August 27, 2009
By Doug Demmons
Who would have thought at the beginning of the 2009 season that Regan Smith would turn out to be one of the lucky drivers?
The Sprint Cup Rookie of the Year and hard-luck loser at Talladega was the odd man out as 2008 closed with DEI becoming DOA and merging with Chip Ganassi Racing.
He landed with Furniture Row Racing way out in Colorado, which is the NASCAR equivalent of Napoleon being sent to Elba. Especially with the self-sponsored Furniture Row team scaling back to part-time status it was like going off someplace to be forgotten.
Fast forward to late summer and Smith is sitting pretty. Furniture Row has decided that its NASCAR program is paying enough marketing dividends that a full-time 2010 season is worth the expense.
That’s an anomaly this season, which is turning out to be the Year Without Silly Season. Other than Martin Truex Jr. going from Earnhardt Ganassi to Michael Waltrip Racing there just hasn’t been the kind of reshuffling of drivers there normally is by Labor Day weekend.
That’s because the jobs just aren’t there. Smith said during a radio interview this week that he was amazed at the number of drivers wandering through the garage at Bristol Motor Speedway in search of a ride for next year -- and not just journeymen but good drivers as well.
It explains why a good driver like Dave Blaney finds himself driving for a joke of a team -- the start-and-park No. 66 entry of Prism Motorsports. At Bristol, Blaney qualified fourth, an achievement the team might wish to avoid in the future because it just drew attention to its business model. When the green flag flew, Blaney’s mission was to get to the rear and into the garage as quickly as possible.
Blaney made it far enough to the rear by lap 4 that he ran into the No. 20 of Joey Logano, who was doing what drivers are supposed to do -- moving up through the field. Blaney ultimately succeeded in finding the garage and brought home 43rd-place winnings for his employer.
So why would a driver like Blaney with USAC and World of Outlaws championships to his credit suffer such an indignity? Because it keeps him in the garage. In NASCAR out of sight is out of mind.
It’s unfortunate he has to do that with a start-and-park team. The whole concept makes a mockery of the word “racing” -- with NASCAR’s blessing -- just to bring home a share of the purse. Nobody buys a ticket to see 40 cars racing for the win and three cars racing to see who makes it to the garage first.
But that’s the way it is in this lousy economy. It was said at the beginning of the year that we could judge the effect of the economy on NASCAR by whether its three main series had full fields for each race. That was wrong.
There will always be full fields as long as NASCAR and its tracks make finishing 43rd lucrative enough to start and park. Somebody will fill that vacuum. The measure is how many competitive teams are fielded each week, how many competitive teams are outside the top 35 trying to get in.
At the moment there is only one such team -- the No. 82 Red Bull team of rookie Scott Speed.
It wouldn’t be surprising if the top 35 rule that was so controversial last year becomes irrelevant in 2010 as the bottom of the order fills out with part-time and start-and-park teams.
Things will only get worse in 2010. Some sponsorships that survived 2009 did so because of multi-year deals that were in place when everything crashed. More of those will be up at the end of this year and will either be dropped or renewed at lower rates.
The recession may, indeed, have finally hit bottom, but the climb back up is going to be slow and painful in the racing world.
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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