It’s hardly a secret that these are trying times for NASCAR.
Teams are clamoring for sponsorship dollars for the 2018 season – not even Danica Patrick, historically one of the most marketable drivers in racing, has a ride lined up. Richard Petty is still looking for a sponsor to spread its name across his iconic 43 for Darrell Wallace Jr. and spread more money around the RPM shop.
TV ratings continue to slide and live attendance hasn’t been encouraging, even through the first three races of the Cup playoffs. Monster Energy, the series sponsor, has asked NASCAR for more time as it mulls over a renewal decision. NASCAR was scrambling for an entitlement sponsorship deal in 2016 and missed several deadlines before reaching terms with Monster.
All of this makes it feel like an odd time for Denny Hamlin to raise his voice and announce that drivers across the Cup grid need should incur higher salaries.
The question that prompted Hamlin’s statement was coming from another direction: Should drivers be willing take a pay cut as teams grasp for dollars?
Hamlin, who recently built a 31,000-square-foot house with a full basketball court inside, wasn’t speaking for himself. He was trying to back up his race car driving colleagues, especially those who spend most of their time in the middle or back of the pack.
“We’re way underpaid as race car drivers,” said Hamlin, the pole winner at Charlotte on Friday and the winner of Loudon’s July race. “There’s no doubt, doing what we do, the schedule that we have and the danger that we incur every single week, NASCAR drivers should be making NBA, NFL money.”
The sport absolutely is dangerous, but there are a lot of occupations with massive risk that is hardly reciprocated in dollars. The military, police and fire rescue might seem like low-hanging fruit for this argument, but those lives are put on the line every day.
This isn’t about breaking down Hamlin’s statement or shaking a fist at yet another professional athlete with a standard of living that towers over most. It’s about recognizing how deeply dependent this sport is on those dollars, and the vicious cycle that is beginning to turn as less revenue comes and therefore less can go into the operation of running a team.
Paying the professional staff – you know, the men and women back at HQ who actually make the cars go fast – takes a big chunk out of the payroll. The crew in the shop, the garage, on pit road, and of course the drivers also need their checks.
And don’t forget the most important piece of all: the race car. Those sure aren’t cheap to build. A 2014 report following the finances of the Stewart-Haas racing team found that it spends more than $1.4 million in competition costs. The cars cost about $200,000, the engine about $100,000 and the chassis is around $25,000.
While fans jump at the site of a wreck – and NASCAR never shies away from promoting that aspect of the sport – teams cringe as their work and money rolls down the backstretch in a ball of torn up sheet metal.
It doesn’t matter how exciting the racing gets. There have been some duds this year but also a lot of entertaining races, and the playoff format can prompt some interesting confrontations (see Jeff Gordon and Ryan Newman after the Dover race last week).
In the end, race cars just aren’t pulling in the general interest they did even 10 years ago. Hopefully that can shift if NASCAR and the manufacturers work together to field cars with more distinguishable features. If you haven’t seen it yet, next year’s Camero is pretty awesome. A real bonus would be if NASCAR could attract a fourth manufacturer to join Ford, Chevy and Toyota. It would diversify the field and give fans another reason to pick a favorite team or driver.
Give Hamlin some credit for being outspoken. As NASCAR bids farewell to another star with Dale Earnhardt Jr. leaving the track for the broadcast booth, the sport needs new leaders to step up. Hamlin is hardly new but he and Brad Keselowski are perhaps the most outspoken drivers to the press corps and on social media. Don’t forget Hamlin played an integral role in helping set up the Drivers Counsel, the closest thing the sport has to an organized group but without nearly as much muscle as the unions we see in the NBA, NFL, MLB and NHL.
It probably is time for NASCAR to rethink how it’s slicing up the pie, but nobody should expect to get a bigger piece in the current climate.
Can someone please remind Chase Elliott that he is a good driver?
The 21-year-old was understandably hard on himself after coughing up what could have been his first Cup win at Dover last weekend only to watch Kyle Busch cruise to Victory Lane for a second straight week.
Some will say it was Newman’s fault. Elliott ran into lapped traffic when he caught the tail of Newman’s 31 and Busch blitzed by them both low on the race track. But some blame belongs to Elliott and the 24 team. Elliott led a race-high 138 laps but somehow Busch, the 2015 series champion, closed a four-second gap in the final segment.
“That’s as close as I’ve been to finishing one off, and when you go through defeats like that, I don’t think you’ll ever forget it,” Elliott told the Associated Press this week. “There is no silver lining. It was nobody’s fault but my own, and I take full responsibility for it.”
Elliott will lead his Hendrick teammates to the green flag on Sunday. He qualified third.
The most important thing for Elliott is to put the loss behind him and move on. He’s still chasing that elusive Cup victory, but that doesn’t take away from the strong season he has had. Elliott has clearly improved from 2016 (average finish 14.6) to this year (average finish 12.7). He made 10 top-five finishes last year. This year he has eight with seven races left. He’s positioned well to make a run at the championship, which in theory could happen without winning a race.
