NASCAR's got 99 problems ...
... but racing ain't one. Here's a plan to get the series back on track
By Ryan McGee
ESPN The Magazine
It's no secret that NASCAR is in a bit of a funk these days.
After decades of breakneck prosperity the king of American motorsports has settled onto an unfamiliar and uncomfortable plateau, a pause brought on by a decline in attendance, TV ratings and revenues. To their credit, Daytona Beach brass have taken the quest for answers to the pits and the streets, holding town hall meetings with drivers and owners and recruiting 12,000 followers to give feedback as part of their Fan Council. Double-file restarts, green-white-checkered "overtime" rules, "Have at it, boys" racing and standardized start times all have roots in these dialogues.
To be fair, a lot of NASCAR's problems can be blamed on the national economy. The recession hits particularly hard when you count on packing grandstands with blue-collar Americans. But the list of issues is also the result of some curious sideways moves made by management during the sport's boom. "It's easy to make the right decisions when you're constantly headed upward and everyone's making a hell of a lot of money," says Jeff Burton, who made his Cup Series debut in 1993, just as NASCAR was about to start its period of greatest growth. "But when things aren't going so well you've got to work. Making the right decisions now is a lot harder than it was five years ago. And I'm not sure where we start."
Funny you should say that, Jeff. We just happen to have compiled a handful of ideas that will get the growth curve going northbound again. In fact, we have a dozen. Call it our 12-Step Plan to NASCAR Recovery and Renewal. It may not solve all of the problems at the track, but it's a start. We present it now -- out of love, not loathing.
<OFFER>
01 SHORTEN RACES.
These days, the NFL seems ready to call in the National Guard to keep a game from lingering beyond three hours. Yet Sprint Cup races routinely approach four. Viewers refer to the "NASCAR nap," the inevitable lull in the middle -- between the first and final rounds of pit stops -- when you can leave to mow the lawn or clear the gutters. With ratings softening (Fox says the first 13 races were watched in an average of 8.5 million households in '09 but that this season the number is down to 7.9 million), it's time to squeeze together those must-see sections.
Yes, in a numbers-centric sport, none means more than 500, a nod to Indy's original test of endurance, mechanical and human. But today's durability has devalued the romanticism of five bills. "In the 1976 Daytona 500 I finished ninth and was nine laps down," says now-team owner Richard Childress. "Fewer than half the cars finished. This year we had 27 on the lead lap."
For history's sake, let's keep Daytona, Darlington's Southern 500 and the Coca-Cola 600 at Charlotte, then slash all the rest to 400 -- or less -- like the 300-miler at Richmond. And if track operators insist on keeping 500 in their race titles, point to Phoenix International Raceway, where events are measured in kilometers.
02 COMPRESS THE CALENDAR.
NASCAR dropped the season's first green flag on Feb. 6 at Daytona's prime-time Budweiser Shootout -- two weeks before the beginning of MLB's spring training. The year's final checkereds will fall 289 days later, at the Ford 400 at Homestead-Miami Speedway, during Week 11 of the NFL season. "It's a long year," says 12-year Cup vet Elliott Sadler. "And that doesn't include testing in January or the awards banquet in December."
Introducing the Chase (in 2004) certainly improved NASCAR's relevance in the fall, but competing for eyeballs with football and the World Series will always be a hard battle to win. Tightening up the longest schedule in sports, and avoiding that clash altogether, just makes sense.
It wouldn't be hard to go from 38 weekends to 30. Fourteen tracks currently have two Cup dates per season, and at least two of those have struggled to sell tickets (Atlanta and Fontana, we're looking at you). Why not cut some two-daters to one? That offers the chance to slide up the late-fall races and start the Chase before football steals the thunder. There's nothing wrong with leaving fans wanting more.
03 GIVE BRIAN DEEGAN A RIDE ALREADY.
League marketers have admittedly struggled to tap into the X Games fan base, even as action sports have become increasingly motorized. A 2008 study by Scarborough Research in SportsBusiness Journal estimated that 12.5 percent of NASCAR's constituency is drawn from the coveted 18-to-24-year-old demographic, while nearly 35 percent are 45 and older. But in May, a tat-covered potential savior -- Metal Mulisha general Brian Deegan -- announced he'd mastered motorcycles and off-road trucks and now wanted to try his hand at NASCAR.
