NASCAR chairman and CEO, Brian France addresses the media during the NASCAR Sprint Media Tour hosted by Charlotte Motor Speedway (Photo: Harold Hinson)

RCR Announces Fourth Car Driven by Sadler, Gaughan; Harvicks Expecting First Child

Chief Operating Officer Torrey Galida announced that RCR will run its No. 33 NASCAR Sprint Cup Series car in the first five races of the 2012 season, including the Daytona 500 with Elliott Sadler behind the wheel with General Mills sponsoring the car. The remaining four races will be run by Brendan Gaughan with South Point Casino as primary sponsor. Both Sadler and Gaughan were excited and honored about their opportunity to race for RCR.

“There are not many second chances in this sport given out,” said Gaughan. “This is going to be my second chance and what I am considering the last chance and a place to stay for a while.”

RCR plans to run three full-time Sprint Cup teams, three full-time NASCAR Nationwide Series teams and three NASCAR Camping World Truck Series teams. RCR will run more races in NASCAR’s top-three series in 2012 than ever in the team’s history.

“We are all in for 2012,” said Galida. “We are here to win a championship in all three series.”

Galida introduced RCR’s Sprint Cup Series driver lineup for the 2012 season. Paul Menard will drive the No. 27 Chevrolet with crew chief Slugger Labbe. In his second year with the team, Menard says RCR “feels like home.”

Jeff Burton will drive the No. 31 Chevrolet with new crew chief Drew Blickensderfer.

“I’m not here to extend my career,” said Burton. “I’m here to win a championship.”

Kevin Harvick will pilot the No. 29 Chevrolet with new crew chief Shane Wilson. During the Media Tour stop, Harvick announced that wife DeLana was 14 weeks pregnant with their first child. Kevin Harvick attributed the end-of-season closing of his and DeLana’s race team, Kevin Harvick Inc., to their desire to start a family.

“The plan to close KHI makes a lot more sense now, doesn’t it,” said Kevin Harvick.

Walmart Expands Partnership With NASCAR
A year after diving head first into NASCAR, retail giant Walmart announced Thursday on the final day of the NASCAR Sprint Media Tour hosted by Charlotte Motor Speedway that it would expand its partnership with NASCAR.

Included in that partnership will be more Race Time events – NASCAR themed events featuring show cars, driver appearances and racing simulators – at Walmart stores around the country.

Walmart will also increase the amount of NASCAR products carried in its stores and online atwalmart.com, bringing the total number of products up to approximately 600. Walmart will also increase the number of stores that carry NASCAR products.

Lastly, Walmart will continue to offer the Walmart Family Track Pack to fans at 17 NASCAR events. The Walmart Family Track Pack includes four event tickets, four hotdogs, four drinks and a souvenir program for just $99.

“What we learned is that if we take care of customers as we bring them very good values that are made possible through the relationship with NASCAR, as we work to lower the prices of NASCAR products, as we work to take care of fans who want to have parties in their houses and watch the race together with family or friends, our customers respond very positively. That is a very good thing for us,” said Rand Waddoups, senior director, entertainment properties and brands for Walmart.

Bill Elliott To Drive Walmart Chevrolet In Coke Zero 400 At Daytona
Walmart will celebrate its 50th anniversary in 2012 and as part of its golden anniversary celebration the multinational retailer will field the No. 50 Walmart Chevrolet Impala during the Coke Zero 400 at Daytona International Speedway on July 7.

Bill Elliott, the 1988 NASCAR Sprint Cup Series champion and two-time Daytona 500 winner, will drive the car. Turner Motorsports will oversee the operation, which will be powered by a Hendrick Motorsports engine.

“You just don’t know how excited I am to be a part of this,” said Elliott, a winner of 44 NASCAR Sprint Cup events during his long career. “This deal started coming together in the last couple days. It is just incredible to be part of Walmart coming into this sport.”

For years, there has been talk of Walmart entering the sport as a sponsor, so this announcement finally opens a door that many expected to be kicked open for some time.

“I’m at a loss for words, and that’s normally not like me,” Elliott admitted after being introduced as the driver of the No. 50 Chevrolet.

MillerCoors, NASCAR and Penske Agree To Partnership Extensions
Penske Racing was joined by MillerCoors and NASCAR Thursday to announce a multi-year partnership extension. MillerCoors will continue to serve as primary sponsor of the No. 2 Dodge driven by Brad Keselowski in the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series for many years to come.

The brewing company also announced that it has extended its partnership with NASCAR. Coors Light, a MillerCoors brand, will continue to serve as the Official Beer of NASCAR. That partnership began in 2008 after Coors Light ended a 14-year run as sponsor of the No. 40 car in the Sprint Cup Series. Coors Light will also continue to sponsor the Coors Light Pole Award.

Allmendinger Happy To Join Penske Racing Organization
A.J. Allmendinger was hired to drive the No. 22 Shell-Pennozil Dodge more than a month ago. Yet it wasn’t until today that he really realized that he was actually going to be driving for none other than Roger Penske himself.

“I finally realized I was a Penske driver this morning when I put on my white Hugo Boss shirt,” Allmendinger joked Thursday.

The 30-year-old native of California moved from Richard Petty Motorsports to Penske Racing this season, replacing Kurt Busch as the driver of the No. 22 Dodge. The opportunity to drive for such a major player in NASCAR doesn’t come often, and Allmendinger doesn’t plan to waste it.

“It has been an amazing ride to get to this point. I’ve worked hard for five years and went through a lot of ups and downs to get to this point,” Allmendinger said. “Right now, this is my time to have a chance at it.

“My goal is to go out there and try to win races, make the Chase and contend for the championship. Anything less than that would be really disappointing,” Allmendinger added.

Allmendinger will make his debut as the driver of the No. 22 Shell-Pennzoil Dodge during the Budweiser Shootout at Daytona International Speedway on Feb. 18.

Hornish Will Race Full Nationwide Series Schedule
After only running a handful of events in the NASCAR Nationwide Series in 2011, Sam Hornish, Jr. will run the entire schedule in 2012 thanks to increased support from Alliance Truck Parts and a new partnership with Wurth Group.

Alliance Truck Parts will increase its primary sponsorship role on the No. 12 Penske Racing Dodge Challenger from six to 26 events in 2012. Wurth Group, a German-based automotive and industrial supply company, will be the primary sponsor of the car in seven events and an associate sponsor in the other 26.

“I’m really excited about this season. Last year was a little difficult to say the least,” Hornish said Thursday. “I was able to learn a lot last year. I just feel like we’ve got a lot of things going for us (in 2012).”

Hornish showed he has the skills to succeed late last season at Phoenix International Raceway when be topped teammate Brad Keselowski and a field full of Sprint Cup regulars to win his first Nationwide Series race. He is hoping the momentum from that victory carries over to 2012.

“Phoenix has always been good to me,” said Hornish, who earned his first IZOD IndyCar Series triumph at the track in 2001. “We’ve definitely got a lot of things headed in the right direction.”

Snap-on Backs Keselowski, Kligerman in Nationwide Series
In celebration of its 30th year partnering with Penske Racing, Snap-on will ramp up its support of the team in 2012 by serving as the primary sponsor of the No. 22 Dodge Challenger in four NASCAR Nationwide Series events this year.

The car, which will be shared by Brad Keselowski and rookie Parker Kligerman, will carry the Snap-on colors during events at Darlington Raceway on May 11, Dover International Speedway on June 2, New Hampshire Motor Speedway on July 14 and Richmond International Raceway on Sept. 7.

Snap-on will continue to serve as an associate sponsor on all Penske Racing cars in the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series, NASCAR Nationwide Series and the IZOD IndyCar Series.

SKF also announced that it has continued its partnership with Penske Racing in 2012. The SKF brand will be a major associate sponsor on the Nos. 2 and 22 cars in the Sprint Cup Series, the No. 12 car in the Nationwide Series and the No. 3 IZOD IndyCar Series entry driven by Helio Castroneves.

NASCAR Officials Give State of the Sport Address to Close Media Tour
The final stop of the NASCAR Sprint Media Tour was hosted Thursday afternoon at the NASCAR Hall of Fame in Charlotte where media members received a 2012 season preview from NASCAR officials. 2012 will be NASCAR’s 65th season overall and will begin in 31 days with the 54th running of the Daytona 500.

NASCAR’s Vice President of Competition Robin Pemberton looked back at the 2011 season and addressed changes moving forward into the 2012 season. Pemberton first touched on NASCAR’s biggest initiative going into 2012: the implementation of electronic fuel injection into the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series.

“That project is several years in the making,” said Pemberton. “We worked with engine builders and manufacturers to be able to associate ourselves with world class technology, partners like Freescale and McLaren for our fuel injection system.  This is a major initiative to us in our sport and helps make our cars more relevant and our engines more efficient.”

Pemberton indicated that NASCAR will eliminate driver-to-driver radio communication in 2012, based on team feedback; however, team-to-team communication will still continue as in the past.

Pemberton also announced that NASCAR has made a “sizable effort to scale back on the amount of tandem style drafting at the superspeedways” including changes to their Daytona rules package. Their new rules package calls for several changes, including a larger restrictor plate at 29/32, a smaller spoiler and softer springs.

“We do believe that we’ve come up with a rules package that will help tandem-style drafting be the exception rather than the norm,” said Pemberton.

Finally, Pemberton spoke briefly about NASCAR’s excitement for the unveiling of all new models of the 2013 cars. In mid-to-late summer, NASCAR expects to release its new rules package for these cars.

“I think the fans are going to love them,” said Pemberton.  “It’s going to be such a positive step in helping our race cars be more and more relevant to our fans, past, present and future.”

Also during the event, NASCAR and Rev Racing, formerly known as Revolution Racing, announced their 2012 class of drivers: Jorge Arteaga, Mackenna Bell, Trey Gibson, Ryan Gifford, Kyle Larson and Brian Ortiz. Rev Racing, owned by Max Siegel, will field four teams in the NASCAR K&N Pro Series and two teams in the NASCAR Whelen All-American Series.

In conclusion, media members heard a “state of the sport” address from NASCAR chairman and CEO, Brian France.

“We’re encouraged that we’re making progress,” said France. “The sport is in a very good place right now, no question about that, and we’re working hard and even harder to achieve the very best things for the sport of NASCAR well into the future.  We expect to have another highly competitive battle for the championship this year with our biggest stars and many new faces in the mix.”

Don Hawk Named Inaugural Recipient of the Bruton Smith Award by U.S. Legend Cars International
Don Hawk, vice president of business affairs for Speedway Motorsports, Inc., was named the inaugural recipient of the Bruton Smith Award during the 2011 U.S. Legend Cars International and INEX Corporation Championship Banquet held Jan. 21 at Charlotte Motor Speedway.

The award captures the spirit of its namesake, SMI chairman and CEO, O. Bruton Smith and recognizes someone with a passion for Legend Car racing and the promotion of it.

“Don has worked very hard to grow and expand this part of our company,” said Smith. “He’s very passionate about promoting grassroots racing and truly puts his heart into it. That’s what U.S. Legend Cars International is all about, developing the next generations of drivers and Don never stops thinking about what we can do to make that happen.”

After receiving the award, the typically animated Hawk was left stunned and speechless for a few moments.

“What this means to me is so hard to put into words,” said Hawk. “Bruton’s been so much more than a boss to me. He’s my mentor for a job that I absolutely love and have fun with every day. This just inspires me to work harder.

“I’m blessed to work for Speedway Motorsports and want to sincerely thank the Smith family and the employees of US Legend Cars International for this recognition.”

Quote of the Day
Brad Keselowski during the Penske Racing press conference: “We might not have any baby news or girls in heels up here, but we have a lot of racing news.”

Source: Charlotte Motor Speedway, Press Release

Brian France, CEO and Chairman of NASCAR - Photo Credit: John Harrelson, Getty Images for NASCAR

Industry To Build On 2011 Success, Introduce EFI, Restore Pack Racing

DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. (Jan. 26, 2012) — NASCAR and its stakeholders intend to build on the success of 2011 as the new season begins with the Feb. 26 Daytona 500 and other Speedweeks events at Daytona International Speedway.

