COMPETITION OR ENTERTAINMENT?
NASCAR has announced a rule change for the Chevrolet’s in time for this
weekend’s race at Atlanta. The Chevy teams will be able to "extend their
front air dam two inches forward below the bumper from the current
measurement."
I’m no engineer, so I’m not sure of what the exact effect of this will
be. Presumably it will let more air come up over the hood, increasing
downforce on the front wheels. Since the main complaint from the Chevrolet
teams has been an unbalanced condition where the front end had a push, this
theoretically should go some ways towards fixing that.
But does NASCAR really know what’s wrong with their sport, at least in the
higher echelons? I’m beginning to think they don’t.
In the sport of racing, there’s a continuum that runs from pure competition
to pure entertainment. At every drivers’ meeting I’ve ever been to,
they’ve always talked about putting on a good show. Heck, I’ve even heard
one NASCAR race director caution the drivers to not outrun the field too bad if it
turned out they had a good car. This was not at the Winston Cup level, but it
shows you their corporate thinking.
NASCAR has to find its place in this continuum where entertainment isn’t
sacrificed for competition, and competition isn’t sacrificed for
entertainment. Granted that’s a fine line sometimes. I’m not sure
there’s a sanctioning body that embodies "pure entertainment" (that’d
be like professional wrestling), but on the other end of the spectrum, there are
sanctioning bodies that don’t really care about entertainment value.
Formula 1 comes to mind, with CART close behind.
The France family has paid close attention to the entertainment value in
recent years, and I think that’s why NASCAR was the biggest growing sport in the
’90’s. There were only four championships decided by margins of 195 points or
more in the ’90’s, and whether you love it or hate it, the points system leans
toward close championship battles. Who can forget the 1992 season coming down to
Alan Kulwicki leading one more lap than Bill Elliott to grab the title?
The point is, if you have one or two or even four or five teams who dominate
week in and week out, the only fans who have a good time watching the races are
the fans of those four or five drivers. And realistically, in the last couple of
years, it’s gotten to the point where the majority of the drivers out there have
to have a perfect day to even run in the top ten. Believe me, it’s not much fun
rooting your driver on to a top 35 finish. It doesn’t take too many weekends of
that to start wondering if you ought to be out in the 100 degree weather mowing
the yard instead of watching a race inside.
I remember when I first really started watching Winston Cup racing on a
weekly basis in 1990 how the commentators would brag about NASCAR trying to keep
the costs down. You still catch them saying that every now and then even today.
But when a set of tires costs close to $2,000, and a team comes in for new ones
under caution after only a handful of laps on the tires they just put on, you
can’t really say that NASCAR is doing much to contain the cost of racing.
To a large extent, as Smokey Yunick says, money does equal speed, and how
fast do you want to go? The teams that spend that money better than the
others go faster (e.g. Yates, Hendrick, Roush). Where does that leave guys like
Ricky Rudd, Bill Elliott, Dave Marcis, Darrell Waltrip, and Brett Bodine? It
leaves them scrambling to sell their teams and going back to being a plain old
driver at best, or holding on to ownership and running with the back markers at
worst. (Yes, I know, Elliott’s started off real good this year, but isn’t he
going to be in Dodge next year?)
Getting back to the rule change I started out with, guess which of the
Chevrolet teams this will impact the most? If you guessed Childress or Hendrick
I’d have to say you’re wrong. The guys this will impact the most are guys
like Bobby Hamilton or Michael Waltrip or even Sabco, who will have to spend
money reconfiguring the noses on their cars that could have been spent on other
things to improve performance. (Before you write be about how rich Felix Sabates
is, notice above I talked about teams that spend the money better than
the others to go faster).
NASCAR has been criticized in the past for making what
seem to be weekly rules changes. They’ve gotten better at this but they still
have a duty to the fans to provide close competition. They have to rediscover
the right balance between competition and entertainment, and if they don’t find
it soon, we may all be talking about more exciting sports like yacht racing in
the future.