The league doesn't help people get gigs, but it couldn't hurt to make a few phone calls to Deegan's NASCAR K&N Pro Series West (think Double-A baseball) team, NTS Motorsports, to see if there's anything anyone can do to help get his career up and running.
"When NASCAR chairman Brian France told the world that NASCAR is a contact sport -- 'We're going to loosen it up' -- I took it as a personal invitation for guys like me," says the 10-time X Games medalist. "I'm not sure Mr. France knew what he was getting into."
Maybe he did.
04 PROMOTE THE PADDOCK PERSONALITIES ... ALL OF 'EM.
Although Deegan is at best a couple of years away from a national series ride, he has two buddies already running in Cup: Carl Edwards and Clint Bowyer. Edwards is one of the chosen few who are constantly placed at the tip of the NASCAR marketing spear.
But what about Bowyer, a hell-raising, dirt-bike riding, Midwesterner who just seven years ago was banging out dents at a car dealership body shop? Juan Pablo Montoya builds and flies turbine-powered RC fighter jets that go 200 mph. Ryan Newman owns a record label. Scott Speed makes midnight golf cart tours of racetrack infields to surprise fans.
But because none of those guys breaks the coveted list of the top-five merch movers -- Earnhardt, Gordon, Stewart, Johnson, Kahne -- they aren't pushed out front by league imagemakers. "You hear fans complaining about the lack of personalities versus 30 years ago," says Max Muhleman, a Charlotte sports consultant. "It's not true. There are plenty. But you tie up too much in a couple of guys, like the PGA did with Tiger, and when those guys struggle, you lose those people who bought into them."
05 PUT A LITTLE GREEN IN THE GAS.
Since the NASCAR Green initiative was formally launched in 2008, the sanctioning body has made tremendous strides in reducing the carbon footprint created by race weekends. Mike Lynch, director of the program, has increased recycling of everything from oil to beer bottles and works with teams and tracks to make them more efficient. He's getting results: During February Speedweeks the Daytona International Speedway recycled nearly 12,000 pounds of plastic and aluminum; Pocono Raceway will operate exclusively on solar power; and Infineon Raceway mows its lawns with the help of sheep.
But even Lynch acknowledges the image issues that haunt cars that run on old-school fuel. "The first goal was to make changes to the lifestyles of our fans and competitors," he says. "Next is doing everything we can to find alternative fuel options."
It can't be too soon, certainly not as the Gulf of Mexico continues to darken. But while no racing league is ready to be on the Sierra Club's Christmas card list, others have done a better job of publicizing their efforts. IndyCars run on corn-based ethanol. The American Le Mans Series has a Green Challenge each race, devised in conjunction with the Department of Energy; the winner is the team that runs the fastest and farthest on the least amount of resources. NASCAR could make a more impactful statement in one weekend than those smaller series can make in a decade.
06 SPLIT WITH THE SPLITTER.
The new car, introduced in 2007, has offered a safer experience for drivers, cheaper builds and some pretty nice racing. But a showroom-ready piece of artwork it's not.
That's why, when NASCAR announced in January it'd be removing the rear wing from the Car of Tomorrow, a smattering of applause broke out in the press room. The carbon fiber attachment was ugly, cumbersome and didn't serve its primary purpose of providing downforce while looking cool. "Ever since they introduced the Car of Tomorrow, we all kind of tolerated the wing," says Kevin Harvick. "And now we're kind of tolerating the splitter."
He's talking about the new car's nose, which drops down, forms a scoop and looks unlike anything you've ever driven -- unless your car has a shelf bolted to the front bumper. And like any shelf, the splitter collects junk, scooping up everything from chunks of tire rubber to hot dog wrappers. "I went through the infield at Richmond a couple of years ago, and that thing acted like a shovel," Harvick says. "I scooped up enough grass to cover a fairway at the Masters."