In his State of NASCAR remarks delivered during the NASCAR Sprint Media Tour hosted by Charlotte Motor Speedway on Thursday, NASCAR Chairman and CEO Brian France said, “The sport is in a very good place and we’re going to work even harder to achieve the very best things for the sport of NASCAR well into the future.”

France pointed to initiatives begun a year ago – a simplified points structure in all three national series and a “Wild Card” twist in the Chase for the NASCAR Sprint Cup™ that placed a greater emphasis on race victories – which culminated in what France called “a championship battle that will be talked about for decades to come.”

While the 2012 season will be one of continuity rather than major change, NASCAR will introduce electronic fuel injection into the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series and implement rules designed to restore traditional “pack racing” at Daytona International Speedway and Talladega Superspeedway.

“We have had a breathtaking number of close finishes at those tracks, but the fans want a mixture of styles including a return to a more traditional ‘pack racing’ and that close side-by-side competition that’s unique to Talladega and Daytona,” France said. “NASCAR and the teams are working hard on this and based on the test earlier this month, we’re encouraged that we’re making progress.”

France also said the sanctioning body continues to operate on a more collaborative method of maintaining and growing the industry by taking into consideration the thoughts and needs of teams, tracks, media partners and especially its fans. “The goal of this effort is to help us better serve our great fans, grow our audience and ensure that our sport stays relevant, vibrant and highly-valuable to sponsors and other partners critical to the health of NASCAR,” said France.

“The industry has never been more united in growing the sport.”

France said the organization is “very encouraged” by increased television ratings across its three national series – NASCAR Sprint Cup, NASCAR Nationwide and NASCAR Camping World Truck Series. He also pointed to attendance gains at a number of venues. “While we are still in a tough economic climate that is still difficult, we are pleased with some positive steps we saw last year,” he said.

France and Robin Pemberton, NASCAR’s vice president, competition and racing development, touched on how EFI and the introduction in 2013 of re-styled NASCAR Sprint Cup cars from Chevrolet, Dodge, Ford and Toyota will make the sport more relevant to manufacturers and technology companies.

“EFI excites the manufacturers and technology companies,” said France, responding to questioning about NASCAR’s embrace of technology. “To attract new companies (to the sport), we’ve had to take a little different view of that.”

Ford earlier this week unveiled its 2013 Fusion prototype with the other OEMs (original equipment manufacturers) to follow in the near future. A closed test of the cars is scheduled early next month with additional testing to follow before final specifications are drawn.

“This is certainly a milestone in our sport,” said Pemberton. “We’ve worked very closely with the manufacturers on the new car and the four new models are simply outstanding.

“I think the fans are going to love them and it is going to be such a positive step in helping our race cars become more and more relevant with our fans past, present and future.”

Daytona International Speedway President Joie Chitwood previewed next month’s 54th Annual Daytona 500 (Feb. 26 at 1 p.m. ET on FOX, MRN Radio, SiriusXM Satellite Radio). He and his staff are committed to building on the enthusiasm of the 2011 season – and last year’s race that made 20-year-old winner Trevor Bayne a household name.

“We kicked off the (2011) season with energy and enthusiasm and that’s our goal for this year,” said Chitwood. “We want to produce that kind of event again.”

Daytona’s season begins Saturday with the running of the 50th Annual Rolex 24. The twice-round-the-clock race, most of which can be seen live on SPEED beginning at 3:30 p.m. ET, kicks off the 2012 GRAND-AM Rolex Series campaign.

Thursday’s event at the NASCAR Hall of Fame also introduced the 2012 Drive for Diversity class which will compete in the NASCAR K&N Pro Series East and at selected NASCAR Whelen All-America Series tracks for Rev Racing.

They are Jorge Arteaga, 25, Aguascalientes, Mexico; Mackena Bell, 21, Carson City, Nev.; Trey Gibson, 19, Easley, S.C.; Ryan Gifford, 22, Winchester, Tenn.; Kyle Larson, 19, Elk Grove, Calif.; and Bryan Ortiz, 22, Bayamon, Puerto Rico.

NASCAR Logo

Statements from Daytona Int’l Speedway President, Joe Chitwood III, NASCAR vice president of competition, Robin Pemberton,  NASCAR’s vice president of public affairs and multicultural development, Marcus Jadotte, Q&A with NASCAR chairman and CEO, Brian France and NASCAR President, Mike Helton.

KERRY THARP:  Good afternoon, and welcome to the NASCAR Hall of Fame for the annual NASCAR preseason press conference as part of the 2012 NASCAR Sprint Media Tour.  My name is Kerry Tharp.  I’m senior director of communications for NASCAR competition.  We are excited about the 2012 NASCAR racing season.  Our thanks to the fine folks here at the NASCAR Hall of Fame for their outstanding hospitality and hosting us here today.

I’ll tell you, each one of you all are invited to tour the Hall of Fame sometime this afternoon.  If you haven’t been through it, I encourage you to take some time and visit the Hall of Fame.

Certainly the 2011 NASCAR racing season was one for the ages, culminated by a classic championship battle during the Chase, and then highlighted by a walk-off victory by Tony Stewart at Homestead Miami Speedway that gave Smoke his third NASCAR Sprint Cup Series championship.

Before we get the program started, let’s take a quick look back at 2011, certainly a season to remember, and then we’ll fast forward to 2012.

(Video shown.)

KERRY THARP:  We are just 31 days until the 54th running of the Great American Race, the Daytona 500, and here to talk about that spectacular event, along with the 50th anniversary of the Rolex 24 at Daytona, which gets underway this weekend, please welcome the president of Daytona International Speedway, Joie Chitwood.

JOIE CHITWOOD:  Thank you, Kerry.  I appreciate that.  It’s hard to believe that we’re only 31 days away.

Last year when I spoke, I talked about polymer modified asphalt cement with an elevated softening point.  For those of you who don’t remember, in layman’s terms, I called that no-pothole asphalt.  So I’m proud to tell you, after a huge project we had such a successful season of not even mentioning that word, so it’s nice to talk to you about that guarantee coming to fruition.

But more importantly, that new pave job represented two fantastic races for us, the Daytona 500 and Coke Zero 400 with two first-time winners in victory lane.  So not only did we live up to our guarantee of fixing our challenge but produced some of the best racing that we’ve seen.

Before I talk about the Daytona 500, it is important right now that we’re in the midst of our 50th anniversary of the Rolex 24, America’s most premier sports car endurance challenge, and for the 50 years we have some great things that we’ve planned.  47 former winners will be in attendance, over 30 of the former winning cars will be there, but more importantly, GRAND-AM is experiencing a resurgence in manufacturer support with Ferrari choosing to put a factory ride in this year’s effort.  We expect the 50th anniversary of the Rolex 24 to be the biggest ever, and I promise you come Sunday after that race I’ll be making that announcement, as well.

When I think about the Daytona 500, it’s tough to not think about what just happened this past year.  We all go about our business and try to provide the proper stage for NASCAR to put on a great race, and I think sometimes we get caught up in the logistics of doing that, but for anyone who was in victory lane, when Trevor Bayne lifted that trophy over his head, you can’t help be caught up in that infectious enthusiasm that he has for the sport.

I think about the magnitude of that day and what really happened.  We’re all in the sports business, but to think that this one day changed this young man’s life, he’s no longer Trevor Bayne, he is Trevor Bayne, Daytona 500 champion, for the rest of his life.  It’s amazing to think that that one day in sport has now propelled his career into a different stratosphere.

There’s so many things that we are excited about, but probably more important than anything is that we kicked off the season with some energy and enthusiasm and more importantly momentum that carried through the entire season all the way to one of the best championship races I have ever seen.  And so that is our goal for this year as we look to what we do to improve the experience for our customer and make sure that we grab that baton from Miami and produce that kind of event again.

We always look at how we invest in the customer experience, whether it’s socially or at the racetrack itself.  I’m proud to tell you that we have the largest social following of any racetrack out there with over an 800 percent increase this past year, year after year.  We’ve invested millions of dollars in our racetrack as it relates to camping areas that our fans enjoy as well as producing a multimedia app that fans can use to navigate the Daytona International Speedway and other technology enhancements that we do around the property.

So I tell you with 30 days to go, our team is ready for the challenge as we prepare the property for what I consider to be one of the best events there is, the Daytona 500, but more importantly, to maintain that momentum and generate excitement for our sport in NASCAR.

Thank you very much.

KERRY THARP:  Thank you, Joie.  The competition on our racetracks has never been better in our sport, and here to provide an overview of what’s in store on the competition front in 2012, please welcome NASCAR vice president of competition, Robin Pemberton.

ROBIN PEMBERTON:  Thanks, Kerry.  Before we fast forward to the 2012 season, I want to take an opportunity to look back on the 2011 season for just a minute.  I’d like to thank all the teams, the competitors, the fans, the tracks and sponsors for all they did to help make last year the most exciting NASCAR season that I have ever had the opportunity to be a part of.

Now, like I say, thanks to the media for all their coverage and reporting and how you helped tell the story to all of our fans, so thank you.  I appreciate it, and I know coming from me, it should mean a lot because I don’t often compliment you guys on what you’ve done.

So let’s take a look ahead to this season.  For 2012, one of the big initiatives that will be implemented in the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series is electronic fuel injection.  That project is several years in the making, and we worked with engine builders and manufacturers to be able to associate ourselves with world class technology, partners like Freescale and McLaren for our fuel injection system.  This is a major initiative to us in our sport and helps make our cars more relevant and our engines more efficient.

You’ll be excited to know, I know I’ll be excited, that this winner of the Daytona 500 will be the first time that they’ll win with electronic fuel injection.

We’ve had just a few minor tweaks to the rules this year.  There’s been a lot of conversation surrounding the driver-to-driver radio communication, particularly at the superspeedway events.  Several of the drivers and the teams came to us late last season and they asked us to do away with the driver-to-driver radio chatter.  So starting this season, we have eliminated the driver-to-driver radio communication.  Team-to-team communication, that will still continue as we’ve known it in the past.

Our Daytona rules package, we’ve made a sizable effort to scale back on the amount of tandem style drafting we’ve seen at the superspeedways over the past few years.  We’ve been to the wind tunnel on numerous occasions, we’ve had tests at Talladega and Daytona last season, and we’ve had a great test this month at Daytona.

We know that the fans want to see more of the traditional style pack drafting, and so do we.  We won’t be able to totally eliminate the two-car push.  It will be a valuable tool that the teams will be able to use from time to time.  However, we do believe that we’ve come up with a rules package that will help it be the exception rather than the norm.

We’ve had a good test at Daytona a couple weeks ago, received great feedback from the teams, and it was unprecedented, it really was.  The communication was second to none.

We’re going to Daytona with the following package:  A larger restrictor plate at 29/32, smaller spoiler, softer springs.  All of these combinations will help the qualifying be more exciting.  We moved the radiator inlet up to the center of the bumper area; that’s two and a half by 20 inches.  Pressure relief valve will start out at 25 pounds.  Another aero change, the rear bumper dimensions were moved downward an additional two inches.

The changes we made in the cooling system and the aero package we believe will aid in getting back to the more traditional style pack drafting that we’ve come to expect at Daytona and Talladega.  We’re also implementing some of the similar adjustments to the Nationwide and the Camping World Truck Series.

The testing policy that we adopted in 2008 or after the 2008 season remains intact for 2012.  Three of our tracks will get a new surface this season.  Michigan finished up their repave last fall before the holidays; Pocono is nearly complete, they will complete it in the spring; and Kansas will repave in between the two races this summer.  We’ll schedule tests at each of those tracks before the events there either a few weeks out or the day before we sign in.

Throughout the 2012 season, you will be seeing and hearing a lot more about our 2013 car.  The manufacturers will begin revealing their models, as we saw the new Ford unveiled earlier this week.  There will be testing in mid to late summer.  We should be in a good position to release our cars and have a good rule package for the 2013 season.  It’s certainly a milestone in our sport, and we’ve worked very hard and closely with the manufacturers on the new car and the four new models that are simply outstanding, and I think everybody will be impressed with them.

