News, notes and numbers from the world of NASCAR
|
|
At season's end, it's easy to wonder how a driver like Jeff Gordon, who won 10 races in 1996, lost the Winston Cup championship to a two-race winner like Terry Labonte. The answer lies, of course, in the intricacies of the Winston Cup point system, which rewards steady runners rather than win-big-or-bust types of drivers. The system is so stacked in favor of consistent performance over winning that some observers have argued that it's time for a change. The driver who wins a race scores 175 points, the runner-up gets 170, third place gets 165 and so on in five-point increments through sixth place. Finishers six (150 points) through 11 (130 points) are separated by four-point increments; the awards for 11th through last place decrease in three-point increments. Every driver who leads a race earns five points; the one who leads the most laps gets five additional points. So over the course of a 31-race season, the rewards of winning races, as opposed to those of merely doing consistently well, are negligible.
By contrast, Formula One awards 10 points for winning, then drops off to six points for second. After the top six finishers, no points are given. Indy Car strikes a middle ground, awarding 20 points for first and 16 for second, then 14, 12 and so on to seventh place, after which the finishers are separated by one point. Both tours reward winning more than NASCAR does. The circumstances of Labonte's '96 championship are not unprecedented in the Winston Cup. In 1973 Benny Parsons won the championship with only one victory. In 1985 Bill Elliott had 11 wins yet finished second overall to Darrell Waltrip, who had only three wins. Waltrip spoke out nobly, saying it wasn't right that Elliott could have such a spectacular season and fail to win the title.
|
|
We may have caught a glimpse of NASCAR's prime growth area recently. Trev Alberts, a linebacker for the Indianapolis Colts and a 1993 alumnus of the University of Nebraska, this past summer announced the formation of a Winston Cup team that will carry the school's colors in 1997. The University of Nebraska Ford Thunderbird, to be driven by Lake Speed, sports a scarlet N on the hood (and will be powered, no doubt, by corn-based gasohol).
The university is not the car's sponsor—the deep-pocketed Alberts and several corporations will take care of funding for the operation—nor is the school saddled with any financial obligations. But for allowing its logo to be displayed on the hood, the university will receive 96% of the profits generated from the sale of licensed paraphernalia associated with the car, a windfall that could be worth as much as $1 million next year—and much more down the road. "Once people get a glimpse of the car and hear about the idea, it will be huge," Alberts said when the arrangement was announced. The union of Nebraska and NASCAR is the first of its kind, but it could mark the beginning of an all-out collegiate gold rush. Look for schools across the country to follow Nebraska's lead in trying to tap into one of the nation's most lucrative sports-licensing markets: Sales of NASCAR-licensed products such as T-shirts and caps reached $500 million in 1995. By comparison, the University of Nebraska's licensed products brought in $3.5 million last year, second among universities only to Michigan's $6 million. "Hopefully we'll be able to bring three or four new college sponsors to NASCAR in 1997," says Gordon Grigg, president of the Empire Management Group in Charlotte, which is soliciting sponsors for the Nebraska car. "Clemson, Michigan, Colorado, Penn State, Tennessee and Florida State have all expressed an interest." So imagine the sports report of the future: "... And in auto racing this afternoon, Penn State upset favored Michigan by three tenths of a second in a thriller at Talladega...."
|
|
One of the surest indications that Terry Labonte would depose Jeff Gordon as Winston Cup champion came when Labonte and Gordon weren't even strapped in their Chevys. It occurred at the 30th annual Unocal Pit Crew Championships, at North Carolina Motor Speedway on Oct. 18. Labonte's seven-man crew changed four tires on his Chevy Monte Carlo and poured in two cans of gasoline (14 gallons, enough to take a Winston Cup car 70 miles) in 22.056 seconds to win the competition, finishing 1.446 seconds quicker than Gordon's second-place crew, which had won in 1994.
Pit crewmen are the offensive linemen of racing: The spotlight rarely shines on them until they make a mistake. And it's a tough job. The nearly 300 pit crewmen in the Winston Cup Series have to perform their duties with 3,500-pound stock cars thundering down pit row just a few feet away; and because every second is invaluable, there is no margin for error. That's why winning the crew competition means so much to those who participate in it.
"The Winston Cup championship can be won or lost in the pits as much as it can be won or lost on the track," says Labonte's crew chief, Gary DeHart. "Winning the crew competition was important because it's something the guys did. Not the motor, not the driver, not the car." It was also important because it proved that behind this season's best driver stood this season's best pit crew.
|
|
Ask a handful of Wall Street brokers to name their favorite sport and you'll probably hear golf before you hear auto racing. But ask them to name a hot investment in the sporting world and you'll most likely get an earful about companies that are putting the stock back in stock car racing.
A week before the end of the '96 season, International Speedway—a corporation run by the France family, which owns the tracks at Daytona, Talladega and Darlington—had a public offering of four million shares priced at $20 each on the NASDAQ exchange. Within days the stock (symbol: ISCA) had posted a 10% gain. That performance was no surprise; between January 1995 and the public offering, another class of International Speedway stock, which was so rare and was traded so infrequently that it was not listed on any major exchange, had nearly tripled in value.
Earlier in the year, two other track-owning corporations—each headed by a very visible racing figure—had made public offerings. In March, Roger Penske's Penske Motorsports Inc. (NYSE symbol: SPWY), which owns Michigan International Speedway, had 3.25 million shares snapped up in an initial offering even though the share price of $24 was $7 higher than Penske had said it would be when he filed with federal regulators two months before. So great was demand that by the end of the first day's trading the stock had soared to $31 3/4. (In early November it was trading at around $34.) Penske retained about 60% of the stock and used the cash from the public offering to finance the construction of California Speedway, his $80 million track outside Los Angeles. Also in March, Speedway Motorsports Inc.—owner and operator of tracks in Atlanta, Bristol and Charlotte—offered 3.1 million shares at $27 5/8 apiece. A portion of the money raised in this offering went toward construction of the Texas International Raceway, SMI chairman Bruton Smith's 1.5-mile, 24-degree banked Shangri-la on the outskirts of Dallas. The offering leaves Smith's stake in Speedway Motorsports (NASDAQ symbol: TRK) at some 70%, or about 28.6 million shares, worth about $700 million. As long as the sport's popularity continues to rise, NASCAR-related stocks should perform well. "The investment community definitely sees potential for earnings to increase," says Sam Nelson, a trader at Morgan Keegan in Birmingham who has followed the growth of International Speedway for 30 years. All of which means that in another few years, the S&P 500 could be a race, not just a financial index.
|
|
"If I had known I was going to lose, I wouldn't have run." -Seven-time Winston Cup champion Richard Petty, after conceding defeat in his campaign for North Carolina secretary of state |
|
|
