The 2021 Running NASCAR/IMSA/other racing things thread

There isn't one. But the Frances are about star power. So are the sponsors. Do you think either of them want a relative nobody when a big name is willing to fill the seat, whether as a one-off or for every stop where the Cup race is also held?

 

I totally agree.

 

I always thought a good idea would be limit the number of lower tier starts Cup drivers got. Pick the races you want to run, but don't run every week.
That might generate fan interest for your bigger races but allow talent to develop more consistently.

 

Kyle Busch is a great driver, but the guys running Cup-level equipment was a bigger problem. Earnhardt and many others ran Busch cars semi-regularly and didn't dominate. Mark Martin did, I suppose.

RCR, Gibbs and Roush just ran over everyone in that series for a decade. Sometimes it was with developmental drivers (Harvick's first title). Sometimes it was with veterans (Carl Edwards).

The current rule should be loosened up a bit. Let Cup guys run half the companion races and up to three standalones. Limit of five Cup guys per companion race. If you don't limit the field, you'll have all the Cup guys' sponsors want them running Daytona, Charlotte and Darlington. They're arbitrary numbers, but you gotta start somewhere.

 

The Busch Series morphed from the old Sportsman class, with the idea of having a driver development series for top Late Model drivers at southeastern-based short tracks like Orange County, Greenville-Pickens and Myrtle Beach, bringing NASCAR to areas where the Cup Series couldn't run. Except NASCAR realized they could make more money by running it as a Saturday support series at the same tracks as the Cup cars instead, because the TV deal pays way more than ticket sales.

The SuperTruck Series was created with the idea of having an entry level, low-cost driver development series to showcase trucks on west coast-based short tracks, testing out different rules like "halftime" and no green-flag pit stops and bringing NASCAR to places where the Cup Series couldn't run. Except NASCAR realized they could make more money by running it as a Friday support series at the same tracks as the Cup cars instead, because the TV deal pays way more than ticket sales.

NASCAR was making money running those races no matter how few people were in the stands before COVID. But NASCAR NEEDS Busch-whackers because who the hell else watches stand-alone Busch and Truck events?

For what it's worth, less than 2 percent of all clicks on NASCAR.com were for Truck-based content and less than 3 percent were for Busch-based content at the height of NASCAR's popularity.

It made little economic sense for Turner Sports to waste our time at the track, writing stories that got less than 1,000 views.

 

It doesn't help that in the 70s and 80s, "rookie" Cup drivers were 30-35 for the most part because they had been running Busch Series races and made their way up just like baseball's farm system. These days, a 35-year-old is closer to retirement than just starting out.

 

Exactly. And most of those guys were local track champions, running multiple races each weekend in Tennessee, Alabama, North Carolina, Georgia or California before they ever got a NASCAR-sanctioned ride. Now some kid is winning "national championships" in karts by 9, in a Legends car at 12 and in an ARCA car at 15.

 

Seriously appreciate this insight and background. There's so much historical knowledge on this thread, in particular.

I've tended to enjoy watching Truck races. They're generally pretty wild given how young and green the drivers typically are, with entertaining racing throughout, and races are pretty short. I've found those fun. I was a Jeff Burton fan, so I've enjoyed watching recent young guys like Harrison Burton come up (even though, I'm sure, Harrison has every single advantage possible).

 

Not only that, several people - Jack Ingram, Randy LaJoie, David Green, Sam Ard - had solid racing careers just based on the Busch Series. They'd dabble in Cup, but their legacy in not there.

 

That was how BZF ran things, and that’s how Kevin Conway became the 2010 Cup Series Rookie of the Year. The development series was overrun with Cup drivers taking the best rides and as a result the rookie class of 2010 was one mediocre driver who had a sponsor that promised to rent seats for him with two different teams (Conway got fired and that sponsor got sued by Front Row Motorsports when it stiffed the team instead of paying, and Robby Gordon flat-out punched Conway when it became clear that the money wasn’t forthcoming). When the sponsor went away, so did Kevin Conway.

At least John Wes Townley’s daddy picked up the check.

 

The ultimate cosmic joke is that I wound up being NASCAR.com's "chief historian" because I was the only person on staff who had actually seen "full bodied" Cup cars run (I went to the 1978, 1979 and 1980 Daytona 500s as a college student) and Turner didn't want to pay Buz McKim for a column.

To be honest, I am a huge fan of baseball (I'm currently replaying a version of the 1914 season on Diamond-Mind Baseball) and the Indianapolis 500. I just happen to gravitate toward how things now got to be that way by looking back at the past. I'm a sports history buff.

So I poured over LexisNexis clippings, went to the Charlotte and Daytona libraries, combed through old media guides and track programs, and called a ton of retired drivers. And what I found was NASCAR dumped all of its pre-1971 data in the garbage when R.J. Reynolds showed up, and then dumped everything from the Winston era later. Because NASCAR has no SABR, nothing is completely verifiable.

There are tons of mistakes from NASCAR's own record-keeping which have never been corrected, so even the Greg Fielden book and Racing-Reference's data are inconsistent with the AP stories and agate from the newspaper accounts (and my driver interviews). So NASCAR's "official history" is just a bunch of "probably, maybe, could be" stories (and a lot of mythology that is been passed down because it's much more interesting than the truth). "NASCAR was started by a bunch of moonshiners" is one of those. Yeah, Raymond Parks owned an Atlanta liquor store and ran the numbers from the back office, but there was a post-war legitimate sanctioned stock car association before Bill France got everyone together at the Streamline.

The Tom Wolfe article in Esquire on Junior Johnson probably did more to push the "bad boy" aspect of the sport, which of course, NASCAR's PR folks ran with for decades. But most top drivers of the day -- Lee Petty, Buck Baker, the Flocks, Cotton Owens, the Woods -- owned garages or worked on cars during the week, making honest money. David Pearson told me he was a roofer before his career took off. Curtis Turner bought and sold tracts of land for lumber. Cale Yarborough was a farmer. Benny Parsons drove a taxi.

Joe Menzer wrote an excellent book on the 1979 Daytona 500, because he's a tremendous writer and talked with all the major combatants. But it's still not exactly how it unfolded because he wasn't there as an eyewitness. I've had the same problem when trying to put together anything that happened before my time. I can make educated guesses based on the facts presented, but I wasn't there -- so it's still well-written hearsay.