Martinsville Went Right, So What Keeps Going Wrong?
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(This
article is going to cover some ground I’ve covered before, so if you’re not
inclined to listen to my “same-old, same-old” rants, go make a sandwich or
something - but look at the “Loose Lug Nuts” down at the bottom.)
The Martinsville Monster/Cup race weekend-before-last
actually earned a higher TV viewership rating than the previous year, making it
the first race this season broadcast on cable/satellite to be watched by more
fans than in 2016. In fact, it broke a streak of seven straight races on NBCSN
that had double-digit decreases.
Hmmmmm… whaddya think? Were the ratings higher because
viewers expected to see wrecks and drivers behaving badly, or was it just
because it was a rainy, dreary, cold day in some parts of the country and you
couldn’t do anything outside? Do you think, maybe, it was because Martinsville
isn’t a mile-and-a-half track, offering something different to watch?
There have been a
lot of races this year that were forgotten by Tuesday, but Martinsville wasn’t
one of them. Was there a correlation between anticipation of this kind of
action and the higher TV ratings?
My guess is that all of those contributed. I don’t watch
just to see wrecks, but a little bumping and rubbing doesn’t hurt, and seeing
PR-perfect racers lose their tempers doesn’t hurt either; not that I want to
return to the early days of tire irons and pistols being used or threatened.
I’ve said it before, but here goes again: the playoffs,
the nutty point system, the nit-picky inspections and the constant rule changes
certainly don’t help, but they aren’t NASCAR’s real problem. The real issue is
that the basic product - the race itself - just isn’t as compelling anymore.
So why is that, and what can we do about it?
Forgive me, but I’m going to do my “old-timer” thing to
illustrate. Let’s drift back 50 years and see what was happening then.
Here’s a
Martinsville start from 1967, the spring Virginia 500. Richard Petty won both
races at the “paper clip” that year.
For starters, NASCAR wasn’t nearly as popular, and we
shouldn’t forget that. The fall race at Martinsville that year drew an
announced crowd of 13,500, and NASCAR wasn’t ashamed to tell you how many butts
were in the seats then. Now we don’t get that info, but it was easy to see that
the crowd was probably three or four times that size, at least - and in 1967,
you didn’t have the option to stay home and watch on TV.
In 1967, Richard Petty beat Dick Hutcherson by four
laps, and Eddie Yarboro finished 10th, 51
laps behind. The race wasn’t a nail-biter.
In fact, NASCAR was struggling in 1967, because Ford and
Chrysler were supporting the sport, but for the most part, GM wasn’t, and
Toyota?
This is what Toyota
would have brought to the track in 1967. Try bumping Chase out of the way in
this one, Denny.
NASCAR had cooked up a sort-of competitive Chevy,
ostensibly owned by respected mechanic Turkey Minton, but at Martinsville, with
Tiger Tom Pistone behind the wheel, it lasted only 49 laps. Bobby Allison had
the innovative, built-with-no-help-from-NASCAR Chevelle #2, but it blew up
before the halfway mark. Petty led the last 195 laps.
For all the
publicity it stirred up at the time, the Turkey Minton Chevelle didn’t leave
much of a footprint; I couldn’t even find a picture on Google. On the other
hand, Allison’s #2, entirely privately financed and raced, is easy to find.
Unfortunately, without a charter, Bobby would have a hard time firing up crowds
today like he did back then.
So other than the fact that I’m one of those stupid old
geezers, why do I look back fondly on 1967. Here you go:
- In 1967, you made the race with mechanical and driving talent, not
charters/owner points/provisions or other products of the NASCAR Welfare
System. I think fans liked that.
- You could take a shot at the big boys, because cars didn’t cost as
much as the gross national product of Trinidad, and if you put one
together that could pass inspection, you might just take the green flag.
You might even bring some fans along. (You might even entice a couple of
them to help change your tires, because you didn’t have a paid pit crew,
let alone an engineer.)
- If you were a local driver, you might bring a lot of fans along, even
if you didn’t have much chance of winning the race.
- You had to know something about driving, because your car used tires
as hard as my head, and downforce was something that had to do with
airplanes or some weird European sport.
- You knew the rules, and if you were good, you knew how to bend them a
little. If you got caught, it was considered more like a speeding ticket
than mass murder.
(Time
for a story: You’ll get a link below to a neat video about NASCAR in 1976, and
in it, Bud Moore talks a bit about bending the rules, explaining that you might
try 20 little things on the car that weren’t exactly legal, and if NASCAR
caught you on 10 of them, you had still gotten away with the other 10 and had a
better car for it, or at least so you hoped.)
This Smokey Yunick '67 Chevelle, shown here with Curtis Turner behind the wheel, never won a Grand National
race, but you’ll find few vehicles from that era that are more fondly
remembered, and one reason is that it seldom was legal.
Everything on my list above gave NASCAR a more human face
in 1967, and people liked that. There wasn’t yet a big audience, but that’s
because there was virtually no TV and no R.J. Reynolds to market the sport in a
way the France family couldn’t. NASCAR didn’t grow because of charters,
NASCAR-designed cookie-cutter cars, look-alike tracks or driver-development-program
drivers. Those came along when the sport was super successful, and those in
charge convinced themselves that they were the geniuses responsible for the
success and could implement all their other grand ideas.
Like the way that turned out, do you?
It’s a good thing beating a dead horse isn’t illegal,
because here I go again: Get rid of those things dragging the sport down and go
back to what made it successful, and we might salvage something.
Frank’s Loose Lug Nuts
Go back in time and check it out for yourself with these
“old days” videos on YouTube (photos are not from the films):
1963
Daytona 500:
This is one of my favorite “the-way-it-was” films. Look
at how much water the pace car splashes through at the pit road entrance when
the race starts. Look at the cars with working, roll-up windows, lug-nut
wrenches, and gas caps that look like what you’d have had on your car then.
Plus, this is the great story of Tiny Lund’s win in the Wood Brothers car he
was given after saving Marvin Panch’s life in a
preliminary sports car race.
1961
Old Dominion 500 at Martinsville:
Whole-race videos aren’t easy to come by from Martinsville’s
early days, but this short film’s fun, if for no other reason than seeing a
couple of Thunderbirds in the field.
Here’s a little longer film of the 1972 Virginia 500:
1953
Southern 500:
Darlington used to produce films of its races (note the
cameraman in the pace car, above), which would be shown in theaters or other
venues during the off-season. In Richmond, these events were presented by one
of the civic clubs. There weren’t many other opportunities to see races you’d
missed in person, so these were popular, and the quality is more than decent.
Step WAY
back in time.
“Stockcar” film:
Dave Fulton pointed me to this one, which covers
personalities more than races but tries to capture the flavor of the 1976
Winston Cup season. The late Kenneth Campbell, longtime associate of Paul
Sawyer at Richmond, was the executive producer, and Dick Brooks, then driver
for Junie Donlavey, is the primary narrator. Donlavey, Bud Moore and Richard
Petty fans will be especially pleased to see long segments on their heroes.
(This is where Moore talks about cheating the way it used to be viewed.)
That’s Kenneth
Campbell at right, with Ned Jarrett and announcer Sammy Bland.
NASCAR
Dirt History:
This is a recent (and brief) TV production, tied to
NASCAR’s return to dirt with the Camping World Truck Series at Eldora, but it
has some good dirt footage.