The future of Cup cars may well have been on display at Daytona over the July 4 weekend, when the new Nationwide rides hit the track: genuine Ford Mustangs and Dodge Challengers with real live manufacturers' styling. They had neither splitters nor wings and didn't try to sell anyone on stickers as brand identity.
The fans loved them.
07 GET ON NATIONWIDE's SIDE.
Those new Nationwide rides might just be the first step toward a future in which the series is more than merely "Cup Lite." We sure could use a return to the days when Saturday felt as if we were watching a whole different series, one in which cagey vets ran down future Cup stars. In recent years the cars have looked secondhand, and Victory Lane has been dominated by moonlighting Cup stars. The result has been a stunting of growth for the youngsters who are looking to move up the NASCAR ladder. And that has stunted the growth of the series itself.
The new car is a good start. So would be the adoption of a proposal recently thrown out at town hall meetings in Charlotte to limit the number of Nationwide races run or points that can be scored by full-time Cup drivers.
Actually, if it were up to us, we'd take it even further. Currently, 26 of the 35 NNS events are run as Cup companion events. Let's reduce that number and send the second division into more markets that don't have Cup races. Or we can send them to the tracks that would lose one of their two Cup dates under our prescribed schedule contraction. "I'm all for anything that boosts the series," says Brad Keselowski, who runs in both series full-time. "The Busch Series I grew up watching definitely had its own identity. That's not true anymore."
08 HEAD BACK TO WHERE YOU STARTED FROM.
One new market for Nationwide might actually be an old one. A very old one. When NASCAR left the North Wilkesboro Speedway in 1996 and the North Carolina Speedway in Rockingham eight years later, the moves were public relations nightmares. Whenever old-school race fans need an example of how the sport has abandoned its core audience, they point to those two empty speedways.
Well, both of those tracks are open for business again. Rockingham has hosted ARCA events and Cup testing since 2008. Wilkesboro will reopen this fall to host a trio of multiregional stock car events. Here's a great chance to right what so many still see as so wrong. Send the Nationwide or Camping World Truck Series back to the Rock and to Junior Johnson's home track. Both need work and SAFER "soft walls," but the investments would be worth it for the headlines and goodwill they'd get for NASCAR and its two lower divisions.
09 PUT DIVERSITY IN DRIVE.
Love the motivation behind the Drive for Diversity program. Love the kids who are involved, particularly a 16-year-old African-American racer with the greatest NASCAR name of all time: Darrell Wallace Jr. But after more than a decade of countless reincarnations of what NASCAR calls D4D, the program's biggest obstacle is apathy, of both outside observers and those inside the sport. A stroll through the garage proves there's more heterogeneity (sex and color) on Pit Road and in front offices than there was a decade ago, but until someone slips into the cockpit of a Cup car -- and does so on a regular basis -- the skeptics won't be silenced. Nor should they be.
We have our eye on Chrissy Wallace, but only once she gets more financial backing. If only a program existed to help her … oh, wait, it does. Sort of.
10 MAKE WINNING MATTER.
"Being consistent through an entire season is a huge accomplishment," says four-time defending Cup Series champ Jimmie Johnson. "But they don't give you a trophy for a solid top 10, they give you one for winning." Fine. Then why is the gap between the guy who wins and the guy who doesn't so small?
If a driver wins a race and leads the most laps, he gets 195 points. A driver who finishes second and manages to lead one lap -- which is typical -- scores 175. A 20-point difference? That's it? Once the 12-team Chase is finalized, the standings are reset (think of it as seeding) and drivers are awarded 10 bonus points for each win. That makes sense, but shouldn't winning mean more at the time?
"In Formula One we had a different system," says Juan Pablo Montoya, seven-time F1 winner-turned- NASCAR-racer. "Winning gave you a much larger share of points, percentagewise. They only awarded like 26 per race, and the winner got 10."
It's time to reward a NASCAR race winner with a much larger gap, say a 50-point spread. Maybe then someone who takes a bunch of checkereds will end up in the Chase where he belongs, instead of out in the cold. See: Busch, Kyle; 2009.