I think the fans are going to love them.  It’s going to be such a positive step in helping our race cars be more and more relevant to our fans, past, present and future.

And speaking of our test policy, while we may have done away with private fines, we do plan on having some private tests.  The first will be next month for our four manufacturers with their new race cars.  We will be having additional tests throughout the course of the season that will be open; however, the OEMs felt it was important for them to have this initial test in a closed environment, and we appreciate everybody’s understanding and respect of that.

In closing, we’re excited about building upon a great season that we had last year.  We’re working very hard to make competition better, putting on the best possible racing week in and week out for our fans.  We look forward to seeing each and every one of you in the coming weeks at Daytona.

Thank you.

KERRY THARP:  Thank you very much, Robin.  Marcus Jadotte is NASCAR’s vice president of public affairs and multicultural development.  He comes today to share a few highlights from last season’s Drive For Diversity success and introduce the new D For D class, which is primed to continue its growth and momentum heading into the 2012 season.  Come on up here, Marcus, and let’s meet the new class.

MARCUS JADOTTE:  Thank you, Kerry, and thank you all for being here today and for playing the important role you do in the success of this great sport.  I’m pleased to be here again today and to have this opportunity to introduce the NASCAR Drive For Diversity class for the upcoming season.  But first I’d like to take a look back at the program’s unprecedented success, as Kerry indicated, last season.

NASCAR Drive For Diversity drivers left an indelible mark on the K&N Pro Series last season.  Drivers tallied six wins in 12 races and scored 10 top 5s and 23 top 10 finishes.  The program placed two drivers in the top 5 final points standings and a third in the top 10.  It was truly a landmark year.

And clearly the academy approach that we put into place two seasons ago is adding value to the development of Drive For Diversity drivers.  Specific to that development, we’d like to acknowledge the contribution of several drivers who are embarking on the next step in their NASCAR racing career.

Darrell Wallace, Jr., and Sergio Peña, who each scored a series leading three wins in the K&N Pro Series East last year are slated to take the next step in their careers in 2012.  Darrell will make his debut in the NASCAR Nationwide Series with Joe Gibbs Racing, and Sergio is signed with Hattori Racing Enterprises.

In addition to that great news, Paulie Harraka, the 2010 NASCAR K&N West series Rookie of the Year and the first member of the Drive For Diversity program to win a track championship back in 2008 will run in the NASCAR Camping World series in 2012.

We’re all excited obviously about the success that these young men have achieved.  We’re also excited about the legacy that they have created in the Drive For Diversity program and looking forward to the drivers who will follow in their footsteps.  That really is what the NASCAR Drive For Diversity program is all about, creating a platform for young drivers of diverse backgrounds to develop and demonstrate their talent and really connect that talent to future growth in the sport.

On-track success has paid off for those young men, and it’s also paying off for Rev Racing, creating fertile ground for sponsors like Toyota, Goodyear and Sprint.  We’re grateful for their continued sport.

In an effort to continue the upward trend and results for Rev Racing, we’re constantly evaluating the NASCAR Drive For Diversity program, looking for ways to enhance that success.  Much like we did when we made the decision to bring all the drivers in house around the academy training model, this year we’ve decided to concentrate the majority of our resources on the K&N East series.  We believe that in the end we’ll get greater results and develop promise on a faster time schedule by doing so.

In short, Revolution Racing and the Drive For Diversity drivers achieved a high level of excellence in 2011, and we look forward to building on that momentum in the current season.

So now it’s my pleasure to introduce the class of 2012, beginning with Jorge Arteaga, originally from Aguascalientes, Mexico, now residing here in Charlotte.  He’ll compete in the NASCAR K&N Pro Series East.  Jorge compiled an impressive résumé in the NASCAR Mexico series before moving up, and he also was voted twice driver of the year, most popular driver in that series.

Mackena Bell of Carson, Nevada, will also return to the Drive For Diversity program.  She will compete in the NASCAR Whelen All-American series for Rev Racing.

Next up is Trey Gibson, who will compete in a second season for Rev Racing in 2012, also in the Whelen All-American series.  The Easley, South Carolina, native earned five top 5 finishes and ten top 10 finishes in 18 late model starts last year.  He finished seventh in the NASCAR Whelen All-American series South Carolina points standings.

Next up is Ryan Gifford, who will compete in his third season for Revolution Racing.  In 2011 Ryan finished 10th in points and collected two top 5 finishes and four top 10 finishes in the K&N East series.  In 2010, you may recall, Ryan made history, becoming the first African American to win a pole in the K&N East series and also scored top 10 finishes in the series that year.

Next up is Bryan Ortiz from Bayamon, Puerto Rico.  Brian began driving for revolution racing in 2011, where he competed in the NASCAR Whelen All-American series.  In 2012 he’ll compete in the K&N East series and also race in select GRAND-AM Continental Tire series events, including this weekend at Daytona.  Looking forward to that.

Our final 2012 Drive For Diversity team member, Kyle Larson, is unable to be with us today because of a previous racing commitment.  However, we couldn’t conclude this introduction without celebrating his accomplishments and welcoming him to the team.  2012 will mark Kyle Larson’s first season with Rev Racing and also his first season in the K&N Pro Series East.  But to put it mildly, Kyle is no stranger to racing.  Kyle opened the 2012 calendar year with a podium finish at the Chili Bowl, finishing third out of 260 entrants, and in 2011 he took American open wheel racing by storm in his first season competing on the national level by capturing 22 major professional feature victories.  Kyle was nominated as SPEED’s performer of the year and competed with Tony Stewart, Dario Franchitti and others for that award.

KERRY THARP:  NASCAR begins its 65th season in 2012, and no surprise, here to bring our keynote address, please welcome NASCAR chairman and CEO, Brian France.  All yours.

BRIAN FRANCE:  Good afternoon, and thank you for being here today.  First I want to thank everybody in the room and the media in particular for covering our sport all year long and every year.  We know you work hard during the season, and I recognize that this season, this off-season, wasn’t much of a break.  We had a lot going on, and you had to be on top of it all, and you were.  We thank you for that coverage, and I know the NASCAR fans really thank you.

Before I talk a little bit about the upcoming season, I want to say a few things that were touched on earlier about 2011.  Last year at this event, we announced a number of changes we believed would build interest in story lines and most importantly would make it easier for fans to understand the championship race.  We’re very pleased with how all those changes played out.  Adding the wild card brought significant drama through the summer and run-up to theRichmond event and through the Chase.  It put a premium on winning among all the competitors and made the drivers throughout the top 20 in the points relevant and part of the story lines right up until Richmond.  And that was exciting for our fans.

You know what, Pick a Series was also a great success.  It returned the spotlight to some of the upcoming stars in the Nationwide and Camping World Truck Series.

Simplifying the points system was also a good move that was embraced by our broadcast partners, the media, and most importantly, our fans.  And it was great to see Ricky Stenhouse, Jr., and Austin Dillon raise those trophies for their teams.  It was fantastic to have 18 different winners in the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series, including five for the first time.  We were thrilled to see so many fresh faces in victory lane and be able to gain the type of exposure that only winning uniquely provides.

To be sure, the entire NASCAR Sprint Cup Series field gave us a highly competitive season, capped by a championship battle that will be talked about for a long, long time.  No question about it, Tony Stewart and Carl Edwards gave us an incredible show that was exciting right to the very end in the last lap.  And in the end, it came down to race wins.  And you know what, that’s exactly how it should be.  So we congratulate Tony, his entire team, and salute Carl, as well, for giving us that great battle.  He pulled off the Chase in such a deserving way.  It’s just a terrific number three for Smoke.

While we all know that the economic climate around the country is still difficult, still presents challenges for everyone in the industry, we’re pleased with some of the positive signs that we began to see improve last year.  Obviously we’re encouraged by ratings increases across all of our national series, excited about that.  We were very happy to see some gains in attendance at a number of venues, including here in Charlotte, Las Vegas, Chicago, Miamiand Phoenix all had uplifts.  And we’re very happy to hear the announcement last month by the CEO of Sprint Dan Hesse in December, announcing that they will be part of our series entitlement sponsor for a long, long time.  We were also happy to renew our XM relationship on satellite radio.

You know, in terms of our company, a lot of important work was done in 2011 to position us for the future.  That work is still going on.  It’s improving safety, competition, cost management for the teams, and that mission never ends, and it happens mostly down the road here at the R & D Center.  Team of engineers at the R & D Center continue to work closely with the experts to study further improvements, cost containment opportunities that we can pass onto the teams.  NASCAR worked closely with the engine builders and manufacturers and enlisted the support of world-class technology partners like Freescale and McLaren to implement the new electronic fuel injection in the Sprint Cup Series beginning this season.

The development, the roll-out, the subsequent introduction of the new 2013 Sprint Cup race car has been an ongoing collaborative effort between NASCAR, the manufacturers and the race teams, unprecedented.

We bolstered our broadcasting team, as well, to better serve our current partners in promoting the sport and their presentation of the sport and to strengthen our position in advance of upcoming TV negotiations.

We elevated and expanded our industry services group and implemented some needed changes to make us more efficient and effective at working with the teams and the track in an unprecedented way.  The dialogue, the cooperation, that’s all been created to move the sport along.  It’s going to be invaluable to us as we work closer together as an industry.

And you know, significant investments of time, energy and money were made to overhaul the communications group.  Most of you are well aware now, as part of a long-term plan to be more proactive, how we tell the story of the sport and how we deliver information in many, many mediums.

We completed an 18-month deep examination of our industry that will be a significant milestone for the company and the sport.  The findings of those studies have inspired a five-year strategic industry action plan that’s already being implemented.

The goal of this effort is to help us better serve our great fans, grow our audience and ensure that our sport stays relevant, vibrant and highly valuable to our sponsors and other partners, and that’s the critical goal of NASCAR, moving the sport along, growing our fan base and doing it in a way that works much more closely with our key stakeholders.

You know, it’s been a busy off-season, as well, for the teams, and now we’re ready to get started here in 2012 with the 550th anniversary of the GRAND-AM’s Rolex 24 this weekend, followed shortly thereafter by the Shootout and then the Daytona 500 in a couple of weeks.  So we enter this season, as you’ve heard and you know, with great momentum.  We’re coming off arguably the best championship battle ever, and our focus for 2012 is continuing that momentum.  We’re very pleased with the changes we made last year.

We’ll continue on the same path in terms of points, the championship format and the rules packages, all of which were very successful last year.  And we’ve made clear we’re working hard to find rules packages that break up the tandem racing at Daytona and Talladega and return it to a more traditional style of racing on those superspeedways.

We’ve had a breathtaking number of close finishes at those tracks, but the fans want a mixture of styles, including a return to that more traditional, more pack racing and that close side-by-side competition that’s unique to Daytona and Talladega.

NASCAR and the teams are working hard at this, and based on the test earlier this month at Daytona, we’re encouraged that we’re making progress.  The sport is in a very good place right now, no question about that, and we’re working hard and even harder to achieve the very best things for the sport of NASCAR well into the future.  We expect to have another highly competitive battle for the championship this year with our biggest stars and many new faces in the mix, and as you heard, aligned with some new teams.

So our style of racing continues to attract the best talent in the world, big personalities from other forms of racing.  It’ll be exciting to see Travis Pastrana, Danica Patrick and others competing in NASCAR full-time against the best drivers in the world.  Having Danica compete in this year’s Daytona 500, that will get it all started.

So we’re thrilled to see the level of competition rise in the regional touring series, and we’re very excited by the talent that is rich in diversity that we’re seeing in the K&N Pro Series and the Whelen All-American series.  You’re really seeing that talent, saw the next class obviously today, but we are really getting some graduates of that program who are going to make an impact at NASCAR’s highest level one day.  I’m very confident of that.

And we’ve talked today and will continue to talk about our move to electronic fuel injection because it’s the next important step in making the cars and the track more like the production cars the fans drive every day.  It also helps us with smart technology at just the right time.

