Written By Tom Baker/SWN - Photo Courtesy Jared C. Tilton/Getty Images

CHARLOTTE, N.C. -- NASCAR's Elton Sawyer admitted this week that the sanctioning body has a short-track problem with their Cup Series cars.  Sawyer said they are working hard with Goodyear to solve it.  

That's all you need to know to understand that NASCAR's short-track problem is a symptom of parity, which ultimately is killing passing.   

If NASCAR were focused first and foremost on solving their short-track problem, they'd be actively looking at more options than just tires. The tires are not the problem.  

Tire performances are a symptom of the mindset that has been used in recent years by NASCAR in their decision-making regarding technology and car rules. And this is not just a NASCAR problem. It's a problem for a lot of different types of racing right now. 

The first problem is parity. Parity is a great theory.  But how you define it, and how you go about achieving it makes the difference. 

The more you make everyone and everything the same, the less exciting it is.  

When you have a variety of cars, drivers, and rules that allow teams to find their speed, but you keep control of your rules in the tech barn and enforce those rules across the board, you achieve a certain level of parody that keeps the competition fair without stifling it.  

When you hand out the car, the motor, the parts, and the tires, and open up the sharing of all driver data across the board, you pretty much hand out the same playbook for success to all your teams. 

Instead of each team doing its own thing to find the advantage and each driver figuring out a better way to drive fast, you create an environment where all the drivers learn to drive the cars the same way at each track, making them just as "spec" as anything else. 

The next-gen NASCAR Cup Series car has been around long enough now for drivers to have figured out how they want to be driven, and you rarely see motor or parts failures.  So, we have more cars running the same speed on short tracks, with fewer DNFs or yellows for spins or accidents.

You've cut the horsepower from 750 to about 650, giving drivers less power off the corners, and you've given the drivers bigger brakes.  

What was it at Martinsville that for decades everyone focused on as being a huge factor in the outcome of the race?  

Brakes, right? 

Not anymore. 

You also have tires that aren't wearing enough.  The next-gen car seems not to be as hard on tires as the Gen-6 cars were, and the tires are taller.  

When you can run almost 200 laps on one set of left-side tires at Martinsville, that's not helping competition happen.  

With the new transaxles, drivers are now shifting on some of the short tracks, likely as a way to compensate for less horsepower. 

The bottom line is, the drivers all say that there is just not enough off-throttle time, and That's why the racing has become less entertaining.  

We have all the same cars, parts, data, and not nearly enough innovation in Cup right now, and when you have a track like Martinsville that's small and tight, everyone runs so close in speed and driving style that it makes passing very difficult, especially when there's no variable like tire fall off to force the drivers to manage anything.  

NASCAR says they don't want to add horsepower because it will add cost but won't guarantee better racing.  

We all know that the real reason that they are reluctant to add horsepower back is that they would like more manufacturers in the sport, and not all of the manufacturers want to build V8 gas hogs to compete because many of them don't offer them in their street cars. 

NASCAR wants parity, and they want to cut competition costs for teams at the Cup level.   

Does having one car that you race everywhere actually save cost?  Well, maybe.  But is entertaining racing the price that we pay for that cost savings? 

Solve One Problem, Create Another

There's a reason why teams always used to have a fleet of cars that were divided into three groups - short track, intermediate (1.5-mile tracks), and superspeedway cars.  

NASCAR, working in conjunction with the teams and OEMs, attempted to make one chassis that everyone has that could race on everything from a quarter-mile temp track at a football stadium to Daytona, Talladega, and road and street courses, to save cost for teams.

That's a great idea in theory.  Their heart was in the right place.  But, how you go about doing something is key to its success.  

The chassis they chose is, for all intents and purposes, a GT car - a car whose natural habitat is road courses.  

I believe this was a purposeful choice because one item on NASCAR's increasingly complex agenda has added more road courses to the schedule in recent years after a few close finishes got everyone all excited about that idea. 

Road courses used to be interesting because they were rare, and the drivers didn't have the skills or experience for the most part to master them, so the racing was crazy fun.  

Now we have more road course races, a car built for road course races, and the drivers have become much more skilled and crafty at racing on them. So, the road course races are, for the most part, not as exciting anymore. 

