July 21, 2009
By Allen Madding
Saturday night, nine unsponsored cars attempted to qualify for the NASCAR Nationwide Series Missouri-Illinois Dodge Dealers 250 at Gateway International Raceway. When qualifying was completed, six unsponsored teams had made the show.
There were so many blank hoods and quarter panels that some joked the series should be renamed the “White Car Series”.
The blank hoods, deck lids, and quarter panels demonstrate just how much of a financial struggle it has become in the last two years for teams to compete in the NASCAR Nationwide Series.
A stroll down pit road prior to a race drives the point home. Pit boxes that normally gleam with fresh paint jobs and sponsor’s emblem once dominated this area. Now there are a lot of Pit boxes that show the wear of season’s past, lack of sponsorship decals, and some do not even match the current race car’s color scheme.
Despite the financial struggle for the teams, NASCAR has announced that it is pressing forward with its plans to introduce the Nationwide Series version of the Car of Tomorrow for the 2010 season. The car will be run at the restrictor plate Superspeedways of Daytona and Talladega and the road course events.
NASCAR has called a meeting on July 28th for NASCAR Nationwide Series owners and drivers at its Research and Development Center in North Carolina to discuss the new cars implementation and the schedule for testing of the new car that it will allow before the 2009 season’s end.
Newsflash – the teams competing in the NASCAR Nationwide Series do not have the budget to build the new cars. All of the automotive manufacturer’s have pulled their financial support of the series, so teams have already had to compensate for the additional expense for engine parts, etc. that once was provided to many teams expense free.
One solution that teams are considering is purchasing a used NASCAR Sprint Cup Series COT chassis from one of the Cup teams and mounting a new body to meet the NASCAR Nationwide Series COT templates. Albeit cheaper than constructing a new car from the ground up, even this solution is not a small financial undertaking. Purchasing a used COT chassis from a Cup team certainly will not be cheap. Fabricating and mounting a brand new body on one will be an expensive undertaking on its own.
NASCAR seriously needs to think of tabling this idea until 2012. Give the economy time to recover. Allow the teams to secure sponsorship and rebuild their budgets. Provide the teams with time to rebuild financially before burdening them with more financial expenses.
This is a time for the sanctioning body to help limit the expenses required to compete in the NASCAR Nationwide Series to preserve the long term future of the sport. Launching the COT in the NASCAR Nationwide Series in 2010 is simply poor timing, and it should be quite apparent.
Walk down pit road, walk through the Nationwide Series garage and look at the hoods, quarter panels and deck lids and then decide if these teams can afford building a new COT for Daytona, Talladega and the road courses.
The thoughts and ideas expressed by this writer or any other writer on Insider Racing News, are not necessarily the views of the staff and/or management of IRN.
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