So now we look forward to Daytona.  Will we have our 11th different winner in 11 consecutive Daytona 500s?  We’ll see.  Can our reigning Sprint Cup Series champion get his first win in the great American race?  And one thing is for sure; NASCAR is carrying great momentum into 2012, and I can’t wait to see it all get started on February 26.  Thank you very much, best of luck in 2012, and we will move the program along.

Thank you very much.

            KERRY THARP:  At this time I’m going to call on NASCAR President Mike Helton to join Brian on stage for questions with the media.  We’ll go about 30 minutes and we’ll take as many questions as we can during that time.

Q.  Generally at this function there’s usually a change or two that you announce.  This year there’s really no changes.  Does that kind of show how satisfied you are with the product and with the way everything was going?  Last year you had a points championship that frankly it will be almost impossible to top.

BRIAN FRANCE:  Well, the way to top that is to have three drivers or four going for the championship if that’s possible, too.  But you’re largely correct that we’re always looking at things.  The big thing, of course, is the tandem racing and getting the right rules package for those speedways, and the industry is working pretty hard at that.

But the other thing is fuel injection is no small thing to introduce, although we’ve been working on it for a couple years.  But you’re right, the format, the wild card, the points, simplification of that, the feedback on that from our fans, the media and others, all of that was right on point.  So we’re pretty pleased with where things are in general.

Q.  Brian, when you look at the three series, we’ve seen some contraction, fewer competitive teams in each series.  Are you concerned about that and is there concern that we’ll see short fields in Cup?

BRIAN FRANCE:  Well, the economy will do that.  It will have an effect on the sponsorship model, the funding of the teams, and various reasons teams also move around or get smaller.  I don’t anticipate short fields, but obviously a very difficult economy that’s lasted so long has had an effect, and that will continue at some level.

Q.  Brian, can you characterize the degree of input drivers and owners have in the policy making processes as you go along with these annual meetings you have with teams now that you’ve been doing that for several years?

BRIAN FRANCE:  Well, I think for us it’s a collaboration that is unprecedented in terms of – that we sit down with, as you know – and not just formally this time of the year but also when we have something very significant to deal with, and it’s been really good.

The answer is they have a lot of input.  What you also need to know, which is pretty interesting for me, is the amount of disagreement on things, honest disagreements that happened.  People that see it one way or another way on anything important is always surprising.  You would be surprised at all of our meetings; someone’s idea of saving money is someone’s idea of not saving money, or whatever it might be.  So we have to make sure that we’re hearing that input and obviously matching it up to our goals.

But they have a lot of input, and they should.

Q.  Brian, can you talk about what went into your decision to make fines public, and do you anticipate still fining participants when they make critical comments about the sport?

BRIAN FRANCE:  Well, I hope that we don’t.  I think you’ve got to look at it in the context of how other sports operate in that manner.  In terms of going public with it, we were frankly – we didn’t have a real strong position on that.  It seemed to bother some people in November when we talked about this.  I talked about it with you.  So we’re not – we didn’t feel strongly.  That’s something that people think is a good thing, so we were happy to do it.

Q.  For either one of you gentlemen, this might be something better aimed at the competition department, but I’ll throw it out there for you guys.  We’ve kind of gotten an understanding of what the auto makers hope to accomplish with their 2013 models when they debut.  From NASCAR’s standpoint, the move presents an opportunity to continue to improve the series.  What areas are you looking at with regard to the new car to possibly improve competition, specifically as it relates to the mile and a half tracks?

MIKE HELTON:  Yeah, first of all, I think the optics of the 2013 car will be very significantly recognized and very popular, and the effort with NASCAR and all of the manufacturers collectively working on this together, the four manufacturers in a room with NASCAR and NASCAR saying we would like for you to help us design this race car in a way that you would like it.  And that was a bit of a surprise to them, for us to be that open with that process.

But as the time went on and we all were engaged in it, it was obvious that that was going to be great benefit to NASCAR in general because of the relevancy and, oh, by the way, the energy that it created at the manufacturer level of being excited about being in the sport, and that can’t be anything but good for the entire sport.

The competitive things that we can learn from past experiences and apply any time we have a new body on a car is important, and it depends a lot on the conversations we have about the tandem racing or the mile and a half racing.  NASCAR is constantly working on being sure that our product, race cars on racetracks, is as absolutely good as it can be.  But it changes on us.  The resurfacing of a track can change the circumstances on us.

But all of those things we’ve learned ourselves, the input we get from the teams and their body guys or engineers and the resources that you have today from wind tunnels and everything help you make small changes that can make a big difference.  But those big differences may not last very long depending on what racetrack you go to next, what size and shape it is, or whether it’s a new surface or an older surface or even the Goodyear tire that gets molded on the car.  So that’s something that we constantly have to chase.

But I think today more than ever we use the resources of our own knowledge but certainly are open like we are with our stakeholders with the teams because we’re all collectively on the same page.  We all want to produce the absolute best race we can.  The teams want it to be them that come out ahead, and we understand that.

But I think we can take advantage of — any time we change a body like this and make the racing better, and that’s our mission, I couldn’t sit here today and tell you exactly what we will do, but there’s a lot of folks working on that nonstop along with the manufacturers and the race teams, because we all understand what we do on the racetrack is still paramount.

Q.  Brian, I’ve heard you say that the good story lines were something that you cited in the increased TV ratings for the Chase, but even before the racing got really good and the championship battle got really exciting, the ratings were seeming to go up for the Chase, and at the same time ESPN was doing side-by-side commercials and there was also some later start times in the Chase.  With the later start times and the commercials the way they did the format, do you believe that played any factor in increasing the ratings at all?

BRIAN FRANCE:  Sure.  All that plays a factor in it.  You want to try to get all of that as right as you can.  But even when you do all those things, if you don’t have close competition, exciting races and hopefully good story lines that are produced out of that, that can only take you so far.  So I still think the story lines are what drives any – interest in anything, frankly, any sporting event.

But all that is true.

Q.  Brian, you mentioned earlier in your speech the Free Scale and McLaren technologies on board in this fuel injection system.  Is this the final piece, or is there ongoing development maybe that we’ll see at the end of the season a different injection system than we see at the first race in Daytona, and what is NASCAR doing concerning cost control in the engine department?

BRIAN FRANCE:  Well, let me say, we’re pretty confident in what we’ve chosen – it’s been tested pretty carefully – that we will be in good shape.  If we’re not, if there’s some change, then we’ll look at that.  But we’re pretty confident that we’ve got the right package on that.

Let me tell you something about fuel injection that you might not have thought about.  Fuel injection excites the manufacturers.  It excites technology companies, and between that, as Mike said, and the various things we’re doing with the 2013, our expectation is the car manufacturers are going to increase their support for the teams, increase their activation, which is great for all of us, and they’re excited to do that because they feel good about it.

So it’s not all what kind of cost we lay in on the front end.  You have to look at the entire puzzle over time.  And the other thing is we’re going to be careful with technology in terms of what it does, the cost of it for the teams, et cetera.  But we’re going to have to look differently at not only the car companies but all the other technology companies that exist want to feel like this is a place that showcases some of that technology.

So to attract new companies into the sport, we will have to take a bit of a different view on that, and we’ll have to – we’ll balance the cost for the teams carefully, but that’s the mission we’re on.

Q.  With the TV contract ending in 2014, do you expect to get the new deal done this year?  Kind of what are the key issues or hurdles in that, and can you kind of talk about how digital rights issues relate to the negotiations?

BRIAN FRANCE:  Well, you know, we’re excited with our current – we really like our current partners.  My expectation is they want to renew their involvement with NASCAR, and my hope is at the right time we’ll figure that out together.  The sports landscape in general, as you know, has heated up quite a bit, so we will be in a good position at the right time.  I don’t know when that will happen.  If it happens early, it’s possible, or it might not.  We’re having conversations.

And on digital, it’s very important to us.  Very important for us to manage those rights carefully in the future.  Obviously between digital and social media, it’s the new medium to develop that deep relationship with our fans and communicate with them.  So we will be taking a very, very active role, already are, and not just us but the rest of the industry.  This is one of these things where the industry has come together on many things, but this is an important one where the industry is working together, the teams, the tracks, NASCAR and so on, to formulate the right social media strategy, the right digital media strategy for the future.  And we’re quite confident that we will manage those rights in a way that takes the most benefit forward on behalf of the industry.

Q.  How confident are you that the current rules package you have in place for Daytona will greatly reduce or possibly eliminate the tandem drafting, or is that going to be kind of a moving target going forward in speedways?

MIKE HELTON:  I think we have some confidence that the tandem racing that we saw ’11 conclude with won’t be a part of the Daytona 500.  But as mentioned earlier, Robin mentioned, we’re not going to write a rules package that prevents the drivers from racing close to each other.  That’s NASCAR racing that fans expect.  So we think the Daytona 500 will be more in line with the fans’ expectations, and you’ll see more than likely cars push each other, but that was happening in 1959 and 1979.

So we’re going to be very careful and not write a rules package that promotes a driver not racing close to each other in Daytona.  But I also expect there could be some tweaking that has to take place along the way, and the drivers and the teams know that because we’re all on the same agenda, to make sure the Daytona 500 is what it deserves to be and what the fans expect it to be.

Q.  Brian, was there a red flag any time within the last few years which made you realize, hey, we need to listen to the owners and the drivers and the fans more?

BRIAN FRANCE:  No, it’s just the way we manage the sport.  I think it’s been incredibly helpful, and that’s my style and Mike’s style, as well.  What we really did was make a determination that, although we talk to them at the track every weekend, which is kind of an unusual thing in sports, that formalizing our meetings from time to time and also letting them interact with some of the people they may not see at the track who are playing an important role in helping in whatever it might be grow the sport, that would be a better concept for us, and it has been, and it’s been – I look forward to them actually.  So that’s working well for us.

Q.  On the abolition of secret fines, will you now still fine drivers but publicly for disparaging the sport, and if so, how would you categorize that given that those comments probably happen outside the realm of an event?  Is that still an action detrimental to stock car racing?

BRIAN FRANCE:  If you challenge the integrity of the sport, we’re going to deal with that.  You know, we have to deal with that.  And I think what’s really interesting is I can’t tell you how many owners or drivers come up to me and say thanks for doing that because some of these comments were irresponsible and unhelpful to growing the sport.

Now, having said that, we give the entire industry an unprecedented amount of – we’re not talking about who’s critical of NASCAR.  You can be critical of things you don’t think we’re doing well, in particular a race call.  You can say I don’t think I was speeding; I disagree with that.  We understand that.  It’s when you go after the integrity of the sport is where we will step in, and they will be public.

Q.  Today Wal-Mart announced they’re going to sponsor a car, and Bill Elliott said it’s as big a news as when the stock cars went to Indy for the first time.  And Miller today announced their sponsorship of the 2 continuing.  What I want to ask is about what corporate America is looking at NASCAR like today, what you think the corporate sponsors are thinking now, and if you think we’ll get to the day that we’ll have cost containment to get one sponsor on these cars instead of so many rotating again.

BRIAN FRANCE:  Cost containment is not a function of splitting the car up with different sponsors.  That’s a financial decision frankly that the teams have made from time to time.  It’s our preference to see more primary sponsors for sure, and I’m very happy, as you just said, about Miller joining, and I think it started last year when we did have a number of renewals, including a very large one with Sprint.

You know, I think everybody has always realized the value in what they can get out of NASCAR, and we’re very pleased that a number of companies are renewing that.  That’s good news.

Q.  On the topic of manufacturer interest, cars have been evolving, and you recall 30 years ago there was an experimental LR car, and the cars of today tend to have 1.62 liter.  How much further are we along from seeing compact cars running perhaps city streets to attract young people, à la the drifting?  How much closer are we to seeing a series for that?

MIKE HELTON:  Well, you’ll see some of that in Daytona this weekend.  The GRAND-AM product now that NASCAR is very much engaged in I think gives us the opportunity to look at what you’re talking about, whether it’s a C class or a B class automobile and gives us the ability to showcase that type of racing and that very specific type of environment, which is historically sports car racing.