NASCAR wanted to hit the Chicago market.  They didn't think Chicagoland was good enough, so they created a street race that debuted last year.  They enticed a bunch of first-time NASCAR fans with a ticket that included concerts and other fun activities.  

Then it rained.  Hard.  

The concerts were canceled, and the race started on wet roads.  NASCAR's drivers had zero experience in this type of racing, but Shayne Van Gisbergen did.  He has won three championships in Australian supercars driving basically the same type of car that the Cup series uses and he knew just to race the track and not the other cars.  

He won.  

Everyone got all excited and deemed the race a huge success because the only driver with experience on wet streets in that type of car won.  The race was a crash-fest, and passing was a premium.  

But it was a huge success, according to those in the know.

Let's see how the next two years on that course turn out.  

As more drivers get more experience on it and figure out setups and the rain hopefully stays away, will it be the same?  Will those first-time fans come back each year?  Will they support NASCAR before and after that race? 

Clash Of Priorities

More road and street courses haven't been the only priority for NASCAR.  They also changed their season-opening "Clash" race which used to be just for pole winners and put it on a 1/4-mile oval.
 
Well, that should be fun, right?  The ultimate short-track oval battle battle royal.  

The problem is that they weren't thinking of the best racing when they made that choice.  They were mainly trying to expand their audience.  

They decided to hold a made-for-TV exhibition at a football stadium with the hope of attracting the L.A. / Hollywood types to pay attention to NASCAR because they wanted to sell off part of the property that Auto Club Speedway sat on. 

That high-speed, highly competitive two-mile oval track was supposed to be rebuilt as a half-mile track, but now NASCAR blames the costs of construction for putting the brakes on that project, no pun intended. 

They wanted to still be in the market, and instead of going to an existing short-track in the area like Irwindale and investing the Million per year into making that facility capable of holding their new-style "Racelmania" event on a track large enough for all 40 cars to start the race, they sank it into running inside a football stadium on a track so small that some teams have to go home without racing in the main event - a giant waste of dollars for those teams, who often go home with a wrecked race car or two to start the season, and laps on their motors for nothing.  

All of this adds up to the competition challenge we have today, trying to build one car with one set of parts that can produce equally entertaining racing on every track configuration to appeal to all audiences and still be affordable for teams.

Bill France - Committee of One 

This leads me to the second problem that we have in NASCAR right now - there are too many seats at the table.  This one is much harder to solve, but it is the main reason we have parity as the main mindset right now.  

When NASCAR began, Bill France, Sr. did what he wanted to do.  Whether anyone approved of a choice he made or not, we all knew who was making that choice.  

He didn't have TV Networks, OEMs, special interest groups, and a nation full of different types of fans to satisfy.  His only focus was on keeping the racing fair, and entertaining fans.  

He used the tech barn to level the playing field as much as he thought he could, without resorting to one-size-fits-all.  He was a racer, and he understood racing.  

In 2024, many different considerations factor heavily into the choices that NASCAR makes, especially with the Cup Series.  

Now there is a whole group of "C-Suite" personnel (executive-level managers) who have to try to satisfy an even larger and more diverse group of "stakeholders" including teams, drivers, TV Networks, Manufacturers, and other special interests, including the fans. 

It is, more or less, a sport run by a committee, and committees have been known to keep minutes and waste hours.  

The larger the group that has input into a business decision, the harder it is to ever make that decision and the less likely it will be the right one because it gets filtered through too many different agendas and personal preferences.

Right now, TV is driving a lot of buses.  TV wants more cars in the picture at all times.  Fans watching the broadcast are more concerned with cars actually passing each other and knowing that they are risking a crash while doing it.   

I don't know of a single fan who asked for rain tires for Cup cars on ovals.  TV did that, so we could get the thing over with in time for the newscast.  

This is national motorsports in 2024.  

Chartering A New Course  

The evolution of special interests and parallel agendas also makes the whole issue of the charters a lot harder to navigate, because unlike the NFL, which only wants a certain number of teams, NASCAR would like to have other carmakers come into the sport, and with that would likely come more teams.  

With only 36 charters as it sits now, Honda, Kia, or another manufacturer would either have to find 2-4 charters that current owners were willing to sell or lease and spend somewhere north of $75 million to acquire them, or buy an existing team away from Chevy, Ford, or Toyota.  