But drivers race to finish first. The checkered flag is everything. Elliott has come close so many times that it’s hard to not root for him to get over that hump.
It will come eventually. You hear across the world of competitive sports and it certainly applies here: Race car drivers need a short memory. It is just the second season of full-time Cup driving for Elliott, so the weight of every race feels like a lot more than for a veteran driver.
He’ll get that win, and when he does, it will lift a huge weight off of his shoulders.
Ricky Stenhouse Jr. is just happy to be here.
The Roush-Fenway driver snuck into the Round of 12 by the skin of his teeth. He placed 25th at Chicago, bumped the wall and finished 15th at Loudon and turned in a 19th-place finish at Dover last weekend. That’s an average finish of 19.7 through the first round of the playoffs, hardly remarkable for most drivers competing for a championship.
But Stenhouse is focused on the positives, and the most positive thing is that he survived and made the second round where he’ll get to race at the track that gave him his first Cup victory earlier this year: Talladega.
It has been a remarkable season for Stenhouse in his fifth year driving a Cup car for a full schedule. His first two wins ever have come at two of NASCAR’s premier tracks in Talladega and Daytona. A good finish at Charlotte would obviously bolster his chances of surviving this round, but the real pressure will set in at Talladega next weekend. A win will automatically send him to the Round of 8.
Clearly the crew at Roush-Fenway has built a good car for restrictor-plate racing. Stenhouse won from the pole at Talladega and qualified sixth at Daytona. He crashed in the Daytona 500.
Stenhouse is enjoying the success, but what he enjoys more is coming to the track every weekend with playoff hopes on the line.
“I love proving people wrong,” Stenhouse said Friday at Charlotte. “I feel like going back to our 2011 championship in the Xfinity Series that nobody thought we’d win. We had some new drivers come in, in 2012, and they didn’t think we’d win that one, either. It’s always nice to prove them wrong. I enjoy doing that.”
This isn’t an encouraging number. Loudon’s last fall race returned the second-lowest rating of any Cup series race since 2000, excluding rainouts. New Hampshire is not alone. Last weekend, Dover’s race tied as the lowest rated NASCAR playoff race ever (since 2004) and tied New Hampshire as the second-lowest rated ever.
The ISM Connect 300 wasn’t great for TV audiences. Busch and Martin Truex Jr. led every lap except for one. That one was led by Kyle Larson … on pit road.
NASCAR fans and media have come into the habit of rating each race individually at its conclusion (we can thank Twitter for that). New Hampshire doesn’t usually rank very well.
Busch, who won his third race at Loudon in September, gave an insightful explanation as to what makes the Cup racing “frustrating” at New Hampshire.
“Sometimes the racing is a little strung out with this place being so hard to pass,” Busch said in the media center after his win at New Hampshire Motor Speedway.
He continued: “It’s just not lending itself to being able to be right on top of or right close to the guy in front of you, because you just get so tight when you’re behind that guy. And you build air pressure in the front tires and you slow down and that guy drives away from you and then you kind of accordion back to the next guy. He’s catching you thinking he’s going to pass you and then he gets tight, and it kind of goes back to the next guy.”
The Magic Mile is perfect for the Modifieds and ACT cars. We’ll see what size of crowd is drawn to the 250-lap Modified showcase scheduled for next September. The race should be exciting but it won’t have the flair of a Cup event.
Oh, about Newman and Gordon: They’re cool now. Gordon was on Elliott’s pit box at Dover and was a bit sarcastic in telling Newman “Thanks for the help” in slowing up the 24 as the race approached the white flag. The two shared some sharp words, but they’re over it. “We laughed about it, it’s all good,” Gordon said.
This is the last time Charlotte will run its fall playoff race on the oval. It unveiled its revolutionary “roval” earlier this week. The track incorporates part of the oval and a road course, adding up to an 18-turn, 2.4-mile track. Reviews from drivers were mixed. The track will make its debut next October.
Sunday pick: Jimmie Johnson is heating up coming off his third-place finish at Dover. He’s chasing a record eighth win at Charlotte today. It will take some work coming from the seventh row, but I think Johnson punches his ticket to the Round of 8 with a win on Sunday.
A little bit of irony to close this out. NASCAR announced its partnership with the Weather Company this week. The multi-year deal will “optimize the weather-related decision process for NASCAR as it incorporates hyper-local weather data and forecasts into their races to improve race-day operations and fan engagement,” NASCAR wrote in a statement. Sunday’s race was moved up an hour from 2 to 1 p.m., and Saturday’s practice was postponed because of rain. Sunday’s forecast isn’t promising but should be clear around noon. Thunderstorms are expected about 2 p.m.
(Nick Stoico can be reached at 369-3339, nstoico@cmonitor.com or on Twitter @NickStoico.)