And we get that.  As we become more merged with the stock car part of NASCAR and the sports car part of GRAND-AM, there’s a lot of opportunities for us to do things like we’re talking about.  There’s a level of interest not only in the current manufacturers but others in the opportunities that exist with B and C class type cars in some kind of a competitive format.

But tomorrow’s race is – how many cars do you have in the Continental race tomorrow, Joie (Chitwood)?  80 cars in the Continental race, which is part of the Rolex 24 this weekend, and that’s an example of what you’re talking about.

Q.  In the ’90s NASCAR had phenomenal growth and then in recent years it’s sort of plateaued, and as you said 2011 was a great year, got a lot of momentum back.  What are maybe some of the next big things you’re looking at?  Are there any new tracks on the horizon, new markets you want to get into, new manufacturers coming into the sport?  What’s kind of the next big thing you see coming down the road?

BRIAN FRANCE:  Well, I don’t know that there’s one big thing that we’re pointing towards.  What I can tell you is all the things that we’re doing that we’ve announced today and have announced in the past.  I can tell you that the industry has never been more united to growing the sport of NASCAR on everyone’s behalf.  And that’s going to be our job.

Obviously you’ve heard a lot about digital and social media as an enormously important place.  We’ve reformed our communications efforts to reach more fans.  So you’re going to see us and the entire industry get more aggressive.  You’re going to see youth initiatives.  You’re seeing the fruits of diversity start to be right around the corner.  That will really advance us if we can get a breakthrough, which I’m very confident we will, at a national level.  So there are a lot of things out there that are all going to point to us being able to either grow our audience with a new demographic, whether it be a younger demographic or more diverse.  We’re doing the things that we think you have to do to put yourself in a position to grow in the future, even though when I say grow in the future, it is a very, very difficult landscape for any sports property to build on.  It’s just very competitive.

So we’re having to be at the top of our game to make sure that we’re delivering what the fans want, what our partners need, and what new fans will get excited about.

Q.  Can either one of you update us on the green initiative?

BRIAN FRANCE:  Green initiative is really well.  I think we’re – obviously the biofuel and ethanol a year ago, fuel injector to a small level.  Let me tell you, we’ve had a big summit in Miami in November, brought a bunch of different companies and brands together in the technology space and the green energy space that would have never looked at NASCAR in the past, and they’re taking a hard look at that.  We’ll be announcing some new companies that are coming in.

You’re aware of all the recycling and all the things that the industry — that we’re marshaling all the resources to get us to a place that’s very important to the car manufacturers.  We’re getting some acclaim for that for taking an offensive-minded strategy in a smart way as an industry, and so I’m real proud about where we’re at and more importantly where we’re going.

Q.  For Mike or Brian, in press conferences this week and even here today, we’re heard talk about the 2013 car making it more relevant for the manufacturers in discussion with EFI.  Talk about making that more relevant to the manufacturers, which kind of begs the question of something was not as relevant before those two things.  My question is how did we get that way, or perhaps as Mike said earlier, is it simply a facet of the general evolution of the sport?

MIKE HELTON:  Yeah, I think it’s a couple of things:  One, as you walk through this Hall of Fame and you watch – are able to visibly see the evolution of a race car and you see how it went, for a lot of good reasons, and primarily for safety’s sake, the evolution of the race car became more motorsports orientated than it was a transportation orientated vehicle.

So we tooled along and everything was working good, but along the way, not just for the 2013 car but along the way, the manufacturers said, well, what about this and what about that.  But we’ve never had a collective effort like we started a couple or three years ago that showed up first in the Nationwide garage with the pony cars and the muscle car look.  And obviously that was very successful for our relationship with the manufacturer but with the car owners and the fans and the racetrack.  So that kind of stepped in then to the Cup side.

Well, what can we do at this level, and by then the manufacturers were saying, okay, NASCAR wants us to help them, and we did ask them to help us.  So that collective effort produced what we’ll see – we saw it Tuesday with the Ford and we’ll see the other three makes as the season goes on.  That collective effort kind of migrated back toward the relevancy, and a lot of it also had to do with technology, the ability of whether designing products or using different forms of technology for us to regulate like a fuel injection system, where we were ten years ago afraid of going down that road because of fear of not being able to regulate it, the technology, and NASCAR is embracing technology to make rules and regulations.  And oh, by the way, just the technologies of fabricating parts and pieces that are now more common in NASCAR than they might have been 15 years ago led us to the ability to create the 2013 car with the manufacturers.

BRIAN FRANCE:  I would add one thing to that.  Their business has changed quite a bit in the last three or four years even.  You see leadership in a number of areas.  They have different expectations.  As Mike said, there’s been a flight to technology on their behalf.  It’s their stated goal, flight to green, to be smarter about emissions, and that’s a lot of it, so we’re going to make sure that we’re delivering on the important promises that they want to get met.

Q.  Brian, with all the positives that you enumerated about EFI, is it NASCAR’s desire and are there plans to bring EFI to the Nationwide and Camping World Truck Series?

BRIAN FRANCE:  I think over time, absolutely, that will be something that will be important.

Q.  This kind of goes to Jim’s question:  Where did the process start or where was the moment where you said, okay, we need to move toward another car, this idea of the 2013?  Did it start with the manufacturers or fans, or did it happen in a boardroom in Daytona?  Where did that process start?

MIKE HELTON:  Yeah, I’m not sure that you could draw a line on a calendar and say here’s the date and here’s the location or here’s the person that said that.  I think it’s just in our DNA to constantly look or try to be able to look around the corner.  So as we focused on the car that we race now, and particularly around the chassis of that car, that was the mission that was to be accomplished.  But even while that was coming to fruition, and once it got into the Cup garage, and we knew it would eventually expand to Nationwide and probably to other types of racing series down the road, that the thought process was, okay, what’s next.

And along with, as Brian mentioned, the leadership and the OEMs that we’re involved with started saying, what can we do, then from that collective conversation came the idea of the optics side.  Sooner or later the manufacturers are going to have another body design or another change, and we’re seeing a lot of things happening on their level that are – that our fans and their customers are excited about, the cars that Ford and Dodge and Toyota and Chevrolet are putting on the street.

So it all just came together, if you will, at the right time for us, we think.  But it’s been a two- or three-year effort and will be another year before we see it.  But I think it’s more just like being in our DNA to continually pursue what’s next.

Q.  A lot of the discussions and changes that have been made over the last couple of years have been traced back to what you’ve talked about the fans are asking for, and it strikes me that perhaps maybe the fans and what they ask for may not always be good for the sport.  I’m thinking about the change in the car in 2007; the reaction initially was, well, we’re tightening up the rules, and this is manipulating the competition.  But now fans are asking you to do exactly the same thing, manipulate the competition and break up the two-car draft or change that at Daytona.  How do you look – what principles do you cling to and hold to as you’re wading through this changing tide of fan opinion?

BRIAN FRANCE:  Well, you know, we don’t always obviously react to every request that the fan base would like to see, because you’re right, some of them are either not practical or wouldn’t work properly.  But it’s kind of real simple for us; we’ve been doing this for over five decades, so we have a pretty good feel for – we certainly have a great feel for our – the values of NASCAR in terms of close, competitive racing.  So if we think there’s something that we can do that enhances that promise that we have and it matches up with cost and all the other things, relevance and all the things you hear so much about today, then we try and do that.

And if it’s something like tandem racing where it’s overwhelmingly, where they just don’t like that style of racing, they like the old style, naturally we will try to – by the way, that’s consistent, because we like the old style ourselves better.  It evolved into something that no one saw coming, and now we’re going to deal with that.

There isn’t a new change in that.  It may seem that way, but the reality is we’ve got our values, we’ve got our mission, and just because you’re collaborative, that’s a really good thing.  I don’t ever want us to think that we’re headed down a road because we listen to people a lot more and that somehow that’s going to foul us up.  It won’t.  We’ll make sure of that.

MIKE HELTON:  And to Brian’s point, I think what we maybe should be most proud of today, we being NASCAR, is being more open minded to all stakeholders, to the racetracks, to the race teams, the broadcast partners, sponsors, the media.  I think what we have tried to do over the past several years is to become more open minded, so we don’t look at it as a fan asking us to change something.  We look at it more as saying to the stakeholders, which include the fans, what do you think and what do you like and what do you dislike, and then we digest all of that across the board from all of our stakeholders and try to make decisions that we feel like will fit best for the next step that NASCAR takes.

It’s not – a team comes to us and says you need to change this, and we say why, and the question that they ask us isn’t as important to us as the answer that they give us once we say why, and then we can follow it through.

Same with fans.  We don’t react necessarily to a fan saying you’ve got to change this as much as we say, well, why, and then hear what the answer is.  And if that answer makes sense, we’re going to go to work on it.  If it doesn’t make sense, then we have to go to the next question.

KERRY THARP:  Before I excuse you from the stage, we just got some very sad news, the passing of Dr. Joe Mattioli up in Pennsylvania today, and I know Brian and Mike are very close to that man and what he meant to the sport, and Brian, I know that he goes back a long ways with your family.  I just wanted to pass that on and didn’t know if you had any comments you and Mike would like to say on behalf of Doc Mattioli.

BRIAN FRANCE:  He was a friend from the very beginning with my grandfather.  It’s very sad to hear that, and we’re very close to the Mattioli family, and obviously our hearts go out to them.  He was a great man, and he really, really cared a lot about this sport.  He’ll be missed.

MIKE HELTON:  Yeah, there’s no question that Doc was very symbolic to the passion of our sport.  When you say Pocono, everybody has their own different interpretation of your first reaction to saying Pocono.  But it’s certainly the character and the passion and the impact that Doc and Rose Mattioli and that Doc made on our sport will be forever engrained in it, and it’s sad to hear of his passing, and like Brian said, all of our thoughts are with Rose and the entire Mattioli family right now.

KERRY THARP:  Thank you, Brian and Mike, for your time up here today.

FastScripts by ASAP Sports

Source: NASCAR, Press Release

Brian France, CEO and Chairman of NASCAR, speaks to the media at Homestead-Miami Speedway on Nov. 18 in Homestead, Fla. - Photo Credit: Chris Trotman/Getty Images for NASCAR

An interview with: 

BRIAN FRANCE:  Good afternoon, everyone.  I would say a couple of things that I’ve said before in previous get-togethers with the media.  That obviously we think the season has gone very well.  TV ratings, attendance, still some issues, depending on what market you’re talking about.

Obviously, the economy continues to weigh heavily on the sponsorship component of our sport.  We rely more on sponsorships than anybody in sports, so that obviously has an effect on us.

But the quality of racing throughout the year, the emphasis on winning that we keep adjusting to, I think is undeniably it is paying dividends.  I would also say one thing about that.  There was some wisdom or conventional wisdom some time ago that if you put more on the line, you put more emphasis on winning in Motorsports, that that wouldn’t make a big difference because they’re all out racing as hard as they can every lap, and it wouldn’t make that big of a difference.  And that’s not true.  We now know that’s just not true.

When there is more on the line, you’re seeing every weekend Tony Stewart and Carl, and everybody elevate and their entire teams are elevating their performance and the competition gets better when that happens.  You saw that last year with Denny and Jimmie.

So naturally we’re going to continue to look at the point system in a way that – and the other portions of how we regulate and conduct the events, with an emphasis on just that.

But one more thing as this weekend unfolds, and naturally we’re all excited because we’re fans too, to watch and see what happens on Sunday.  But the other thing that is happening in the marketplace is some really, really good things.

We held a Green Summit for the first time in Miami Beach yesterday.  Had a number of companies that are doing some really, really great things in our industry – they’re environmentally smart and productive – share their experiences.  And we had a lot of new companies that were interested in what NASCAR was up to in the space where their technologies and their emphasis is.  So they joined us as well.

My hope is that we’ll continue to march down that road and get better and smarter and we’ll attract more companies as a result of that.

Then just this morning, we awarded a $250,000 check to the Homestead Hospital in the Neonatal Care Center, trying to invest in the hospital as part of our NASCAR Foundation, and my mother and so on was there to present that.

In addition to an exciting weekend, the industry is really celebrating the fact that they’re here in South Florida and doing some great things.  So, with that, I’ll be happy to take some questions.

