Catchfence

With the inevitable reduction in race purses at the Winston Cup level, it was also inevitable that someone would cry that track promoters were somehow using the sport’s recent economic struggles to line their own pockets. It’s a hoary perennial in pro sports, the accusation that competitors somehow get shafted of their rightful earnings while owners line their pockets at the expense of their team. It’s a charge being made by Jonathan Ingram now.

In so many words Ingram accuses track promoters – primarily ISC and SMI being the largest two track promoters in the sport – of soaking race teams and lining their own pockets. To buttress his case, Ingram claims that at least one team “managed to be competitive all season long and hover around the Top 35 with only ten full-time crew members and a crew chief.”

Right away he loses me, because the notion that a team could cut to that bare a set of bones and “manage to be competitive all season long….with ten full-time crew members and a crew chief” is nowhere close to plausible; this is start-and-park territory.

Ingram further suffers when he cites financial statements for Charlotte Motor Speedway from the latter 1980s – when the sport’s economics were far more restrained than today – showing hefty profits for the track. His point is that the TV deal from 2001 onward so infused the sport with money that it basically has allowed tracks to print money.

I’ve heard this argument with regard to team owners such as the Red Sox ownership – that they print money. The problem is there’s no such thing as printing money for team owners, and the amounts that must be spent to maintain speedways and other large sporting venues – a key factor in the coming meltdown between the NFL and its players because teams are building bigger stadiums that allow greater revenue streaming and the costs involved have eaten into team owners’ budgets – is enormous. And one must factor in what tracks pay for insurance, for taxes, etc. and the end result is exhorbitant.

The reality is tracks spend a great deal of money just to be able to make money and put on races, and the reality of the need for additional sources of revenue is out in force with Kansas Speedway’s casino project. The notion that tracks deliberately skimp on purses in order to pocket what they can makes zero economic sense, as the reality of the competitive market dictates exactly the opposite – if they don’t pay competitive purses they’re cutting their own throat.

What Ingram is doing is letting race teams off the hook, and he’s wrong. He notes how some teams made do with less, yet it doesn’t seem to occur to him that perhaps team spending is a major factor in the sport’s recent economic troubles. It comes down to a simple – perhaps simplistic – question; would the sport’s present money troubles be as egregious if the most a team like Hendrick was spending was less than $30 million per year?

What the recent reduction in purses says loudest is the need for a spending cap on raceteams. Team spending across the sport has to come down and be kept down. There’s no other way around this. The sport’s salient failing is that it has spent decades dancing around the reality of rising team spending and recent efforts at cutting costs do nothing remotely serious about this goal. Limiting the number of crewmen who can be brought to a racetrack is a minor step; directly limiting how much money a team spends per season is something long overdue for the sport’s long-term well-being.

Perhaps Jonathan Ingram would do better to start questioning why the sanctioning body doesn’t have a spending cap on raceteams rather than question how much money promoters make.