NASCAR wrapped up a season that was troubling even by the standards of previous disappointing seasons, and enters a new year with the fallout of 2008 still very much a part of the sport’s fabric. TV ratings and on-site attendance that continued to deteriorate were combined with the seeming implosion of the sport’s spendaholic economic model, and suddenly even people at Hendrick Motorsports were left talking ominously about a virtually dead sponsor environment, this amid layoffs of teams’ rosters left and right.
And with all this has come the shuttering of some teams and absorption of others into established outfits that looked somewhat shaky themselves – how else to describe the merger of DEI with Ganassi/SABCO Racing, a merger that cut Dodge’s lineup even before the reluctant release of Bobby Labonte from Petty Enterprises amid its own sponsor struggles, struggles that may short-circuit the belated full-time debut of Chad McCumbee with the organization. All this combined to leave Dodge at just two teams, one of which (Gillett-Evernham Motorsports) was laying off employees as the year closed.
As a result, the Sprint Cup Series enters 2009 with the prospect of not reaching 43 entries in some of its races and with what amounts to no prospect of the sport’s now-closed competitive loop opening up again. 2008 failed to see a first-time race winning driver or team and with only six teams winning races as it was there can be no serious hope of a new winning driver or team – it is simply too much to hope to see someone other than Hendrick, Roush, Joe Gibbs, RCR, Penske, or Gillett winning races, and even RCR, Penske, and Gillett don’t look strong enough to sustain anything like they had even last year.
Talk about a fall from grace – not eight years ago the sport began to reach a zenith of competition depth it hadn’t seen in decades, as the sport saw 26 different winners among 14 different teams. New drivers like Elliott Sadler, Kevin Harvick, Kurt Busch, and Johnny Benson broke through. New teams like Andy Petree Racing and Morton-Bowers Racing broke through. Established teams kept winning. It was depth that was new for a lot of people in the sport. And within eight years it was gone.
———————-
It’s been such that in December it led to a running controversy over an article at the SLATE website critical of NASCAR, written by one Robert Weintraub, an Atlanta-based writer and producer who has called for “euthanizing” the sport. The brouhaha that has ensued has noted some of the sport’s mistakes over the last decade but curiously has ignored the big picture problems of the bottomless pit of spending that KMart’s leadership cited in 2002 as reason for discontinuing their company’s sponsorship efforts in NASCAR.
It is an issue the sanctioning body has been ignoring, despite occasional rhetoric to the contrary, for well over a decade, and is the key reason for the recent retraction of competitive teams. It remains impossible to visualize any similar level of economic struggle in a sport operating at spending levels less than half of what their level presently reaches.
It all means that the sport needs some kind of miracle to reach what it needs to now reach. It now needs an infusion of new winning drivers, of new winning teams. It needs the comeback of teams like Petty, Bill Davis, and Yates Racing. It needs racing like it sees at Talladega but at more tracks. It needs, in short, what 2009 cannot promise and what it surely won’t deliver.
So 2009 is here whether we want it or not. How the sport handles it may tell us something about whether it can reverse its competitive ennui.