NASCAR Troubles Get Ranted

"Peter DeLorenzo has long been the most outspoken national critic of NASCAR." So notes Janice Putman in the introduction to Autoextremist's April 18 rant on NASCAR's decline in popularity. This of course is a bit of an understatement, as DeLorenzo's attacks on NASCAR have often been vicious and periodically grossly unfair; even when he makes valid points, as he does in his April 18 Rant, he cannot pass up some cheapshots and offering some solutions that are either wrong and/or do not address the sport's problems.

DeLorenzo notes the massive drop in TV ratings from the start of 2004 - interestingly, the launching point of the Chase For The Championship, implemented ostensibly to boost ratings - onward across the country. "That the wheels are coming off the NASCAR money train shouldn't be a surprise to anyone." Indeed, as the decline in ratings and attendence have shown, NASCAR is not as hot as it once was, and the more it tries to market itself the worse it gets.

DeLorenzo runs off a laundry list of reasons for the sport's decline - "Sky-high ticket prices, empty seats, market oversaturation, too many sponsors creating a paralyzing amount of message clutter, the abandonment of traditional dates and racetracks, cookie-cutter cars that bear no resemblence to recognizable production car versions, too many races, etc."

The problem in this list is that some of the reasons are wrong. "Cookie-cutter cars that bear no resemblence to recognizable production car versions?" What is he talking about? Because the racecar versions of the Monte Carlo have an airdam, side skirts, etc. they do not resemble their production breathren? This is the revisionist history that permeates a lot of discussion, the notion that "stock cars used to really be stock cars." The fact of the matter is stock cars stopped being stock as soon as the sanctioning body was founded, and when superspeedways were built - by far the biggest single reason for the sport's growth - stock cars could no longer have any serious stock quality. They had to evolve into racecars.

And too many races? If anything the sport has too few races. The anger over some of the sport's markets would not be there to any extent if the sport had simply stayed at North Wilkesboro and Darlington - it was the way Texas and other tracks got onto the schedule, at the expense of North Wilkesboro and Darlington, that drives anger, not the fact of these new tracks themselves. What drives anger over now-abandoned projects in NYC and Washington State is that such tracks were aimed at replacing existing tracks instead of simply being added onto the schedule.

Certainly the reality of demographics argues against tracks in NYC and the Seattle area regardless of that, and one cannot deny that it is the "redneck" demographic that makes the sport - "Are we moonshiners, country music, banjos, and Route 66? Or are we merlot and Rodeo Drive?" as Humpy Wheeler has frequently asked. The fact is that merlot and Rodeo Drive do not account for any serious percentage of a sport's demographic, and the sport needs to stop trying to cater to merlot and Rodeo Drive.

Incredibly, DeLorenzo misses the most salient failing accounting for the sport's decline in popularity, and it it summed up in this question -

Where Are The Lead Changes?

It is telling that Talladega almost alone in the sport has not seen significant losses in attendence or TV ratings - with a per-race average of 40 lead changes from 2000 onward, it is all too easy to see why, and it is all too relevent to ask - why can't these other tracks also break the 40-lead-change barrier?

The sport's Dead-Lane Era of uncompetitive racing and a closed-loop of winning teams has done more than anything to alienate fans. Only ten teams have won races from 2003 onward, and one of them - Cal Wells - disbanded after 2006 while another - Morton-Bowers Racing - was bought out by billionaire Robert Ginn. On top of this several other teams in the sport - Ray Evernham, Robert Yates, and Petty Enterprises - are almost certain to be either bought out or take on big-money partners just to keep racing.

The sport's rules packages have for the most part done nothing to alter any of this, and frequently have made it worse. The Car Of Tomorrow is the most graphic such example; the roof spoiler package was abandoned after 2001 (though it returned for BGN in 2004); high downforce has given way to the 5&5 rule; and the hard-tire package of 2001-2 - which helped see 26 winners among 14 teams - was abandoned.

Whether coming from the view of Peter DeLorenzo or someone else, the fact remains that the sport needs to drop the "yes-man" coverage so depressingly common and start acting toward real solutions for the sport's real problems.