NASCAR's burgeoning popularity will be fueled by new tracks and new stars in '97by Ed Hinton
For several years now, NASCAR has been headed uptown. In 1997, it will arrive.
In Los Angeles, NASCAR is ready to rival the Lakers in the number of Hollywood hangers-on it attracts, and in Dallas-Fort Worth, it's ready to take on the Cowboys as the darlings of media hype. The reason? There will be brand-new tracks and inaugural Winston Cup races in those areas. There will
also be a second stop in NASCAR-insatiable New England and a second annual exhibition on the sacred Formula One turf of Suzuka, Japan.
And the best new racing facility of all, Las Vegas Motor Speedway, isn't even on the tour yet, only because NASCAR hasn't found a way to squeeze in another race. The '97 schedule, which includes 32 Winston Cup points races and three major exhibitions (mainstays Busch Clash and Winston Select, as well as Suzuka), is the most grueling since 1971, when 48 races were run. And in those days, the teenaged stock car league was still barnstorming places like Maryville, Tenn., and South Boston, Va.
That year was the end of the beginning for NASCAR, the year it accepted Winston sponsorship and rode it to a more selective but far richer schedule. The years from '72 to the present are considered the modern era of NASCAR. But in '97 the sport seems ready to lift off toward who knows what heights. Stock car racing's following already includes so many Hollywood types that Winston Cup team owner Rick Hendrick—who introduced Tom Cruise to the sport and is friends with the likes of Paul Newman and producer Jerry Bruckheimer (the man behind the stock car epic Days of Thunder)—predicts the Southern California race in June "will be like a Lakers deal." That means fans may be able to see Jack Nicholson, trackside, wearing a Citgo hat.
Cruise is one of the many circuit celebs who now show up trackside.
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Fans in Texas may not be treated to such celebrity, but they will be able to watch the inaugural Texas 500 on April 6 at a track with twice
the capacity of Texas Stadium. Bruton Smith, the wheelingest of all NASCAR's dealers, has built his 150,000-seat shrine to racing—Texas Motor Speedway, just outside of Fort Worth. The 1.5-mile, 24-degree banked track has the largest initial seating capacity of any sports facility in the United States. (The Indianapolis Motor Speedway now seats 265,000 spectators, but most of Indy's bleachers were added to the 77-year-old track in recent years.) Smith, who also owns the tracks NASCAR runs on at Charlotte, Atlanta and Bristol, Tenn., admits that the huge number of seats at his Texas venue may be a bit of a gamble on immediate acceptance. "We're building something that this country has never seen before," he says. "We've had ticket requests from all 50 states. The forecast is that DFW airport will have the most passenger traffic of any airport in the United States by 2000. The interstate that runs right past our door [I-35] probably will be named the NAFTA Highway. You can leave Mexico City and drive right to the speedway. Then you can go straight on to Canada. I think the world will be able to find us."
NASCAR has been in both Texas and Southern California markets before. But that was years before the sport and the markets were ready for each other. Texas World Speedway, unkempt when NASCAR raced there in the '70s, didn't draw crowds because of its location. "Texans have never had a speedway even close to what we're completing down there," says Smith.
The same can be said of Southern Californians. Roger Penske's new track, California Speedway, is a two-mile, 14-degree banked oval that's a 40-mile freeway ride east of Los Angeles; it is light-years ahead of NASCAR's former West Coast stops—the road course at Riverside and the ill-conceived Ontario Motor Speedway—both of which were plowed under in the early '80s.
Smith announced recently that he will help design and build a track in the Quad Cities area of Illinois, which would bring Chicago into the Winston Cup market.
And he has an eye on some Long Island real estate. Oh, dear. Is the doorstep of
New York City itself becoming NASCAR territory? "If they built a track on Long Island and got a Winston Cup race, they couldn't build enough seats to meet the demand," says New Jersey native Ray Evernham, Jeff Gordon's crew chief.
The brand new Texas Motor Speedway, just outside Fort Worth, Texas.
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To the new venues, certain and potential, comes a growing sophistication that will fit in uptown. Gone are the grammar-fracturing drivers who used to tell how they "knowed" when their engines "blowed." Gordon, the sport's poster boy, still speaks with the non-accent of his Bay Area upbringing. And among the fresh candidates for Victory Lane in '97, virtually all could anchor a six o'clock newscast. Robby Gordon (no relation to Jeff), who left a promising CART career for the hotter action of NASCAR, is from Southern California. Prodigy Tony Stewart, a refugee from the Indy Racing League, is from Rushville, Ind., and looks and sounds like a movie star. Ricky Craven, who is moving up to a Hendrick Motorsports ride and is therefore a threat to win in his third year, is from Bangor, Maine.
