Team owners' feud with NASCAR gives fans excuse to tune out — again
NASCAR‘s kumbaya has been replaced by a record scratch. And a boycott. This feels like a bad idea.
Remember 2020? That’s when the pandemic shuttered the world, but it was NASCAR, bunkered in with its team owners and drivers, that famously put together a plan that allowed it to become the first big league sport to return to its big-time venues.
Remember 2021? That’s when NASCAR unveiled its Next Gen race car, trumpeted for its cost-cutting and one-size-fits-all versatility but even more heralded for the “unprecedented levels of cooperation” to design and build the new machines.
Remember 2022? That’s when stock car racing’s juggernaut sanctioning body rolled out a long-promised overhauled schedule, packed with new races and places. It started with a preseason exhibition held on a bullring constructed inside the high holy Olympic temple of the L.A. Coliseum. When the sport rolled into Daytona two weeks later, the garage was all hugs and smiles and Jeff Gordon did all of that and more when he snatched up myself and Marty Smith on live television, screaming during the embrace, “NASCAR is back, baby!”
Well, this is 2023. And all of that good-feeling stuff listed above feels as if it has been punted into a ditch like it was involved in a restart at the Circuit of the Americas.
If only it were that exciting. Instead, it’s meetings and pie charts and finger-pointing and … gross, right?
The first dark cracks in the sunshine started to show late last summer, at the height of NASCAR’s most competitive season in a generation. That’s when drivers became very and understandably vocal about lingering safety issues with the Next Gen car, specifically the two elements every racer hopes to avoid the most: fires and head injuries. NASCAR seemed to be caught off guard by it all, with president Steve Phelps admitting to ESPN over the winter that he hadn’t realized the severity of the drivers’ feelings that they weren’t being listened to.
“Honestly, I was taken aback,” he said, “but I am thankful that they spoke up, as uncomfortable as that was, because it led to more frequent and formal meetings on, really, a weekly basis.”
The next round of disgruntlement came in October 2022, when an Avengers-like lineup of high-powered team executives, including Gordon, met with a small group of NASCAR reporters to voice their dissatisfaction with the series. Over what? What they believed had been a too-slow reaction to their requests for a new, “fairer” deal concerning team charter agreements. The current agreement, a new idea intended to conjure up franchiselike value for race teams, was started in 2016, extended in 2020 and set to expire at the end of 2024.
Over the past few weeks, NASCAR drivers and owners and the sanctioning body have sparred publicly over penalties and fines. See: NASCAR VP of competition Elton Sawyer, himself a former driver, expressing his displeasure that Hendrick Motorsports successfully appealed for reductions of its massive penalties from Phoenix Raceway last month and Denny Hamlin on Twitter pretty much all the time.
Just as a reminder.
I went on a podcast and apparently broke 3 rules 24 hours later. 50k and 25 POINTS.
— Denny Hamlin (@dennyhamlin) March 30, 2023
On Wednesday, driver Chris Buescher also took to social media with a meme that questioned what has largely been viewed a success: converting Bristol Motor Speedway into a dirt race for the third straight season. Yes, Buescher won the last run on the half-mile track last fall, sans the dirt.
— Chris Buescher (@Chris_Buescher) April 5, 2023
Just as Buescher was using images of an exasperated Pedro Pascal to illustrate his feelings, though, there were a lot of feelings being hurt at NASCAR HQ. That’s because when they settled in for their quarterly meeting with the owners of the Cup Series teams, those owners never showed up. None. Of. Them.
It was an organized team owners boycott.
Why? When one of those owners was reached Wednesday afternoon, they said, on condition of anonymity, “The same bulls— reasons that were spelled out for you last fall. Nothing’s changed. So, why come to a meeting when you know that nothing is going to happen? That’s called a waste of time.”
When The Associated Press broke the story, other owners — also wishing to keep their names out of it, citing “the sensitivity of the negotiations” — said NASCAR was not handling those negotiations in good faith, including a perceived lack of urgency when it came to the speed of the process. Racers have never enjoyed going slow. They also said they wanted to deal with not merely the same old NASCAR brass but rather some good old-fashioned NASCAR royalty, specifically chairman (and son of sanctioning body founder), Jim France.
