NASCAR's biggest battle isn't on Sunday

ThatsRacin.com Opinion

Saturday, Feb. 14, 2009

DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. - Sunday's Daytona 500 is not going to fix the mortgage meltdown or the credit crunch.

The number of lead changes won't decide which way the Dow Jones average moves over the next two weeks. The Fed isn't going to set interest rates based on whether a Chevrolet, Ford, Dodge or Toyota goes to victory lane.

That's not to say that the economy won't have a profound effect on NASCAR as it begins its Sprint Cup season with Sunday's race.

There are not many businesses and certainly no professional sports operations more directly tied to forces in the marketplace as the heavily sponsorship-dependent NASCAR teams are.

Job reductions, sponsorship cutbacks and team mergers have pock-marked the sport's offseason headlines, and a memorable race Sunday would at least offer a momentary respite from all of that.

But Sunday's race, good or bad, won't change the sport's fundamental issues.

"Though still America's second-most-watched sport after football...NASCAR is no longer the unstoppable marketing phenomenon it used to be," reads an article in Forbes magazine. "The sport is suffering declines in sponsorship, attendance and financial stability, and the roots of the problem go a lot deeper than the lousy economy."

The Forbes article points out that NASCAR ticket sales and television ratings flattened and even began to dip as early as two years ago, long before bailouts and stimulus bills were the coin of the economic realm.

Most of the seats for Sunday's race will have someone in them, but only because Daytona International Speedway cut the price of some of those tickets to levels not seen in a decade or more. Tracks from coast to coast are cutting prices, offering payment plans and doing anything they can to entice people to come to their events.

"And once this economic thing is over, those prices aren't going to go back up where we had them, either," an official with one track said this week. "The fans aren't going to stand for that."

Money, from all sides, has become a hot-potato topic for the sport.

At last year's Sprint Cup awards ceremony, money totals for the top finishers in the championship standings were greatly de-emphasized. Normally the size of the Daytona 500 purse is trumpeted each season as a sign of the sport's robust health, but this year you have to ask to find out it's around $18.8 million.

And when Forbes.com this week reported that estimated values of more than $300 million each for Hendrick Motorsports and Roush Fenway Racing, and that Dale Earnhardt Jr. earned $35 million and Jeff Gordon made $30 million last year, there was certainly no effort from the NASCAR public relations office to push those numbers into broad release.

On Jan. 27, several major American companies announced the combined layoffs of around 60,000 employees. Three of those announcing major cuts were Caterpillar, The Home Depot and Sprint, all companies with a major presence as NASCAR sponsors.

How, came the immediate questions, could these companies tell people they no longer had jobs but still pour money into a NASCAR sponsorship?

"I understand that people who don't like racing and don't see the impact can look at our sport and say, 'Golly, you shouldn't be spending money on that. If you had that money you could do something else with it,' " said Jeff Burton, whose No. 31 Chevrolet is now sponsored by Caterpillar.

"What they don't understand is there has been a justification in spending that money. Our sponsors believe that being involved in this helps them sell product.

"For that 'X amount' of dollars they're spending on it, they're getting 'X-plus' on return. If you don't spend that 'X' you don't get the plus. People look at it as an expense and they don't look at it and see that expense creates income. We don't have a single sponsor who we are associated with who doesn't get income based on their expense.

"You have to market. You have to put your product in front of people. Chief executive officers and chief marketing officers don't make those decisions because they're race fans. They make them because their customers are race fans."

But it's still uncomfortably easy to draw a line from General Motors getting taxpayer money to stay in business to a Chevrolet team's driver being featured on a television show about his lavish new home or the new private jet he just bought.

You can explain that there's no way for a driver traveling from Daytona this week to California next weekend to fly commercially and still fulfill the sponsor appearance obligations he has in between, but that part's not going to make the sound bite.

There is romance in the fact that Jeremy Mayfield put his own team together in less than a month and made Sunday's race, or that the car Scott Riggs will drive is owned by Tommy Baldwin and was prepared by a crew that's largely working on a volunteer basis until the team gets its financial feet on the ground.

But the truth is that the cars most likely to contend for victory Sunday will come from multicar teams that have managed to keep full sponsorships and exponentially larger budgets than some of those that are trying to keep up.

The appeal of the underdog's story doesn't change the fact that the disparity between the sport's haves and have-nots someday must be addressed.

NASCAR isn't going to fix the nation's economic policy, and when and if those policies fix the broader economy NASCAR won't be able to benefit fully unless its own business model makes sense - and unless the product is worth the price of admission.

"Racing fans, many of whom can barely afford the steep ticket prices at the track, are bored by the lack of drama when they get there," the article in the Forbes magazine contends.

"Several of the biggest drivers are look-alike, clean-shaven white guys in track suits, and their cars, which now hew to the same technical specifications, are equally cookie-cutter."

Fair or not, that perception is what NASCAR really is fighting these days. Believe it or not, NASCAR knows it.

"What people really care about," chairman and chief executive officer Brian France said this week, "is how good the racing is."

Get that right and the rest will take care of itself.

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