NASCAR has hit a few speed bumps, according to a recent article in The New York Times. Attendance and TV viewership aren’t growing like they once were; new race venues around the country have been axed or aren’t pulling the numbers that races pull in the core Southeast. Maybe the best argument that NASCAR has hit the wall in turn three is this: The powerful France family, the inventors, owners and sole proprietors of this mighty V-8 juggernaut since 1948 didn’t make any comments for the NYT article. No denials from the throne, and a few admissions that all is not well in the kingdom from Kyle Petty, son of Richard the King, and Jack Roush mean the pits are not just for changing tires and gassing up anymore. So what happened?Everything runs in cycles, and this could be one. Most people quoted said that. I am no NASCAR expert, but I do remember reading the endless articles a year ago about NASCAR’s RFP tour through several cities (Richmond among them) looking for a place to build its Hall of Fame. I can’t remember who won. But maybe NASCAR needs to build it faster, while there is still some fame to stuff in the hall.I have a few uneducated opinions about what happened to NASCAR and what just might help revive it, not that the France family reads my blog or cares what I think. But NASCAR’s slowdown is interesting news and what happens next will be even more interesting than the Car of Tomorrow built to make the races more competitive.
When I was a kid, competition wasn’t a problem. The South was dotted with more little ovals of under a mile for racing than there are Cracker Barrel restaurants. These were not the palaces we see now with hundreds of thousands packed into soaring aluminum stands jutting into the searing humidity above burning oil and rubber. These old tracks were often dirt and attracted the people who built the foundation for what NASCAR became. The cars were also not the marvels of un-buyable technological wonder we see doing endless left turns now; they were stock, like you or I could buy from any car dealer, jacked up under a shade tree or in a barn and manipulated to the degree of talent and skill available to the drivers at the time. Sometimes the drivers drove their race car to the race, won it (or lost) and drove that same car home. They wanted to win for reasons beyond anything today’s drivers can comprehend.
These guys bought their cars, tinkered with them and drove the laps themselves. It was personal, and that personal thing built the early cult of driver identification among fans. Were you a Chevy person? A Ford man? A Plymouth or Dodge lover? The driver was probably your mechanic.
I remember as a kid seeing garishly painted and randomly decaled race cars driving down the road and sitting in yards, and I knew some of the people involved. It was local and regional and the stars were touchable and real. They were us.I spent a day once with Junior Johnson, who got his start in stock car racing outrunning the law for various reasons. He said it was more personal back then, more local and more ingrained in the lives of the fans. You could go into the pits and touch the cars and talk to the drivers. Stock car racing was the people’s sport, because while not everyone had a talent to play baseball or football or the money to play golf, all of us drove cars and the racers drove the same cars we all drove.
Stock car racing had what YouTube has now, interactivity. Regular people were part of the action. You could drive a car like the one Red Farmer raced because he probably got it from your dealer. The tracks weren’t massive, so you could feel the wind and rocks as the mufflerless machines blew past you in a vortex of pure Detroit exhaust. You could feel and taste stock car racing then. NASCAR polished the rough edges off, removed it from the average person and turned this greasy, regional wrecklessness into a seriously legit sport that was clean enough to invite home to Mama, Coke, Winston and Budweiser. Daytona and Talledega soon buried the short tracks in a Phil Spector-ish wall of sound and a Bill Gates-ish pile of money.
Unlike Indy with its Kentucky Derby-ish upper class snootiness, stock car racing was down and dirty and populated by real characters, not professionally manufactured and PR-groomed stars. Some of them transitioned into the early days of NASCAR. Lee Petty begat Richard Petty, Red Farmer and Donnie and Bobby Allison, Buck Baker, Buddy Baker and David Pearson turned stock car into NASCAR.
I remember a race one night in Montgomery where two drivers pulled over, got our of their cars, yanked off their cowboy boots and whailed on each other while the other cars raced. Soon several good old boys in the stands started doing the same thing right next to me. Bubba see, Bubba do. Racing and cussing and fighting on the track and in the stands were a weekly occurrence like WWF, Ultimate Fighting and racing all in one. It wasn’t polite but it was worth the price of admission.
Clearly, NACSAR organized that kind of ragged behavior into something much safer and more presentable and payable to sponsors. NACSAR’s tremendous national success can only be laid at the doorstep of the France family. It is still a dangerous sport, to be sure, but it has made some cash. The money is clear. The danger is never far from view as popular drivers like Dale Earnhardt can die on a sunny day with a hundred thousand watching in shock. However, in the general pasteurization of stock car racing, the intimate and visceral connection to the fans has been lost. That is a problem.
What would happen if NASCAR went back to real stock cars with real stock engines just like you and I can buy down at the local dealer? Let the teams tinker with them any way they want within certain boundaries. Would that bring back some of the connection? Perhaps.
What would happen if they had an American Idol-ish competition for new drivers, where the public votes for their favorites in weekly racing and personality competitions? Create a TV show around it and have the winners compete at Daytona and Atlanta, Texas and California? Maybe they could sing. Would that rebuild some of the connection to the drivers? Perhaps again.
I could be wronger than Tom Cruise pretending to be a wheel jockey on all of this, but it seems that fans want more involvement in the sport than just buying NASCAR stuff. They want to be a part of NASCAR. They want some of that old connection back.The France team has figured it out before; maybe they will figure it out again. Truth is, they don’t have a choice; the numbers don’t lie. With NASCAR down about 20 percent this year, they have to figure it out or the market will do it for them.