Thing is, France was there Wednesday and ended up being stood up by the people who were so adamant about having him there in the first place.
What is all of this really about? It’s about how the next round of television money will be divvied up. That’s it. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. There is a lot of talk about those charters, that the teams want them inked in permanent marker forever and ever, amen, while France prefers to keep signing franchising deals contract by contract seeing as how no one has any idea what a forever future will actually look like.
But all of that is tied to the TV money, which is the only real giant pile of cash the NASCAR world has up for grabs. The current pie chart of the last rights deal signed, an $8.2 billion contract with Fox and NBC in 2015, reportedly sends 25% of that loot to the teams via race purses, 10% to NASCAR and 65% to the racetracks — the majority of which are owned by NASCAR.
Those uneven chunks have their roots in a time that predates this century, when individual tracks did their own TV deals. That was also a time when race teams were like Richie Rich sitting atop a mountain of coins, able to demand blank checks from the likes of Budweiser, GM Goodwrench and DuPont, and those corporations blindly forked over the dough as if they were being robbed and happy it was happening.
That’s no longer how it works. It hasn’t for a very long time.
Today’s sponsorship landscape is a daily fight and a quiltwork of deals. That’s why today’s owners are so worried, openly complaining about — in the words of Team 23XI adviser and longtime team co-owner Michael Jordan consigliere Curtis Polk — an “economic model that is broken for the teams. The sustainability in this sport is not very long term unless we have a fundamental change in the model.”
With the current TV deal expiring after the 2024 season, an exclusive negotiation window with the current broadcast partners will close at the end of this month. So, yeah, that’s the funnel that all of this is being pushed through. That’s the reason for this sense of urgency from the owners.
However, they should also be monitoring another concern that might not feel as urgent but certainly is: how all of this looks to NASCAR fans. Think about it. A classically disgruntled fan base, made that way because fans felt increasingly disconnected from the racers, finally seemed to be back to enjoying the on-track product. Upticks in TV ratings and attendance prove it. Just as they are once again getting settled onto their couches on Sunday afternoons, does the sport really think they are going to have the stomach for a protracted, publicly played-out drama full of squabbling over who gets what percentage of billions of dollars?
This weekend at Bristol team owners and #NASCAR brass gonna be like that couple who broke up in front of everyone at the prom on Saturday night but then still have to sit next to each other in class Monday morning. From @JennaFryer at AP… https://t.co/BDZQqZj7Q9
— Ryan McGee (@ESPNMcGee) April 5, 2023
Major League Baseball first opened its long, ever-widening chasm-digging divide between itself and baseball fans in the 1980s, when labor disputes and giant player contracts and arbitration hearings and player strikes and blah, blah, blah overran the conversation about wins, losses and home runs.
American open-wheel racing ripped itself in half in 1996 when Indianapolis Motor Speedway heir Tony George broke away from the CART IndyCar Series to form the Indy Racing League. The series’ team owners and drivers themselves believed they could rally fans to their respective sides by airing endless clotheslines of dirty laundry through the media. Instead, those fans became confused and disgusted and walked away. The sport will never fully recover. Because sports fans tire of such posturing.
Like, say, boycotting a meeting and then not-really-anonymously leaking the fact that you boycotted a meeting just to make a point.
Now, when NASCAR seemed to finally be turning the tide of a decade-plus of bad decisions. Now, when stock car racing finally had momentum. Now, when everyone seemed to at least be perceived as rowing all oars in the same direction … this? Now? Public jabbering and posturing about shares and franchising and he-got-this and I-didn’t-that and yes, blah, blah, blah? Really?
There are definitely issues. Those issues definitely need to be resolved. But that’s what meetings are for, slow or otherwise. It’s also why meetings are held behind closed doors. There’s a reason no one sells or buys tickets to meetings. Because no one without a vested interest cares, especially when they are working all day to try to make ends meet and the fight they are being forced to watch is a tug-of-war between millionaires and billionaires.
Do what you have to, NASCAR owners and execs. Heck, call me and tell me all about it. Just don’t do it out loud. It’s boring. It’s self-serving. Your fans don’t care. They have racing to watch … unless you give them a reason to go watch something else. Again.