Q.  Brian, in particular light to your comments about the winning.  Eight years ago Matt Kenseth won the championship before the Chase, had one win for the season which seemed to cause an uproar, and thus the Chase format was developed.  Carl has an opportunity on Sunday to again win a championship with only one race week win in the entire season.  Why should that be looked on any different as what Matt Kenseth did in 2003?

BRIAN FRANCE:  Because we didn’t change the point system because somebody had one win or a few wins. That was never the emphasis.  The emphasis was that we could create bigger moments if we had a more playoff style atmosphere as opposed to a complete consistency model in the years past.  And we’ve achieved that goal, not all the time because it’s obviously out of our control.

I would tell you the one win that Carl had might make the difference though.  He only leads by three points. The one win in Las Vegas may well make the difference tomorrow.  I don’t know.

Clearly we cannot make winning the only thing.  There are 43 teams racing at every weekend.  So this is not – however, we can make sure that we emphasize that.  We can make sure that we reward that.  And we’re pretty happy that that translates into better racing.

Q.  Not taking anything away from Jimmie’s great accomplishments of five straight there.  How much do you think an uptick of interest that there’s been to have a new face fighting out for the championship this year?

BRIAN FRANCE:  I don’t know.  But I do know that this will mark the end of one of the historic runs in all of sports with five consecutive championships.  I would have never thought I would witness that.

Jimmie it’s just a marvelous achievement, and Carl and Tony both are very popular, so they’re creating new moments and we’ll have to see how it all plays out.

Q.  There’s been an uptick in the television ratings.  I’m wondering is that what you expected?  Is that a slow surge to what you think will be more?  Is it less than you thought it would be?  What are you working on in the off-season that would be your main goals for next year?

BRIAN FRANCE:  We’ve always said that ratings go up and down because of many, many things.  The things we can control are showcasing the racing, telling our story, and giving the drivers some big moments to race for.  That will help us.  You never know how it all percentage- wise what really matters the most.

But we know that that’s the NASCAR we want.  We want to see these elevated performances, and they’re just fun to watch.  We want to see what’s happened.  I’m confident if we do that, and do a lot of other things, we will have better ratings and better attendance.

Q.  NASCAR has fined, at least four times that we know of, drivers for disparaging remarks they’ve made, and NASCAR did not go public with those fines.  Other leagues do.  They do publicly say you can’t talk about the officials.  You can’t talk about this or the league.  Why does NASCAR take the position that these matters should be private and not public?  Are there others that we don’t know about?

BRIAN FRANCE:  There could be.  That’s why they’re private, right?  Well, let me tell you what we’ve done in the last couple of years.  In the last couple of years we’ve taken a position that drivers are going to be able to speak their mind and criticize the sport way more than any other sport would allow.  So let’s start with that.

However, there have to be some limits.  We thought those limits were being exceeded in the last couple of years because you can’t denigrate the sport.  You just can’t do that.  We’re not going to accept that.

You know what is interesting, almost every driver has come up to me at one time or another and said I’m glad you did that, because I don’t like it when somebody just says something that is irresponsible about the sport.

Let me say one other portion of this.  They are perfectly fine to criticize anything we do, any call we make. They can say they don’t like it, they disagree with it.  We didn’t make the right call.  That’s fine.  But we’re not going to let anyone denigrate the sport, and that’s going to continue.

Whether we make the fines public or private, we didn’t see a benefit to making them public.  If there is some benefit to that, we’ll take a look at it.  But that is the reasoning behind the penalties.

Q.  But don’t you think there is harm when it comes out after and fans take the stance of why did they do this in secret?  What else are they doing in secret?  In fact we’re talking about secret fines today instead of your big game seven moment?

BRIAN FRANCE:  That’s up to you to what to write and be interested about.  I can only tell you that I take every question.  I never say no comment.  I’ve explained it.  If there’s a better way — sort of this idea that there are a bunch of things going on behind the curtain.  We’ve never been more transparent.  We’ve never had more of anything, and that is the way it should be.

If there’s a benefit to announcing them to the public and the media, we’ll take a look at them.  We just didn’t see a benefit at the time.  Maybe there is a benefit.

Q.  How much did the Kyle Busch situation at Texas concern you?  How do you balance boys-have-at-it in retaliation with what appears to be a non-definitive line?

BRIAN FRANCE:  That’s not accurate.  It was very concerning to all of us.  There was a swift and very is he penalty on that as you know.  There is a line and the drivers, and they may walk around and say sometimes that they’re not clear about it, but they know the line.

We have these conversations with them all the time.  What you’ve got to remember is this is a contact sport. So you’re going to – we thought a couple years ago that we were overregulating the events.  We wanted to give more authority back in the drivers’ hands, and that’s been good for NASCAR.

But there is always a limit.  You can’t do anything you want.  We will look at it.  We talked to the drivers.  If they’re close to the line, we have a conversation that day.  If they go over the line, we’ll deal with that too.

So this idea that there is no – nobody knows where the line is, not true.  Not accurate.

Q.  Brian, corporations all across the United States have been raising funds for the last years or so while you guys are looking for sponsorships.  What is NASCAR doing to get corporate treasurers to open up the purse strings and become sponsors at a time when NASCAR really needs the employment?

BRIAN FRANCE:  If the President of the United States is not getting them to do that, I’m not sure what we’re going to be able to do to figure that out.  But having said that, obviously we just held a green summit.  We were doing things that attract new companies, new technology to validate in our sport.  We’re renewing a lot of companies, and some companies – and it happens all the time, every year for us, will pull back their sponsorship or commitments or leave all together.

That is just the reality of having hundreds of companies involved in this sport.  But we’re working harder than ever with the teams and their business groups to tell the NASCAR story and the value that it brings to sponsors.  We’re having success with that.

I think if you ask the individual team owners, we’ve never had a more offensive strategy doing it together to bring in as many new companies as possible.

Q.  After the test you ran this week in Daytona, what are the goals you’re looking for for Daytona in February, and is one of them a virtual complete elimination of the tandem drafting?  Is that one of the things you’re after?

BRIAN FRANCE:  It is one of the things we are after.  We would prefer to eliminate tandem racing in the manner it exists today.  There is no question about that.  We are working on rolling back the clock to traditional Daytona, Talladega races.  We’ll have to see how that goes.  I think the majority of fans would like to see that and so would we.

Q.  You mentioned that you answer every question and you don’t duck anything.  There was a time when your grandfather and your father attended every race.  They did these press conferences almost every Saturday or Sunday behind the hauler or whatever.  We don’t see you very often.  We wonder why is it that you think the sport that you’re not needed at every weekend or just why are you not around more often for these press deals?

BRIAN FRANCE:  I frequently say, and I’ve said this before, if I thought that I was the last one out of every event and I turn the light off on the way out that that would grow the sport in some way, I would do it.

What we have is a different sport than it was 10, 15 years ago, and that’s real clear.  I don’t publish my schedule, but it’s pretty busy.  We feel like we’re managing the sport.  We know we’re managing the sport the best way that we need to to grow the sport.

Q.  Could there come a time in the future where all the penalties are transparent?  That they’re all black and white so it can be reported as normal rather than just finding things out on the internet secondhand?  Secondly, Bob earlier mentioned the Kyle Busch incident.  Can you explain to me other than Brian Vickers’ situation last week where he was not under caution as Kyle Busch was with Ron Hornaday at Texas, why Brian Vickers, something wasn’t done about him when he, in fact, just came out of nowhere and plowed into Matt Kenseth for no apparent reason other than retaliation?

BRIAN FRANCE:  Well, there is something being done about that.  We’re having a conversation about that, and they are very different circumstances.  One was on a mile and a half track, a lot faster.  One was under caution, which is very significant different.

Racing accidents under green are always subjective.  Even though you may say this one wasn’t, but typically there is always a debate about who went where.  Ron Hornaday was racing for a championship, and you know we value that greatly.

So there are lots of differences.  It doesn’t mean though that we didn’t think the line was almost met or somewhat close, whereby, we would have a conversation to explain that.  We will be having a conversation with both Brian and Matt regarding really what happened in Martinsville the week before, which is a short track.

A lot of contact happened in that particular race.  Like I said earlier, there is a line.  The drivers know where the line is.  If we should be guessing about that for some reason, we’re happy to sit down and walk them through it.

Q.  Ricky Stenhouse is probably going to win the Nationwide championship tomorrow.  The decision NASCAR made to limit drivers to one championship run, has NASCAR gotten what they want out of that or is that policy going to be reviewed at any point?

BRIAN FRANCE:  All policies are reviewed, but I think it’s worked the way we want it to.  We want to showcase the young drivers in their own series and still have the participation with drivers with a lot of experience.  That’s exactly what we’ve gotten.

I think it’s been good for the young drivers to get some different notoriety.  The honor and prestige of winning a championship and the money that comes with that and all the rest has been a good thing.

Q.  Going back to the driver fines things.  When you say you don’t see a benefit to that, can you explain why there is no benefit to that?  It would seem like if you’re punishing somebody for disparaging the sport, you would want to let people know we’re punishing this guy because we don’t like what he said.  In this room, you’re monitoring social media, all the fans want to know more about it and want to understand why.  It just feeds to the perception that you’re an autocratic regime that doles out punishment in a capricious manner.  Why would you not want to tell people here’s why we’re doing it?

BRIAN FRANCE:  Sure.  I’ll explain it.  We went for 50-something years and never had a system to fine anybody for disparaging remarks in the sport.  We’re the only sport on the planet that had that.  So we simply really in the last couple of years changed that policy because we thought we needed to.

.  So it’s a new policy.  It’s not something that’s been around for a long time.  But like I said, we’re happy to look at that in the off-season.  See what benefit there would be.  When it comes to social media, nobody is investing more, doing more, encouraging the drivers and everybody in the industry to participate on social media.  Say what you want and all the rest.

So, you know, we ought not look at one policy and try to define how NASCAR approaches things.

Q.  What’s the primary benefit to not telling people?

BRIAN FRANCE:  The way we looked at it, what would be the benefit?  The drivers know exactly what we’re after.  We have these annual meetings with them, right?  And then we have semi-annual meetings with them, and we meet with them every weekend at the track.  We have formal meetings in the off-season.

So they know exactly what we expect out of them.  When they don’t handle that, the only way we can control that is obviously a fining system.  But look, don’t panic over this.  We’ll look at it in the off-season, if we need to change it, we’ll change it.  Not a big deal.

Q.  You mentioned earlier about the Chase format and that you’re always adjusting.  Is there a good chance that the Chase format will be tweaked yet again for the following season?

BRIAN FRANCE:  It’s possible.  I don’t know.  We take those ideas throughout the year.  We really look at them as carefully as we can.  Then what we do is we run them past the team owners and drivers and other – everybody else in the industry in the off-season before we would do anything, and that’s exactly what we did last year going into this year.

We looked at all kinds of things and settled on this as a nice step forward to simplifying the point system. Hopefully getting what we have, which is a more competitive Chase, and we’ll look at it again.  I don’t know where we’ll end up.

Q.  As far as the Chase goes, it’s been a really exciting Chase.  As far as when you came up with the idea of the chase and then you tweaked it.  Did you expect that kind of result what do you feel about the future?

BRIAN FRANCE:  I actually expected more years like this, frankly.  I couldn’t imagine somebody as incredibly dominating as Jimmie has been in a five-year run, so you have to give him an enormous amount of credit.

But our expectation is that given the balance of things that we have 43 cars at every event and given the nature of auto racing and how it unfolds and some of the traditions that you have to obviously respect, I think the current system and more tweaks will always come and we’ll just have to see what they are.

Q.  We’re here for the first time actually, so we’re growing interesting in NASCAR covering, and I would like you to talk about the growing of NASCAR in other countries than the USA, like Brazil with Nelson Piquet and Miguel Paludo?

BRIAN FRANCE:  I think it’s great.  I was in Mexico City Wednesday and Thursday working on that very issue. We’ve got an Hispanic driver from Mexico running in the truck race this weekend.  Our diversity program focusing on that.