Teams are growing louder in their pleas for a bigger piece of the TV pie and a new business model that puts them in a closer partnership with NASCAR, and I'm sure any manufacturer looking into joining NASCAR is paying very close attention to how this shakes out over the next several months as the end of the season nears.

Think about this - Why do you think teams are so heavily dependent on drivers paying to play these days?  

It's because they're not able to be profitable businesses from the purse! 

If the teams were able to make more money through TV and other revenue through the sport, they could go back to hiring drivers based on talent instead of just on whether they have millions of dollars to bring to the deal.  

This is also why much of short-track racing has gone the route of paid drivers.  The costs of fielding a car are very high, because 

After Phoenix in November, the current charter agreement ends, but the clock is ticking for both sides to get this worked out much sooner because 2025 schedules and sponsorship negotiations are going to become very important as we get into the summer.

Shorter Weekends, Less Fan Time 

I don't envy Jim France and the NASCAR leadership. The world has changed a lot since 1949, and the leadership's desired audience reach has gone from the Southeast US to the world.  

As the number of fans at the track grew, and the number of team sponsors also grew, it became harder for drivers to have the time to satisfy those two groups of people adequately on Sundays because there was a race to run. 

NASCAR's decision (again, driven ostensibly by cost-cutting) to shorten the race weekend made it less expensive for the teams but also less of an experience for fans who spend a lot of money to travel to the track, because drivers had even less time at the track now to divide between fans, sponsors, and their real job - driving a race car.  

That's a lot of complex challenges that Bill France, Sr. didn't have when he formed the sport, and the price you pay for a big TV deal and more Fortune 500 company involvement than ever.  

Let's Get Back To Basics 

I believe these challenges are all solvable by going back to the basic mindset that France employed in the beginning - putting on fair and entertaining racing at tracks, helping the teams to get to the next show,  and giving fans a great time for three hours on Sundays at a price they can afford.    

A race team used to have five or six guys who were mechanics, a driver, a crew chief, a PR guy, and someone in the office handling things like travel and other business.  Cup cars were not all that far from the street stock that raced at the local track.

Now these teams have up to four cars worth of expensive computers and a staff full of engineers to run them in addition to having dozens of people on staff to pay for.  

Gooseneck trailers have been replaced by tractor trailers and fuel bills that would have been unthinkable 40 years ago.  

Greedy hotel owners know they have a captive audience so they double or triple room rates and often force fans to pay for an entire weekend to stay there.

Some of those things are first-world problems beyond NASCAR's control, but they still need to factor them into their decision-making about events and locations and purses and costs. 

NASCAR used to be a blue-collar sport.  Bill France Sr. knew who his desired audience was.  

The more his successors have trended toward trying to grab a wider audience demographic, the more complicated it has become to satisfy everyone's interests.

It sometimes feels like the fan who jumps on their John Deere on Saturday mornings to mow the lawn is no longer as important to NASCAR as the fan who pays someone to do that for them.

I don't believe I'm the only one who feels that way, and I think NASCAR (and SMI) should put fixing the on-track product first on their priority list, and then work on making better decisions where fan attendance is concerned - like not racing on Easter Sunday, and adding more engagement time with drivers back into the weekend.  

If they do that, you might see more fans come back to places like Bristol, Richmond, and Martinsville.  

NASCAR should stop worrying about micro-managing every last detail of their race weekends and focus on taking care of their teams and their fans at every track they go to.  That goes for SMI as well.  

Share the revenue, know your true fan avatar (blue color fans, in this case), and focus on doing all you can to keep them.  The others will find their way to you if they care enough.  Go back to building up the short tracks as Winston did.  Create loyalty from the bottom up.  

Stop trying to alter your brand to fit markets that don't match.  Days of Thunder was a movie based on NASCAR.  It didn't tell the story of parity and modern racing on street courses.  

It told the story of what truly made NASCAR great.  

NASCAR has far too many agendas right now to be able to get them all right.  

I just hope short-track racing doesn't end up being sacrificed in favor of trying to be something that you most definitely are not.  

One last thought:  I have always said that Brian France should have duplicated Martinsville or Bristol instead of duplicating intermediate tracks because short-track racing always produced the kind of on and off-track entertainment NASCAR was built on.  

Nowadays, the best racing NASCAR Cup Series puts on is often on the intermediate tracks.

Ironic, isn't it?

What do you think?  Leave a comment and let's have some fun discussion.