Craven doesn't see any residual redneck image in stock car racing. In fact, he says, "I'm not sure there was any when I got here. This thing has evolved into big business. It's kind of like Wall Street now. If you don't meet expectations and criteria, there is some pressure applied. This isn't just about how well you drive or how well you speak or how much product you can sell. It's about all of the above."
Sponsors must be getting their money's worth, because corporations are waiting in line to get involved. "Every week, we get calls from companies that have never been in the sport before," says Hendrick, who is loaded with sponsors for his three drivers. "They want to know if we've got anything available, any opening. They call wanting to give us money. In a couple of cases I've said, 'No, we don't have a primary sponsorship open [those go for $4 million to $6 million per season, per driver], but we might have a small associate sponsorship [$400,000 to $1 million].' Both times they said, 'No, I want the whole car [$6 million and more], and I'm willing to pay.'
"I had a call from the president of a Fortune 500 company who wanted me to start another Winston Cup team with a guy out of CART," says Hendrick. "That executive was willing to pay the bucks it took to get the driver."
Says Richard Childress, Dale Earnhardt's car owner, "When word got out that we were going to run a second team in '97 [with Californian Mike Skinner as driver], I had four or five major corporations call me, wanting to get involved." Childress could pick his benefactor. He chose the budding Lowe's hardware and home-improvement empire, headquartered in his hometown of Winston-Salem, N.C.
With new tracks in Texas and California (left), the Winston Cup schedule will swell to 32 races in '97.
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NASCAR's current labor situation is a perfect example of the law of supply and demand. "There are now more sponsors than car owners," says Steve Hmiel, crew chief for driver Mark Martin's branch of the Roush Racing operation. "There are more owners than drivers. There are more drivers than crew chiefs." The result: Crew chiefs now routinely command six-figure salaries and company stock.
Soon, says Hmiel, "there'll be more teams than there are mechanics to support them." As a result, the price of labor is soaring. Not many years ago, the typical NASCAR mechanic got a handwritten check for a couple hundred dollars after the race—and there were no benefits. He was expected to do everything: prepare the car during the week and be part of the pit crew during the races. In '97 the typical entry-level NASCAR mechanic will start at $40,000 a year with full health, life and retirement benefits, and free fitness-club membership (team conditioning, from the owner to the driver to the gofers, is becoming a NASCAR-wide obsession). And chances are good that he will be a specialist. Some teams are now recruiting pit crewmen for their strength and speed rather than for their mechanical knowledge.
ESPN-addled couch potatoes dreaming of NASCAR careers need not apply, however. "Television has made it look cool to be a NASCAR mechanic," says Hmiel, who, like other team managers and crew chiefs, tosses out hundreds of résumés a week sent in by fans who think they can learn as they go. They can't; either formal education or significant racing experience is mandatory. Most teams employ at least one staff engineer; Hendrick Motorsports has six. One of Earnhardt's co-crew chiefs, Bobby Hutchins, is more computer whiz than mechanic. And Clemson University now offers graduate-level training in the highly specialized field of motor-sports engineering.
To make the most of precious expertise, and to accommodate as many sponsors as possible, the top NASCAR teams have become multicar, multidriver operations, like their cousins in Formula One and CART. That contradicts stock car racing's longstanding tradition of one driver, one team, one solid effort to win. Childress, the last holdout among the Winston Cup's major players, will yield in '97 as he fields cars not only for Earnhardt but also for Skinner, who was brought up from Childress's truck team.
Childress simply grew tired of being outdone by the squadrons from Hendrick Motorsports (Jeff Gordon, Terry Labonte and, in '97, Craven), Roush Racing (Mark Martin, Ted Musgrave and Jeff Burton) and Robert Yates Racing (Dale Jarrett and Ernie Irvan). It wasn't so much that these teams of drivers were ganging up on Earnhardt on the track as it was that their technology-sharing sent them into races better prepared.
"The biggest reason for a two-car team is that it gives you more resources and more testing time," says Childress. "If you have two teams at a track, you get four hours of practice instead of two. If your teams work together and share information, it works really well."
Young drivers like Indy Car defector Robby Gordon (left) will vie with vets like Earnhardt (right) for wins and fans.
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Even Earnhardt—long opposed to the notion that he should have a teammate—has come around. "He sees that even with all the resources we've got, we just can't do it with one car anymore," says Childress. "The situation is that if you're going to win races in Winston Cup, it's going to be with a multicar team. That's just the way it's gonna be. The way it's gotta be."
Combine the average sponsorship packages of about $7 million per driver per season and teams are hurtling along, packing $14 million to $21 million per organizational wallet, with nothing but bigger cash flow in sight.