11 WHO HAS TO GO TO NASCAR HOF INDUCTIONS? EVERYONE.
After years of being criticized for trying to sever ties with its moonshiner roots, NASCAR has finally accepted its ancestry with the opening of the sparkling, $200 million NASCAR Hall of Fame in downtown Charlotte. The inaugural induction ceremony in May was an amazing celebration of past and present, with one glaring exception: the noticeable absence of current stars walking the Hollywood-style blue carpet. "They were all invited," bemoans one Hall official. "About a dozen came. The guys you'd expect were here -- Earnhardt, Johnson, Gordon, Mark Martin -- but it would have been nice to have had more."
Back in the day, two members of that first class, former chairmen Bill France Sr. and Bill France Jr., would have solved that disrespectful snub with a phone call: "You have been invited to attend the Hall of Fame ceremony," the voice mail waiting for the likes of Matt Kenseth and Denny Hamlin would have said. "If I don't see you there, don't bother coming to the track next weekend."
12 REINSTATE THE DICTATORSHIP.
If nothing else, the HOF induction reminded us of the Frances' strong influence. We've all heard the stories of the late-night calls from Daytona or of being pulled into NASCAR's "City Hall" trackside office for a "What the hell were you thinking?" chat. No one thinks the new town hall meetings are a bad idea -- everyone deserves to be heard -- but at the end of the day, ideas aren't implemented by committee.
Bold moves come from individuals. Like slashing the schedule from 48 races to 31, which Big Bill did in 1972, or taking NASCAR west, which Bill Jr. did in the 1990s. Their heir, Brian France, has shied away from such sweeping changes since his Chase-Sprint-CoT trifecta in the middle of the decade. But now he seems ready to start swinging again. "If we pull a lever, you might have unintended consequences downstream," he said at Daytona on July 2. "We won't get it all right, but we'll try to do as best as we can."
Bold moves often create results. If nothing else, they wake people up. And we love racing too much to watch its fan base fall asleep.
... but racing ain't one. Here's a plan to get the series back on track
By Ryan McGee
ESPN The Magazine
It's no secret that NASCAR is in a bit of a funk these days.
After decades of breakneck prosperity the king of American motorsports has settled onto an unfamiliar and uncomfortable plateau, a pause brought on by a decline in attendance, TV ratings and revenues. To their credit, Daytona Beach brass have taken the quest for answers to the pits and the streets, holding town hall meetings with drivers and owners and recruiting 12,000 followers to give feedback as part of their Fan Council. Double-file restarts, green-white-checkered "overtime" rules, "Have at it, boys" racing and standardized start times all have roots in these dialogues.
To be fair, a lot of NASCAR's problems can be blamed on the national economy. The recession hits particularly hard when you count on packing grandstands with blue-collar Americans. But the list of issues is also the result of some curious sideways moves made by management during the sport's boom. "It's easy to make the right decisions when you're constantly headed upward and everyone's making a hell of a lot of money," says Jeff Burton, who made his Cup Series debut in 1993, just as NASCAR was about to start its period of greatest growth. "But when things aren't going so well you've got to work. Making the right decisions now is a lot harder than it was five years ago. And I'm not sure where we start."
Funny you should say that, Jeff. We just happen to have compiled a handful of ideas that will get the growth curve going northbound again. In fact, we have a dozen. Call it our 12-Step Plan to NASCAR Recovery and Renewal. It may not solve all of the problems at the track, but it's a start. We present it now -- out of love, not loathing.
<OFFER>
01 SHORTEN RACES.
These days, the NFL seems ready to call in the National Guard to keep a game from lingering beyond three hours. Yet Sprint Cup races routinely approach four. Viewers refer to the "NASCAR nap," the inevitable lull in the middle -- between the first and final rounds of pit stops -- when you can leave to mow the lawn or clear the gutters. With ratings softening (Fox says the first 13 races were watched in an average of 8.5 million households in '09 but that this season the number is down to 7.9 million), it's time to squeeze together those must-see sections.
