An Apology to NASCAR and a Franchise Plea

April 10, 2008

By Brian Watkins

Brian Watkins

I’d like to kick off this column by eating a few slices of humble pie. Last season, prior to the first COT race, I, like many others cried foul on the new car. I didn’t like the look, or the concept and didn’t think it was needed. I wasn’t alone. Many fans, drivers and journalists had the same opinion. In fact, aside from Toyota, there was really no other change that drew as much ire and criticism and cries of “what are you doing to our sport” as the Car of Tomorrow did.

Well, as the new season kicked off, fewer complaints were aired. The look of the car is starting to grow on me, and the racing (with the exception of Texas) has been, well, very racy. While these were all stated reasons for the change, the biggest one, safety, had yet to be truly tested.

When Jeff Gordon tagged the wall in Las Vegas it was clear that the new car could stand up to some serious abuse, and while the safety of the ride was motioned, it wasn’t celebrated; that is until last Friday. NASCAR history is filled with spectacular wrecks and tragic endings, however none in recent history measure up to the dramatic turn 2 acrobatics of Michael McDowell’s #00 Toyota. I won’t rehash the event because changes are that if you haven’t already read about it 5 or 6 times, you’ve seen the video clips. The fact that he not only survived the wreck but also walked away should put to rest all but the most die hard anti-COT crowd.

You can have all the exciting racing you want, but the minute someone is killed or seriously injured in a wreck, the race becomes irrelevant. While nothing can protect a driver 100% of the time, the COT appears to be pretty close.

I still have issues with NASCAR, but in regards to the COT, I take my hat off to them and the designers of all the other advanced safety gear drivers use today. You should all be very, very proud.

Would You Like Franchise With That?

Sponsors for NASCAR teams big and small seem about as hard to come by as $2 a gallon gas, with no signs of improvement on the horizon. Teams are now banding together out of financial necessity and taking on partnerships with interested parties previously unrelated to the sport.

With a weak dollar, sky-high fuel prices and a myriad of other complicating factors making the financial life of almost everybody more complicated than we care to say, how will teams today be able to remain viable? How can we fix the uncertainty teams and those that own the logos on the cars are facing? I say they should go from a France-ized system to a Franchise system.

I won’t be so bold to say that franchising is the only answer or that it will solve all the problems. I’m not an economist, or a team owner and I certainly exert no influence on anything related to the sport aside from making sure die-cast sales continue to grow. But it seems that if ever there were a time to move from the current system to a system that would guarantee both teams and sponsors that if they owned a franchise, their car would be in every race every weekend of every season. It wouldn’t promise that their car would perform well, but they’d have a shot every week.

The fact that franchising would kill the top 35 rule alone is reason enough for me. I understand the current reasoning behind the rule, but I think there’s a better way. With a franchise system, each team would buy a piece of the action. Qualifying would be qualifying again. No one would be forced to race their way in. No more provisionals. A franchise team could rotate drivers and cars all they wanted and the points lost or gained by the move wouldn’t be nearly as important.

There are many details about franchising the sport that I certainly don’t pretend to have a grasp on. The one detail that I do understand though, is that if NASCAR were to franchise, the current owners of NASCAR would have to give up a chunk of their power, which I must admit is unlikely. To their credit, the France family has done very well with the sport taking it to one of the most popular and profitable sports in the world. For all the complaining we as fans do about how NASCAR is run they must be doing a lot of things right or we’d be stuck watching open-wheel racing every weekend.

While the reality of seeing NASCAR franchised may come to pass, I doubt it will be soon enough for some of the struggling smaller teams. I almost called them “low budget teams”, but in this day and age, if you can afford to drive your haulers and your team from Concord to Fontana and back, you’ve got a bigger budget than I ever will.

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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