"This thing is a marketing tool, this thing is entertaining, this thing is national, and this thing is going international," says Hendrick. "Look at the most popular movies out there today—action, explosions, wild scenes. NASCAR is the closest sport to these action-adventure films. It's fast, it's dangerous, it's competitive—and it's real."
Such is the gold rush that Hendrick says he's had "at least 10 calls from people all over—Midwest, Northeast, Northwest—saying, 'We've got a group of investors together and we want to build a track. Can you help us go to NASCAR and get a race date?'" says Hendrick. "I say, 'There's nothing I can do. The only thing you can do is buy a race date from somebody and move the race.'"
Which brings us to the sad side of NASCAR's upward mobility: the desertions down home—in particular, NASCAR's abandonment of its small tracks. In '97, for the first time in NASCAR history, little North Wilkesboro (N.C.) Speedway, in the heart of the Appalachian moonshine country from which NASCAR's original stars came, will not host a Winston Cup-level race. Smith and New Hampshire International Speedway owner Bob Bahre each bought a half-interest in Wilkesboro, only to cannibalize it for its Winston Cup dates. Smith took the April date to Texas, while Bahre moved the September date to New Hampshire.
Yet even after stripping Wilkesboro, NASCAR came up with the most crowded schedule since its barnstorming days. So where will this schedule expansion end? After all, the Winston Cup season already runs longer—mid-February through mid-November—than either the NBA or NHL slates, playoffs included.
"We've got too many races right now, in my opinion," says Childress. "I think a 30-race schedule is plenty." Hendrick believes that "we can probably run 34 if we can get the rules stabilized." Midseason rule changes in recent years have kept teams frantically rebuilding cars to meet new mechanical and aerodynamic specifications designed to maintain parity between Ford Thunderbirds and Chevrolet Monte Carlos. "We can run two or three more races easier than we can keep cutting these cars up to meet new specs," says Hendrick.
Thanks to TV exposure, working on a pit crew has become a glamorous gig—but only the experienced need apply
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Other big-market tracks are waiting along with Las Vegas for a date. An oval is being completed near St. Louis, and the new Homestead, Fla., oval, just south of Miami, is already hosting Indy Car and Busch Grand National races. This presages a squeeze on the Winston Cup's cradle, the down-home tracks that NASCAR calls "small-market facilities." Among the tracks likely to lose at least one of the two races now run there are Martinsville, Va., Rockingham, N.C., and Darlington, S.C.
Bristol, although a short track in a small market, will probably be an exception to the move away from the grass roots. First, the night racing there has become such a wild and enormously popular event that tickets are hot items. Second, it is owned by—you guessed it—Bruton Smith, who is entertaining notions of doming the track and increasing seating capacity to 130,000. Putting that many people under the same roof with massive doses of carbon monoxide threatens to make watching a race more dangerous than driving one. But Smith claims his consulting engineers have all the ventilation problems worked out. They'd better.
Beginning with the upcoming season, Smith will control as many tracks on the Winston Cup tour—four—as NASCAR's ruling France family (which controls Daytona, Talladega and Darlington outright, and part of Watkins Glen). Smith concedes that he is in a position to start a rival league. "But I'm more interested in building NASCAR, because the bigger it is, the better it is for me," says Smith. "I don't want to damage what we have. I think the France family has run a damn good ship."
So how does NASCAR president Bill France Jr. assess Smith's positioning? "The only thing I can tell you," says France, "is what Bruton said at Daytona last February—how much he loves us and that he's with us forever. Bruton's all right. Everything'll be all right."
Some team owners are in a position to form a CART-type organization and make demands on NASCAR. (Penske, one of CART's founders and the majority owner of NASCAR's Penske South operation, which fields Rusty Wallace's car, doesn't even make the "big four" list of the most powerful team owners in Winston Cup. That club is composed of Childress, Hendrick, Roush and Yates.) But such a confrontational move by owners seems unlikely. "I am not in favor of multicar teams, even though I'm sitting here taking advantage of it," says Yates. "I think that trying to monopolize this sport is wrong. Even if Rick Hendrick has enough teams to field his own race, I don't think he's the kind of guy who'd want to gang up and destroy this sport."
"We'd be stupid to put ourselves into a situation like CART is in right now," says Hendrick. "We ought to avoid that at all cost. When you let egos and pride get in the way of good business, you make a big mistake."
So that's about the size of it. Business is booming. The racing is great. Everybody is too rich and happy to fight. And the sport streaks toward its shiny new era.
"We don't need to kill the golden goose," says Hendrick. "NASCAR has changed with the times."
Has it ever.
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