Yes, in a numbers-centric sport, none means more than 500, a nod to Indy's original test of endurance, mechanical and human. But today's durability has devalued the romanticism of five bills. "In the 1976 Daytona 500 I finished ninth and was nine laps down," says now-team owner Richard Childress. "Fewer than half the cars finished. This year we had 27 on the lead lap."
For history's sake, let's keep Daytona, Darlington's Southern 500 and the Coca-Cola 600 at Charlotte, then slash all the rest to 400 -- or less -- like the 300-miler at Richmond. And if track operators insist on keeping 500 in their race titles, point to Phoenix International Raceway, where events are measured in kilometers.
02 COMPRESS THE CALENDAR.
NASCAR dropped the season's first green flag on Feb. 6 at Daytona's prime-time Budweiser Shootout -- two weeks before the beginning of MLB's spring training. The year's final checkereds will fall 289 days later, at the Ford 400 at Homestead-Miami Speedway, during Week 11 of the NFL season. "It's a long year," says 12-year Cup vet Elliott Sadler. "And that doesn't include testing in January or the awards banquet in December."
Introducing the Chase (in 2004) certainly improved NASCAR's relevance in the fall, but competing for eyeballs with football and the World Series will always be a hard battle to win. Tightening up the longest schedule in sports, and avoiding that clash altogether, just makes sense.
It wouldn't be hard to go from 38 weekends to 30. Fourteen tracks currently have two Cup dates per season, and at least two of those have struggled to sell tickets (Atlanta and Fontana, we're looking at you). Why not cut some two-daters to one? That offers the chance to slide up the late-fall races and start the Chase before football steals the thunder. There's nothing wrong with leaving fans wanting more.
03 GIVE BRIAN DEEGAN A RIDE ALREADY.
League marketers have admittedly struggled to tap into the X Games fan base, even as action sports have become increasingly motorized. A 2008 study by Scarborough Research in SportsBusiness Journal estimated that 12.5 percent of NASCAR's constituency is drawn from the coveted 18-to-24-year-old demographic, while nearly 35 percent are 45 and older. But in May, a tat-covered potential savior -- Metal Mulisha general Brian Deegan -- announced he'd mastered motorcycles and off-road trucks and now wanted to try his hand at NASCAR.
The league doesn't help people get gigs, but it couldn't hurt to make a few phone calls to Deegan's NASCAR K&N Pro Series West (think Double-A baseball) team, NTS Motorsports, to see if there's anything anyone can do to help get his career up and running.
"When NASCAR chairman Brian France told the world that NASCAR is a contact sport -- 'We're going to loosen it up' -- I took it as a personal invitation for guys like me," says the 10-time X Games medalist. "I'm not sure Mr. France knew what he was getting into."
Maybe he did.
04 PROMOTE THE PADDOCK PERSONALITIES ... ALL OF 'EM.
Although Deegan is at best a couple of years away from a national series ride, he has two buddies already running in Cup: Carl Edwards and Clint Bowyer. Edwards is one of the chosen few who are constantly placed at the tip of the NASCAR marketing spear.
But what about Bowyer, a hell-raising, dirt-bike riding, Midwesterner who just seven years ago was banging out dents at a car dealership body shop? Juan Pablo Montoya builds and flies turbine-powered RC fighter jets that go 200 mph. Ryan Newman owns a record label. Scott Speed makes midnight golf cart tours of racetrack infields to surprise fans.
But because none of those guys breaks the coveted list of the top-five merch movers -- Earnhardt, Gordon, Stewart, Johnson, Kahne -- they aren't pushed out front by league imagemakers. "You hear fans complaining about the lack of personalities versus 30 years ago," says Max Muhleman, a Charlotte sports consultant. "It's not true. There are plenty. But you tie up too much in a couple of guys, like the PGA did with Tiger, and when those guys struggle, you lose those people who bought into them."
