth industry here is the 305 sprinter, basically the same car but with a much cheaper engine. Young drivers race 305s on the way up, and older guys can afford to keep racing with one of these cars in the garage. The organizers actively discourage spending lots of money on equipment.
For the Xfinity and Camping World Truck Series, I believe NASCAR must come up with a similar, major cost-cutting change for these classes to survive. The crowds aren’t coming back, so everything has to be adjusted to meet the new reality.
The other nice thing about sprint cars is that the rules are pretty standard, so when the World of Outlaws series comes to town – that’s the closest thing to Cup racing in the sprint car universe – you can take a shot at the big guys in your weekly racer. People like to see that, and it used to be that way in NASCAR, sort of. Ray Hendrick, my favorite driver as a kid, won hundreds of modified and late model races, and every now and then, he ran a Grand National (Sprint Cup) race. In the second GN race I ever saw, he raced a two-year-old car, fielded by a group calling itself Rebel Racing, and finished seventh in the fall race at Richmond, running the last lap on three wheels. That played at least a little role in cementing racing as my favorite sport. Later, former racer Emmanuel Zervakis and several drivers (most notably Sonny Hutchens, another Richmond weekly racing favorite) did even better in a series of relatively low-buck cars.
We need for local heroes to be able to challenge the Cup racers, so their fans will follow and become the next Cup fans. (Surprise, NASCAR, those “developmental drivers” don’t bring tons of fans with them from K&N or ARCA.) But leveling the playing field also would require cost-cutting, maybe adopting a more common style of race car and maybe harder tires, too. (It would require as well ditching the ill-considered charter system and allowing cars to make the race on merit, not wallet.)
PART III – Will It Work?
Can we go back to the “good old days,” when Ray Hendrick, Rebel Racing and others took on the big boys when they came to town? That would be different. Consider this: Leading up to Charlotte, there have been minimal variations in the starting line-ups of this year’s events, but it wasn’t always that way.
Take the five-race stretch around Charlotte (two races before and two races afterward). When that’s finished this year (after Michigan), probably 34 drivers will have run all five events. Twenty years ago (1996), that number was 35, but 10 years earlier (before NASCAR’s glory years) it was only 18. (If you go back another decade, you hit the era where short-tracks had smaller fields – in 1976, Nashville would have been in the five-race stretch, and it only started 30. Then you add Riverside in the days when many smaller Cup teams didn’t travel west, and only half the 35-car field there was made up of Cup regulars, so the number of drivers in all five events was barely a dozen.)
Good or bad? If you want close racing for all multi-hundred laps, maybe not so good. Look at it this way: Last year (2015), for the five races around Charlotte, an average of 21 cars finished on the lead lap. Twenty years ago (1996), that number was still a decent 13, but in 1986, the average was only a little over seven cars, and in 1976, it dropped to 2.5. In 1966, the winner in each of those five races was on a lap by himself.
Does that mean they were boring races? Hardly, but they were different. Whether newer NASCAR fans would enthusiastically keep up with races like that is a good question. We loved having our locals compete against the big boys, but they seldom stayed up front. We were pleased that they were in the top 10, even if several laps behind. Would that still be the case?
I don’t know where all that would lead, but while it might satisfy hardcore veterans of stock car racing fandom, I’m not sure it would bring in 100,000 people – it didn’t back then – and I don’t think it would be quite as made-for-TV as what we have today. And since TV is where most of us now see most of our races, bringing back the good old days might cost us our Saturday/Sunday viewing.
I’d still go for the changes, though. Make the cars a lot cheaper to build and race, and make the tires a lot less grippy so you can’t go as fast. Then let the best cars start the race, whether by qualifying or heat races. And if that doesn’t work, Brian, I’ll cover . . . well, I’ll cover the cost of a Coke down at McDonald’s tomorrow, OK?
One more thing: you might think twice about your charter system. Get some advice from those who’ve tried it – you can find them at the next CART race.
Let’s see . . . TV ratings continue their slide, and advance ticket sales are dropping. So I’m up there in the corporate suite, and the boss wants to know if we’re going to plop down $20 million again next year for our NASCAR sponsorship program, or do we want to take a (much cheaper) leap to Xtreme Frog Jumping.
Question is this: Do I call Brian France and ask for a job before or after I make my suggestion?
Everybody can see there’s a problem, but none of us arm-chair promoters has the millions in our pocket to say, “Try it my way, Brian. If it doesn’t work, I’ll cover the losses.” That “everybody” includes me, but I’ll give my advice, anyway.
My “givens” are these:
1. NASCAR caught the right tailwind back in the ‘90s and became the “next big thing,” riding that breeze for a decade, during which time it grew a lot faster than turns out to have been sustainable.
2. NASCAR then started losing the “next big thing” tag, and troubles mounted when the economy tanked, leading to empty seats and lost or reduced sponsorships that have put a big strain on team and track budgets.