So any time we are able to attract a talented driver, Juan Pablo being an example or anyone else, I think that broadens up the sport.  Makes us more relevant to whatever home country that they’re from, and we view that as a very good thing.

Q.  Specifically in terms of what Brad said as far as EFI goes, what was it about that that NASCAR thought crossed the line?  It wasn’t a case of what Denny did in impugning the integrity of the sanctioning body, but more or less expressing opinion on the technological direction of the sport at that particular point. Could you at least elaborate on that?

BRIAN FRANCE:  I can’t elaborate on that because we didn’t issue a public fine on that.  You can read into what people say just like I can.  When you cross a line that denigrates the direction of the sport or the quality of the racing, we’re not going to accept that.  Not going to accept it.

Happy to have any other criticism, any other complaint, happy to hear them all.  If I own a restaurant and I say you know what, the food in my restaurant is not very good, we’re not going to accept it.  It’s as simple as that.

Q.  In light of that, will you be issuing a secret fine to Jaime Allison of Ford Motor Company for saying almost the exact same thing as Brad Keselowski did this week?

BRIAN FRANCE:  Jaime Allison doesn’t participate in NASCAR.  I mean, he does in his corporate role, but come on.

Q.  Sort of following up on that.  One of the problems with the EFI, the electronic fuel injection topic, I think is the economy’s bad and it’s going to be expensive or be another expense.  I think that’s what Brad was talking about and we’ve been talking about in here and engine builders have been talking about.  It is an extra expense at a bad time.  Is it something that could be postponed for another year or so?  Does it have to be right now?

BRIAN FRANCE:  Well, we announced it several years ago.  These are not the things that you can just pull off the shelf and put them back on and off.  We have agreements with suppliers that have to be met.

You’ve got to remember why are we doing that?  Because we want to be more relevant to the car manufacturers and other green technologies as well.  We always said that we will do that in a balanced way.  We’re not going to be like some other divisions around the world that are heavily emphasized on that on technology.

But we’re going to have to do more than we did in the past.  It’s not because we feel like doing it or want to put additional costs on anyone, but because they’re accepting a lot of money from the car manufacturers, and that’s what’s under the hood on cars today, and we have to be mindful of that as we make policy.

FastScripts by ASAP Sports

- NASCAR, Press Release

Brian France, CEO and Chairman of NASCAR, speaks at a press conference at Charlotte Motor Speedway in the Media Center Deadline Room on May 20 in Charlotte, N.C. - Photo Credit: John Harrelson, Getty Images for NASCAR

An interview with BRIAN FRANCE

BRIAN FRANCE: Thank you. I’ll start out by saying many of you have come up to me and said through the years that you feel like the media sometimes gets a little short-changed, doesn’t quite get the treatment that you deserve. Looking at that TV and the screen out front, the new screen, you guys maybe right. That is quite a big screen, and quite a resolution.

On a serious note, we’re almost not at the halfway point, but we’re headed that way here at the All-Star break. And obviously we got off to a fast start at Daytona with a young, dynamic winner and a great race.

This week, of course, today is NASCAR day, we’re very proud of the money raised going to children — mostly children who need it the most, and not to mention the moneys just granted to the tornado victims throughout Alabama, Tennessee, and Mississippi and other parts of the industry having chipped into that.

Audio: 2011 NASCAR Sprint All-Star Weekend Q & A with NASCAR CEO, Brian France

So that’s good to see, and it’s good to see that NASCAR day continues to make good things happen for people who need it. Of course we’re also celebrating the Hall of Fame of the second class here on Monday night. It’s a great class. The community is really supportive. I was at the event Wednesday night, so we’re looking for a really fun and deserving night on Monday night.

I understand that attendance is up for tomorrow night as well as going into Memorial Day weekend and the Coke 600. So that’s nice to see the track here in Charlotte do doing a really good job.

I would just tell you a few things and I’ll take questions in a moment. But about competition, which obviously is the centerpiece of what we do. If you look back, and I would go back not only to the first part of this year, but really go back to most of last year where you saw a rise in the competition level, lead changes, new winners, very competitive chase down the stretch between Denny and Jimmie Johnson and so on. That’s carried on to this year.

So you’ve seen some resurgence by some of the drivers who mean the most to the NASCAR fan base, and obviously that would be Dale Jr., who is, I think, fourth in points now, contending for wins. And it looks like he could contend for a championship if he continues to improve with his team.

There’s been a lot of excitement, and I know we’ll have some questions on some of the mixing it up on the racetrack in recent weeks. Not surprising, because things are tighter, the competition level is higher, emotions are higher, so that doesn’t surprise us to see that that’s the case.

So a good part of that is exciting and great for the sport. Obviously there are limits to what we think how far that can go, and we’ve shown those limits recently.

If you look at the Kevin Harvick incident, which was not even a racing incident, it was after the event, where you saw us take action and step in. You saw us take action as well with discussions with Juan Pablo and Ryan Newman as well. So there are always limits, but on balance, the most important thing is how tight the competition is.

I’ll say one other thing about that. You know, the wildcard format where wins are going to matter as we go into July and August and close out the regular season, you know, you could have some really interesting things happen with some drivers like Regan Smith or others that are going — who were counted out before, but they have a win. They maybe have more wins, and that could be a factor, probably will be a factor.

So I think if you talk to anybody who is in the know, that you would get a very good report card on the competition. I’ve always said that’s the steak on the plate for us.

Then the final thing is that we mentioned to you some time ago that we had engaged in some reviews of things within the industry that we think we can improve on. They range from the experience at the track, the things we can do at the league level, and things the team owners can do differently and better to serve our fans.

Those reviews are in. They’re good, they’re constructive. We’ll be sharing those with the team owners here shortly. We have shared it with a number of tracks already so far. So we’d like to think that we’re our own good self critic in some areas that we think we can improve on. So with that, I’ll be happy to take some questions.

Q. I’m wondering where you personally fall on the boys-have-at-it issue? It’s a little tricky in that NASCAR has to maintain law and order, but you get all this outside interest and you bring all these new eyeballs and it gets people talking and it’s a real water cooler thing. So where do you personally fall, and what is the proper way to manage that?

BRIAN FRANCE: Well, I think — that’s a good question. I think there are limits. You saw one of the limits is that if you put anyone in danger, like what happened with Kevin Harvick and Kyle Busch where it was after the race had happened.

I think it’s important to note if you look through NASCAR’s history, one of the videos that showed the most Wednesday night was the famous finish at Daytona with Richard Petty and David Pearson where they obviously hit each other and spun out in the grass. You go through our history and that’s part of it, contact, emotion, in particular late in the race.

We’re like anybody. We can over-officiate and over-regulate in some circumstances, over a 60-year period of time. And I think our point was a couple years ago we thought we might be in a pattern of that, and we wanted to put it more in the drivers’ hands.

We never said there were no limits to that. You just can’t go around with a missile and a weapon out there. But if you’re having contact, that’s part of NASCAR. So it’s tough for us, but that’s what we do. And it’s tough for any sport to have certain areas of the game or in auto racing that are subjective as to what is too
much, but we’ll figure that out.

We’re going to remain, obviously, a contact sport, and we’re going to remain with the basic philosophy that we’re putting more of it in the drivers’ hands. If they go over a line we think is there, we’ll deal with that.

Q. Despite the fact that we’ve seen some really incredible competition and the product is as strong as I can ever remember on the racetrack, Jeff Belskus, the CEO and president of Indianapolis Motor Speedway, had a comment in the papers that said we don’t disclose numbers, but you saw a lot of empty seats here last year are, and I think you’re going to see more of it this year. Is there some sort of problem with the relationship there when it was like the second most prestigious races on the Sprint Cup tour? Are you getting some sort of kickback from Indy at all?

BRIAN FRANCE: Well, no, the relationship is fine. I think, obviously, there were a couple years there where we had not our best day in terms of the tire problems and other things. They also had other issues that had nothing to do with us and other series had race there, and they’ve had management changes and so on. I know they’re trying to figure that out.

There are going to be some markets, based on the economy and based on other circumstances, that we will be off in attendance. There will be a lot of areas we’ll be on in attendance. I said this weekend is an example of that in Phoenix and many markets. Kentucky will be sold out. Iowa do will very, very well, all in that mid-west region too, by the way.

So we know the economy’s still not perfect in places like Michigan and Florida, California, for sure. So, while we’re not economists, we understand when our fans are going through tough times, and we’re going to work with the tracks to get ticket pricing and other things that might help that cause.

Q. There’s been some comments from drivers, I guess most notably from Tony Stewart, talking about wanting more specific parameters about what they can and can’t do in this new environment. And I realize a lot of this is subjective, but is it possible to say you can’t do this, you can do that. Can you draw better lines there?

BRIAN FRANCE: We think not. We think there is a 60-year history of how we officiate the events. Most of our top officials — and certainly Mike Helton who is in charge every weekend and has been at the helm for a decade and longer. So we have a lot of — this shouldn’t be a big surprise for anyone to try to read us and how we’re going to officiate the events.

We said late in the event if your car’s faster than somebody else and there is some contact and somebody gets by, that’s NASCAR racing. We celebrate that throughout our history. Look here at the All-Star. Some of the great finishes have all been with contact – Earnhardt and Bill Elliot, going to the grass. That’s just the way it is.

The drivers know us well enough to understand, and they certainly have conversations that we’ll be happy to reiterate our situation. But there is still going to be subjectivity. There is no set of eight things we’re going to be looking at, because that would be impossible. It’s not practical.

Q. If you could address the health of the NASCAR Home Tracks program and how that would affect or relate to the health of the sport overall? What is that relationship like and how about the health of the home tracks program?

BRIAN FRANCE: Well, I think two things. The home track area of the business has improved in the last couple of years, in particularly the regional events like the K&N Series, who showcased throughout those home tracks, and gave them a big night.

One of the things that’s happened with our regional series in our home tracks is we’re starting to get — you’ve maybe heard me say that some of the drivers in our diversity program who were in the K&N series, who were in those home tracks — one being Darrell Wallace, who I know is winning in some very competitive situations. He is going to, I’m sure be a national series, one of the four national series shortly. And if that happens, and if he’s successful, I hope he is, it would be a tremendous boost for us, and a tremendous accomplishment for him.

Other drivers like Sergio Pena and others who are coming from the home tracks, coming from the regional series, and they’re getting opportunities and showing their skills and that’s going to be a good thing?

Q. Following up on the attendance. During the famous realignment news conference eight years ago, your father said he didn’t like seeing empty seats at racetracks and that was a big factor at making a schedule. In light of some of these tracks struggling such as Dover with three straight smaller crowds, and barely full on Sunday, where does NASCAR stand on that? Could you still strip track of races or do they get some dispensation as the economy recovers?

BRIAN FRANCE: My father was pretty forward thinking. But even he I’m not sure saw the financial crisis that we had in ’07 and ’08 come. So that tends to modify your thinking of how you view these things.

Look, Dover, had a tremendously bad weather forecast. It’s a miracle that that event — and I’m not making total excuses here — but it’s a miracle on Saturday and Sunday that think got the races off at all. So there were no-shows, there was no walk-up, they didn’t get any help from the weather.

We’ll take a look at it because he was right. We certainly don’t like to see empty seats. We like to see as many fans enjoying this great competition as possible, but we’re also realistic that some things are going to take time. There’s not many sports that aren’t being affected in one way or the other in attendance. And they’re having to do a lot of things, so are we, so are the tracks, to be sensitive.

We have high gas prices that are upon us, and that is certainly another factor for our fans to consider. We certainly don’t want to see empty seats. We’ll be working with tracks to get the best dates possible, and we’ll go from there.

Q. It seems like this year especially but late last year too, mid-last year about that time, there’s been a new focus by NASCAR, generally you guys, not necessarily industry, but by the powers that be in the company to embrace what NASCAR was because for a time there was a shift to try to go be something else. How much have you guys talked about that, embracing the history and being what it is?

BRIAN FRANCE: Well, I wouldn’t agree with that. I don’t think there was a time when we didn’t think the best racing in the world was important or that our core fan wasn’t important. That just wouldn’t be accurate. Obviously, we have a job to do which is to satisfy the core fan in every way we can possibly and we’ll try to do that. We’re also trying to be appealing in ways to new fans.