05 PUT A LITTLE GREEN IN THE GAS.
Since the NASCAR Green initiative was formally launched in 2008, the sanctioning body has made tremendous strides in reducing the carbon footprint created by race weekends. Mike Lynch, director of the program, has increased recycling of everything from oil to beer bottles and works with teams and tracks to make them more efficient. He's getting results: During February Speedweeks the Daytona International Speedway recycled nearly 12,000 pounds of plastic and aluminum; Pocono Raceway will operate exclusively on solar power; and Infineon Raceway mows its lawns with the help of sheep.
But even Lynch acknowledges the image issues that haunt cars that run on old-school fuel. "The first goal was to make changes to the lifestyles of our fans and competitors," he says. "Next is doing everything we can to find alternative fuel options."
It can't be too soon, certainly not as the Gulf of Mexico continues to darken. But while no racing league is ready to be on the Sierra Club's Christmas card list, others have done a better job of publicizing their efforts. IndyCars run on corn-based ethanol. The American Le Mans Series has a Green Challenge each race, devised in conjunction with the Department of Energy; the winner is the team that runs the fastest and farthest on the least amount of resources. NASCAR could make a more impactful statement in one weekend than those smaller series can make in a decade.
06 SPLIT WITH THE SPLITTER.
The new car, introduced in 2007, has offered a safer experience for drivers, cheaper builds and some pretty nice racing. But a showroom-ready piece of artwork it's not.
That's why, when NASCAR announced in January it'd be removing the rear wing from the Car of Tomorrow, a smattering of applause broke out in the press room. The carbon fiber attachment was ugly, cumbersome and didn't serve its primary purpose of providing downforce while looking cool. "Ever since they introduced the Car of Tomorrow, we all kind of tolerated the wing," says Kevin Harvick. "And now we're kind of tolerating the splitter."
He's talking about the new car's nose, which drops down, forms a scoop and looks unlike anything you've ever driven -- unless your car has a shelf bolted to the front bumper. And like any shelf, the splitter collects junk, scooping up everything from chunks of tire rubber to hot dog wrappers. "I went through the infield at Richmond a couple of years ago, and that thing acted like a shovel," Harvick says. "I scooped up enough grass to cover a fairway at the Masters."
The future of Cup cars may well have been on display at Daytona over the July 4 weekend, when the new Nationwide rides hit the track: genuine Ford Mustangs and Dodge Challengers with real live manufacturers' styling. They had neither splitters nor wings and didn't try to sell anyone on stickers as brand identity.
The fans loved them.
07 GET ON NATIONWIDE's SIDE.
Those new Nationwide rides might just be the first step toward a future in which the series is more than merely "Cup Lite." We sure could use a return to the days when Saturday felt as if we were watching a whole different series, one in which cagey vets ran down future Cup stars. In recent years the cars have looked secondhand, and Victory Lane has been dominated by moonlighting Cup stars. The result has been a stunting of growth for the youngsters who are looking to move up the NASCAR ladder. And that has stunted the growth of the series itself.
The new car is a good start. So would be the adoption of a proposal recently thrown out at town hall meetings in Charlotte to limit the number of Nationwide races run or points that can be scored by full-time Cup drivers.
Actually, if it were up to us, we'd take it even further. Currently, 26 of the 35 NNS events are run as Cup companion events. Let's reduce that number and send the second division into more markets that don't have Cup races. Or we can send them to the tracks that would lose one of their two Cup dates under our prescribed schedule contraction. "I'm all for anything that boosts the series," says Brad Keselowski, who runs in both series full-time. "The Busch Series I grew up watching definitely had its own identity. That's not true anymore."
08 HEAD BACK TO WHERE YOU STARTED FROM.
One new market for Nationwide might actually be an old one. A very old one. When NASCAR left the North Wilkesboro Speedway in 1996 and the North Carolina Speedway in Rockingham eight years later, the moves were public relations nightmares. Whenever old-school race fans need an example of how the sport has abandoned its core audience, they point to those two empty speedways.
