NASCAR's Big Meetings

Well, NASCAR has seen the light and decided to have some “meetings” today with Cup owners and drivers. It must be that the brain trust of Brian France, Mike Helton, and John Darby have finally caught up with the fact that ratings and attendance are tanking. My feeling is that these meetings are mostly for public relations purposes. If you look at the history of NASCAR, it is the slowest moving organization in the world. It doesn’t listen to advice from outside its ruling elite.

There are many things that need to be addressed. I hope the owners and drivers speak up without fear of retribution on such things as the current car, the fence that really did not hold at Talladega, the drug testing policy, and whatever else they think can improve the series. But, I want to state as I have in previous posts the problems from a fan’s perspective.

1 – Too many races. It’s an endurance test even for hard core fans such as me. The casual fan will never stick with it.

2 – The television productions are terrible. Please TNT, don’t overdo it like FOX has. So much blather, so much nonsense.

3 – The cars have really become IROCized. Allow some creativity.

4 – Get rid of the Lucky Dog rule. Make a team earn that lap back. Do not change the restarts to double file with lap down cars to the rear. What you did before worked. It just needs a little tweaking for safety.

NASCAR can and has blamed the ratings problems and the attendance issues on many things. The economy, the rain shortened Daytona race, competition from other sports and activities, and lack of driver controversy. The real problem is that they have not paid attention to their base of hard core fans. They misread the ratings spike that occurred from the death of Dale Earnhardt Sr. They thought they had suddenly hit the big time, and they failed to realize why.