NASCAR's State Of Confusion

NASCAR enters Charlotte's two weeks of racing with yet more confusion as to where the sanctioning body is going. First came a Reuters story that the France family was looking to sell its ownership stake, or at least part of it, to an outside buyer - the story got a sharper angle when a name of a potential buyer was mentioned in Comcast, the entertainment giant - in keeping with Liberty Media's purchase of the F1 sanctioning body. Another angle comes with word that team owners are increasingly unhappy with NASCAR even as the sanctioning body and team owners have striven to work together more in recent years. Such news comes amid ratings for the sanctioning body continuing to labor.

"A budget cap is one aspect of the wider topic of the competitive framework of the sport, which has been an imoretant topic of late in Team Owner Council meetings and RTA discussions."

Andrew Murstein of Richard Petty Motorsports in the Sports Business Daily piece advocates going to more night races and going to some mid-week races, ignoring the failure of night racing in Winston Cup and the fact that late start times for Sunday races have helped drive fans away.  


This comes as the 2018 season has seen some genuine improvement in the racing, with a wild and compelling Daytona 500, a strikingly spirited Phoenix 300, and a wild finish at Kansas.

Kansas had several spirited bouts up front.

 





It also had a huge melee late in the race.

Kevin Harvick had to run down Martin Truex to win the race.


Word of a possible sale of at least partial ownership to an outside entity has brought out the usual bitterness from some long-time fans with the usual nonsensical calls for "bring back stock bodies" etc. - never mind stock bodies proved unusable long ago.   Solutions are well known and should not need belaboring and the bitterness by some fans continues to reek of spurned lover syndrome.


As for the on-track competition, with the coming All-Star Race the restrictor plate-draft duct package will get its first race on an intermediate oval after last year's successful Lillys Xfinity 250 at Indianapolis.   Given that the draft historically has mattered a great deal on intermediates like Charlotte and Atlanta one can feel this package will open up passing.   The likely winners will be Fords, whose program is simply that much better than everyone else's, especially the Stewart-Haas Fords, though Penske's bunch is still good.

JGR and Truex are still stout, but it's obvious Truex's team misses the #77 car, as their muscle simply isn't there now.

Chevrolet has become irrelevant, period.   More and more the prospect that Chevrolet will not be in any contention the rest of the season is becoming real, and shows how the favoritism of Chevy to Hendrick's team is now costing them - having done nothing to bolster their other teams, Chevrolet is now not just also-rans but junk as such.   Chevy needs to reassign some of their engineers to other teams and get all of their teams working directly together a la the Pontiacs two decades past.

A humorous byproduct is the failure of the young gun drivers, who have simply been out of contention from the start of the season.   True, Chase Elliott has led laps and fought for top fives but nowhere has shown the maturity or intelligence that indicates he's learning how to win.   His young Hendrick teammates right now look lost at the Cup level; they look like actual rookies, and weak ones at that.   The old NASCAR saw that it will take five years to see if the kids actually can become competent racers seems to have come back to the sport - talk about throwback.

Elliott's idiotic tantrum at Ricky Stenhouse after the race shows what's wrong with the young guns - Stenhouse swerved Elliott high in Four and afterward Elliott drilled him, then complained about Stenhouse racing him too hard, a contemptible opinion for which Elliott was deservedly ripped by Larry McReynolds.   Stenhouse for his part does deserve criticism for chopping off Elliott instead of holding his line better.

The flameout of the young guns has now cost one of them his race team as Trevor Bayne is now going down as the first spectacular drafting bust of NASCAR in recent memory.   One struggles to see him ever getting another Cup chance.


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An unexpected angle came with the Supreme Court's overruling of government bans on sports betting, opening up the potential that sports bodies will see direct gambling by fans on contests, players, etc.  Concern about competition integrity is legitimate, but as pointed out on Sirius XM radiocasts it is bookies themselves who expose cheating scandals and thus ensure competitions are legitimate.   The potential revenue sanctioning bodies may achieve has been the big temptation involved, and NASCAR may be the sport best suited to legalized gambling.

For the sport to benefit most, teams and tracks need to see genuine benefit.  Betting should also shy away from NASCAR's misbegotten playoff idea - instead betting should be about winning races, laps led, and hard charger awards - performance, in short, not contrived title formats.

So we thus await the All-Star affair and whether NASCAR can begin getting things in better order for going forward.