March 4, 2010
By Doug Demmons
Last year I came across a pocket of socialism right here in central Alabama.
While interviewing the director of the infield medical center at Talladega Superspeedway I learned that they will treat just about anyone who walks in with a medical problem during race week -- for free. Don’t need an insurance card or a co-payment or a referral from your primary doctor.
Just walk right in and be served. Did I mention it was free?
Yep. Socialized medicine smack dab in Talladega.
If socialism is good enough for Talladega, surely a little Marxism would be good for the rest of NASCAR, right?
I’m talking about soaking the rich to give to the less fortunate, your basic redistribution of resources.
What’s that, you say? UnAmerican? Communistic?
Not hardly. In fact it’s common practice in other professional sports.
Every spring the sorriest, lousiest team in the NFL gets to pick the best player that college football has to offer. Major League Baseball imposes a luxury tax on rich teams like the Yankees and redistributes the money to the pathetic teams.
It’s your basic Marxism 101 at work -- take away from the successful to give to those who can’t compete in the interest of the greater good of the community.
The idea, of course, is that the sport does much better if there is parity, if a few teams aren’t spending a gazillion dollars to pummel the opposition and win every year.
Which brings us to the start-and-park teams -- the “little guys” that NASCAR fans love to pull for in the ever-so-slight hope that we can bring back the good ole days when a few guys could build a car in their garage and go racing with the big boys.
Those days went out with disco -- and yet we still cling to the idea like a hot dog wrapper to a front grill. NASCAR even likes to promote the idea that some plucky startup team can just show up and compete on stock car racing’s biggest stage.
But even NASCAR got tired of sick of hearing about start and park, especially after Prism Motorsports decided to be a two-car start-and-park operation this year. So they confiscated the No. 66 of Dave Blaney after Fontana for an engine teardown.
Was it a message to the start-and-park teams? NASCAR didn’t say that, but they did say that from now on they would be doing a teardown on whichever car leaves the race first and isn’t involved in an accident.
That requires a team to rebuild the engine once they get it back, at a cost of thousands of dollars. Presumably, S&P teams will be inspired to not be the first one in the garage and will run more of the race.
If that’s what it takes to end S&P, so be it. But what about that concern for the little guys about to be crushed under the jackboot of Big Mean NASCAR?
This is where Marxism comes in.
If NASCAR really wants to promote the growth of its fledgling teams it needs to step up to the plate with some assistance. And there are plenty of ways to do this short of writing checks.
How about having special test sessions just for the little guys? Any team that has averaged a 35th-place finish over the last 10 races gets to come to a special test session paid for by NASCAR.
Or how about a special sponsorship deal? What if NASCAR recruited a company to sponsor a special race within the race?
What if every unsponsored team signed up and put this company’s logo on its hood for the next race? All these unsponsored teams would compete against each other during the race -- whichever one earns the highest finish gets a 10-race sponsorship from the company. That team would then be prohibited from doing a start and park or else it would forfeit its sponsorship. When the 10 races are up, another race of unsponsored teams is held.
It would be a good deal for the company, which might have five or six cars carrying its logo in the race within the race and would likely get quite a bit of air time.
And then maybe we’ll see Dave Blaney challenging Jimmie Johnson for the lead on the final lap.
And maybe pigs will fly. But maybe we’d have just a bit more parity in a sport sorely lacking in it. And there would no longer be an excuse for teams to start and park.
Doug Demmons is a writer and editor for the Birmingham News ~ he writes daily and weekly auto racing columns ranging from NASCAR to open wheel to Formula One, local tracks and more... you can read Doug's columns online at Blog of Tommorow
Follow Doug on Twitter: @dougdemmons
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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