Well, both of those tracks are open for business again. Rockingham has hosted ARCA events and Cup testing since 2008. Wilkesboro will reopen this fall to host a trio of multiregional stock car events. Here's a great chance to right what so many still see as so wrong. Send the Nationwide or Camping World Truck Series back to the Rock and to Junior Johnson's home track. Both need work and SAFER "soft walls," but the investments would be worth it for the headlines and goodwill they'd get for NASCAR and its two lower divisions.
09 PUT DIVERSITY IN DRIVE.
Love the motivation behind the Drive for Diversity program. Love the kids who are involved, particularly a 16-year-old African-American racer with the greatest NASCAR name of all time: Darrell Wallace Jr. But after more than a decade of countless reincarnations of what NASCAR calls D4D, the program's biggest obstacle is apathy, of both outside observers and those inside the sport. A stroll through the garage proves there's more heterogeneity (sex and color) on Pit Road and in front offices than there was a decade ago, but until someone slips into the cockpit of a Cup car -- and does so on a regular basis -- the skeptics won't be silenced. Nor should they be.
We have our eye on Chrissy Wallace, but only once she gets more financial backing. If only a program existed to help her … oh, wait, it does. Sort of.
10 MAKE WINNING MATTER.
"Being consistent through an entire season is a huge accomplishment," says four-time defending Cup Series champ Jimmie Johnson. "But they don't give you a trophy for a solid top 10, they give you one for winning." Fine. Then why is the gap between the guy who wins and the guy who doesn't so small?
If a driver wins a race and leads the most laps, he gets 195 points. A driver who finishes second and manages to lead one lap -- which is typical -- scores 175. A 20-point difference? That's it? Once the 12-team Chase is finalized, the standings are reset (think of it as seeding) and drivers are awarded 10 bonus points for each win. That makes sense, but shouldn't winning mean more at the time?
"In Formula One we had a different system," says Juan Pablo Montoya, seven-time F1 winner-turned- NASCAR-racer. "Winning gave you a much larger share of points, percentagewise. They only awarded like 26 per race, and the winner got 10."
It's time to reward a NASCAR race winner with a much larger gap, say a 50-point spread. Maybe then someone who takes a bunch of checkereds will end up in the Chase where he belongs, instead of out in the cold. See: Busch, Kyle; 2009.
11 WHO HAS TO GO TO NASCAR HOF INDUCTIONS? EVERYONE.
After years of being criticized for trying to sever ties with its moonshiner roots, NASCAR has finally accepted its ancestry with the opening of the sparkling, $200 million NASCAR Hall of Fame in downtown Charlotte. The inaugural induction ceremony in May was an amazing celebration of past and present, with one glaring exception: the noticeable absence of current stars walking the Hollywood-style blue carpet. "They were all invited," bemoans one Hall official. "About a dozen came. The guys you'd expect were here -- Earnhardt, Johnson, Gordon, Mark Martin -- but it would have been nice to have had more."
Back in the day, two members of that first class, former chairmen Bill France Sr. and Bill France Jr., would have solved that disrespectful snub with a phone call: "You have been invited to attend the Hall of Fame ceremony," the voice mail waiting for the likes of Matt Kenseth and Denny Hamlin would have said. "If I don't see you there, don't bother coming to the track next weekend."
12 REINSTATE THE DICTATORSHIP.
If nothing else, the HOF induction reminded us of the Frances' strong influence. We've all heard the stories of the late-night calls from Daytona or of being pulled into NASCAR's "City Hall" trackside office for a "What the hell were you thinking?" chat. No one thinks the new town hall meetings are a bad idea -- everyone deserves to be heard -- but at the end of the day, ideas aren't implemented by committee.
Bold moves come from individuals. Like slashing the schedule from 48 races to 31, which Big Bill did in 1972, or taking NASCAR west, which Bill Jr. did in the 1990s. Their heir, Brian France, has shied away from such sweeping changes since his Chase-Sprint-CoT trifecta in the middle of the decade. But now he seems ready to start swinging again. "If we pull a lever, you might have unintended consequences downstream," he said at Daytona on July 2. "We won't get it all right, but we'll try to do as best as we can."
Bold moves often create results. If nothing else, they wake people up. And we love racing too much to watch its fan base fall asleep.