3. Cup Series purses have been relatively stagnant for about a decade now, but additional drops in attendance (and maybe TV revenue) will make it hard to hold that line. Nevertheless, purses could drop 25%, and they’d still be more than three times what they were 20 years ago, when that faster-than-sustainable growth began. If the climb hadn’t gotten so high before the fall – if all we were told was that Cup purses were up 200% over the last 20 years, we’d be crowing about NASCAR’s success.
Unfortunately, we have infrastructure and financial expectations based on the higher growth level. My sense is that NASCAR and all of us will eventually have to accept a lowering of those standards. The Chase can’t change that, nor can heat races or caution clocks – and certainly not a franchise/charter system for team owners.
All we can do is try to make the show better for those of us who still care.
PART II – The Suggestions
I live in sprint car country, where the ruling 410 sprinter is a thing of brute beauty. Like Indy Cars at Richmond, they’re literally almost too fast to stay between the walls. But in their own world, 410 sprinters – especially the motors – are frightfully expensive; a lot of racers can’t afford them. That’s why the growth industry here is the 305 sprinter, basically the same car but with a much cheaper engine. Young drivers race 305s on the way up, and older guys can afford to keep racing with one of these cars in the garage. The organizers actively discourage spending lots of money on equipment.
For the Xfinity and Camping World Truck Series, I believe NASCAR must come up with a similar, major cost-cutting change for these classes to survive. The crowds aren’t coming back, so everything has to be adjusted to meet the new reality.
The other nice thing about sprint cars is that the rules are pretty standard, so when the World of Outlaws series comes to town – that’s the closest thing to Cup racing in the sprint car universe – you can take a shot at the big guys in your weekly racer. People like to see that, and it used to be that way in NASCAR, sort of. Ray Hendrick, my favorite driver as a kid, won hundreds of modified and late model races, and every now and then, he ran a Grand National (Sprint Cup) race. In the second GN race I ever saw, he raced a two-year-old car, fielded by a group calling itself Rebel Racing, and finished seventh in the fall race at Richmond, running the last lap on three wheels. That played at least a little role in cementing racing as my favorite sport. Later, former racer Emmanuel Zervakis and several drivers (most notably Sonny Hutchens, another Richmond weekly racing favorite) did even better in a series of relatively low-buck cars.
We need for local heroes to be able to challenge the Cup racers, so their fans will follow and become the next Cup fans. (Surprise, NASCAR, those “developmental drivers” don’t bring tons of fans with them from K&N or ARCA.) But leveling the playing field also would require cost-cutting, maybe adopting a more common style of race car and maybe harder tires, too. (It would require as well ditching the ill-considered charter system and allowing cars to make the race on merit, not wallet.)
PART III – Will It Work?
Can we go back to the “good old days,” when Ray Hendrick, Rebel Racing and others took on the big boys when they came to town? That would be different. Consider this: Leading up to Charlotte, there have been minimal variations in the starting line-ups of this year’s events, but it wasn’t always that way.
Take the five-race stretch around Charlotte (two races before and two races afterward). When that’s finished this year (after Michigan), probably 34 drivers will have run all five events. Twenty years ago (1996), that number was 35, but 10 years earlier (before NASCAR’s glory years) it was only 18. (If you go back another decade, you hit the era where short-tracks had smaller fields – in 1976, Nashville would have been in the five-race stretch, and it only started 30. Then you add Riverside in the days when many smaller Cup teams didn’t travel west, and only half the 35-car field there was made up of Cup regulars, so the number of drivers in all five events was barely a dozen.)
Good or bad? If you want close racing for all multi-hundred laps, maybe not so good. Look at it this way: Last year (2015), for the five races around Charlotte, an average of 21 cars finished on the lead lap. Twenty years ago (1996), that number was still a decent 13, but in 1986, the average was only a little over seven cars, and in 1976, it dropped to 2.5. In 1966, the winner in each of those five races was on a lap by himself.
Does that mean they were boring races? Hardly, but they were different. Whether newer NASCAR fans would enthusiastically keep up with races like that is a good question. We loved having our locals compete against the big boys, but they seldom stayed up front. We were pleased that they were in the top 10, even if several laps behind. Would that still be the case?
I don’t know where all that would lead, but while it might satisfy hardcore veterans of stock car racing fandom, I’m not sure it would bring in 100,000 people – it didn’t back then – and I don’t think it would be quite as made-for-TV as what we have today. And since TV is where most of us now see most of our races, bringing back the good old days might cost us our Saturday/Sunday viewing.
I’d still go for the changes, though. Make the cars a lot cheaper to build and race, and make the tires a lot less grippy so you can’t go as fast. Then let the best cars start the race, whether by qualifying or heat races. And if that doesn’t work, Brian, I’ll cover . . . well, I’ll cover the cost of a Coke down at McDonald’s tomorrow, OK?
One more thing: you might think twice about your charter system. Get some advice from those who’ve tried it – you can find them at the next CART race.