Sometimes there is a different path that you have to be on, slightly different, to accomplish both things. But you’re never off of one path for long, and they’re never very far apart. So we’re focused on being — our history couldn’t be more important. The Hall of Fame being exemplary proof of that on Monday and through the week.

We’ll always keep our eye on the ball. But on the other hand, we’re reacting to social media, we’re reacting to the digital media landscape that’s changing quickly, and most of you in this room know it better than I.

We’re reacting to how young people, in particular, are taking in their favorite sports or learning about their favorite sports. It’s very different than it was ten years ago, say five years ago.

You just can’t have your head down when all these things are going on your way to trying to grow a fan base.

Q. It’s no longer unusual for a Formula 1 driver to come to NASCAR. I’m wondering what it means to have this influx. Does it matter to NASCAR? Is there a benefit to it? Is there something about it that maybe detracts from the fan base?

BRIAN FRANCE: Not at all. I don’t think the tracks at all. I think it shows you the level of competition that the best drivers in the world want to be a part of. And that’s been going on, as you said, for some time. Juan Pablo will probably be at the head of the line in that regard.

So, no, I think it’s great. Some will have more success than others. But the idea that they look at this style of racing and level of competition on par with anybody in the world, that’s exactly what we’d expect.

Q. Wonder if you could assess is how you think the new points are working out so far in light of the fact that drivers now have to pick one series to run a championship in? Is there any consideration to maybe run in an All-Star type event for Nationwide or trucks?

BRIAN FRANCE: I don’t know about an All-Star Race. It’s been talked about and discussed before. I think the points, I assume, you’re speaking about the Nationwide restrictions for the regulars to race for the championship. I think that will come into better play for us later in the year. I think it’s added something, no question, to the events.

I think you’re going to see us take a slow, steady look at making sure that we’re getting the most out of the Nationwide Series, which needs to be analogous to college football and being able to build some Stars that come from Saturday to Sunday for us.

This was a big step, but it’s not going to be the only step, and we’ll be looking at ways to enhance the young drivers and their talents, and new owners, for that matter, in the Nationwide and other national series, that don’t just get this, you know, perforation of Cup drivers to the point where it just homogenizes Sunday and Saturday and doesn’t deliver the benefit that’s we like to see with showcasing yuck drivers and young talent and young owners, new owners.

Q. Earlier Jimmie Johnson this week was commenting on the fact that he’s the number one athlete of America’s most influential athletes by Forbes magazine, which I’m sure you know of. But do you feel like — he had said that he thought a note that NASCAR was finally getting its due. I’m wondering if you feel that’s indeed true, and if you think the perception of NASCAR, if you think the momentum is starting to turn a bit?

BRIAN FRANCE: I think, listen, he’s won five consecutive championships at the highest level of
competition in American Motorsports and I would argue around the world, so he’s deserving of that position by Forbes.

I can’t say that we’ve turned the kind of corners I’d like to see the sport turn, that’s why we’re doing so many things to be a better contributor and better partner in that area with our IMC, that I know most of you are very familiar with now. And we’re led by Brett Jukes and we’re hiring some of the best talent that we can find to help tell the NASCAR story to mediums across all of these new places.

Can I say we’ve achieved anything close to what I’d like to see? No. But, obviously, all Motorsports would like to have our problems, but our problems are challenges and we’re going to meet them head on and that’s our job. Grow this sport, tell the story, showcase our drivers in the best competition in the world.

Q. Roger Goodell has done a number of conference calls this year with season ticket holders for various NFL teams with fans to talk to them about whether it’s the lockout issues or particular issues they have about the sport. Why haven’t you done something like that or why couldn’t you do something like that with say season ticket holders at the various tracks throughout the circuit?

BRIAN FRANCE: You know, I’m sure he was trying to reassure his fan base on some issues that he was working on, and I assume that is the labor issues. I don’t know. I wasn’t on any of those calls.

The tracks sell the tickets here, and have, and they know their customers best. If I could add something to a call with our fan base and their ticket customers, I’d be happy to do it.

I haven’t been asked to do it. I think we tend to let the tracks have that relationship, and that will remain until there is a need to do something different.

Q. It’s appeared that being so sponsor dependent that NASCAR might have been hesitant to embrace the split-screen commercials. Did FOX inform you that they were going to to do it, and what do you think about ESPN’s plans?

BRIAN FRANCE: We’ve been informed. Obviously it’s not a brand-new concept. It was tried a decade ago or so with some mixed reviews. And they’re trying some different takes at it. I think — listen, if it enhances the viewing experience and works for the advertisers, then we’re all open to that.

I think we’re going to trust our TV partners to try some new things and they’ll be as critical as we will be in terms of how it’s working and we’ll have to see how it goes.

Q. On a related note, I’m curious. The last television deal you signed in December ’05 for a deal that started in ’07, are you going to follow a similar time line then? Can you talk about how that side by side might affect the next negotiations?

BRIAN FRANCE: Yeah, I don’t know. It’s too early to tell how that would affect the negotiations, because we don’t know how it’s going to work commercially or otherwise.

Look, there is no question that the television landscape with what’s happened with Comcast and NBC coming together, and recent deals, the Pac-12 deal and others, that sports content has never been more important to all of the networks who are in the business, and some new ones that are getting into the business.

But our first obligation and hope is that we get renewals done with our incumbents. When that day comes where that’s not possible, which I hope it doesn’t come because I think we have the best lineup of broadcast partners, we’ll deal with that and we’ll have to see how the broadcast affects it.

Q. You talked earlier about NASCAR paying attention to social media changing, interests of younger audiences. I was wondering whether you’ve decided whether to do this or not, is shortening some of the races on the table at all?

BRIAN FRANCE: We have shortened races. Over the last five or six years, we’ve shortened several, including some Nationwide Series.

So, yeah, I think we’d be open to that if it works for the tracks and works for our network partners. And, obviously, if the fan base wants that, that will be something that will be case by case. But are we open to that? Yes. Have we done it before? Yes.

Q. What does probation mean and why was the All-Star Race included with Kevin and Kyle? A lot of fans are confused by that and think maybe because it’s a non-points event that it shouldn’t be included.

BRIAN FRANCE: What probation means is there is a different set of eyes and expectations that are placed on a driver who has been placed on probation. They’re going to have a more limited flexibility in how we’re going to officiate them should they be in a similar area that they have just violated.

Why it’s important to have consistent rules even through the All-Star Races is there are safety elements that are inter-affected between events. There are lots of different reasons why you just wouldn’t want to say we’re not going to have a standard set of NASCAR rules in the All-Star Race.

Keep in mind, given that there are no points at stake, by definition, it gets more aggressive. We know that. That’s fine. Drivers take more chances, they’re not worried about where they are in the point standings, so it’s going to be more aggressive and more competitive.

But if we took the lid off and said there are no rules or don’t worry about any ramifications that might extend into next week at all, then we believe that — as I said earlier in my remarks — there has to be limits to all of this. That would be above the limits that we believe going into an event would make any sense. Thank you.

FastScripts by ASAP Sports

- NASCAR, Press Release

Brian France On ESPN's NASCAR Now and SportsCenter

On SportsCenter, France told anchor Kevin Negandhi that the sport has momentum. “We started off with a really neat champion in the Daytona 500, Trevor Bayne, a young kid with an old team, so we had some neat storylines. Some of the drivers that had been struggling, like Jeff Gordon, have already won and they’ve put notice that they’re going to contend for the championship. Jimmie Johnson could do something historic and get to six, and then Dale Earnhardt Jr. is running well, he’s well within our playoff structure to make it, and he’s competing at a high level, so we see a lot of neat things going on right now.”

Some more quotes from France’s appearance on SportsCenter:

What does it mean to the sport of NASCAR when Dale Earnhardt Jr. is succeeding?

“He’s the biggest franchise in NASCAR. It would be great if he continues to figure out the chemistry of the team. He’s done that, and I think his confidence is finally back to where it was a few years ago. He went through a pretty good slump, so it’s nice to see him competing at a high level.”

Why do you think Jimmie Johnson doesn’t get enough credit?

“I don’t think that’s something he runs around trying to promote and figure out. I think he just puts his game face on and wins when he needs to win. He’s a great guy, he’s represented us well, and we’ll see what he does on (championship) No. 6.”

What’s your favorite thing when you go out to the track?

“The size of it, the huge crowds that file in, the energy level when the green flag comes out. It’s just a different feeling than perhaps any other sport.”

France later joined part of the one-hour Monday roundtable edition of NASCAR Now to discuss the sport with ESPN NASCAR analyst Ricky Craven, ESPN.com senior writer Ed Hinton, NASCAR Now lead reporter Marty Smith and host Allen Bestwick.

About NASCAR on ESPN:

ESPN produces comprehensive, multi-platform coverage featuring telecasts of the final 17 NASCAR Sprint Cup races, including the 10-race “Chase for the NASCAR Sprint Cup. Additionally, ESPN2 is the television home of the NASCAR Nationwide Series. ESPN’s NASCAR coverage extends to ESPN.com, SportsCenter, ESPN the Magazine, ESPN Classic, ESPNEWS, ESPN Deportes, ESPN Radio and ESPN International, among other ESPN platforms. ESPN aired 262 NASCAR Cup Races over a 20-year period starting in 1981 and returned to NASCAR coverage in 2007. The network’s award-winning, live flag-to-flag coverage on ESPN has been honored with 19 Sports Emmy Awards, as well as many industry honors. It is widely credited for helping to popularize the sport nationwide.

- ESPN Communications, Press Release

NASCAR Chairman and CEO Brian France answers media questions - Photo Credit: Jason Smith/Getty Images for NASCAR

Brian, at this time I’m turn the floor over to you for some opening comments.

BRIAN FRANCE: Thanks, Kerry. Good afternoon, everyone. We’re just having on our off week here a little bit of a discussion about the start of the year, some of the things that are going on, some progress reports in a few areas. I’m going to reserve most of the time to take as many questions as we can.

But obviously in general with a very dynamic Daytona 500, having a really young star born, having the iconic 21 Wood Brothers team in Victory Lane, with 74 lead changes, very interesting way the competition played out during the Daytona 500. We started there and then on to Phoenix, getting Jeff Gordon back in Victory Lane, record lead changes again there, attendance up across the board.

Audio: March, 2011 Q & A Session with NASCAR Chairman & CEO, Brian France

Obviously, the competition has never been better. That’s been brewing in terms of going in the right direction for a number of months, dating back well into last year where, as you know, we made a number of changes in the new car, which is not a new car anymore, but to get the car racing as good as we possibly can.

There’s still some challenges for us and for many, many sports, many companies with still an uncertain outlook for the economy. As we said all along, we’re not economists, we’re not building around a doom-and-gloom, robust economy, we’re doing what we think we need to do in general terms.

Obviously fuel prices are never helpful to our fans or anybody who needs to drive to an event, or anywhere. So those things are always out there.

The last thing that I would mention above competition that I think is important, we said during the last couple years that when the economy does what it does, you have some challenges, that’s the time to look around and look deep at some of the areas for the future that you think you might be able to improve on.

Those reviews range, as you know, from the communications review, which brought us our IMC structure, Brett Jewkes, a number of new hires that are coming, has obviously been completed and we’re implementing that on behalf of the industry and ourselves.

Then everything that would range from digital media, how effective are we in that new medium, range from the fans’ experience at track, away from the track, trying to really get connected to our future in some meaningful ways.

Those reviews – I’ve sat through them all – are going very well. They’re going to give us good ways to make sure this sport keeps on getting bigger, better and grows in the future.

With that I’ll turn it over to questions.

KERRY THARP: Thank you, Brian. We’ll open it up now to questions for Brian France.

Q. Brian, I wanted to ask you in regards to the TV ratings, different people said different things about them, I know there were challenges last year from going against the Winter Olympics, the Daytona pothole, the Vegas race. I wanted to ask you, shouldn’t the ratings have been up this much anyway based off of not having that competition? People in the industry talk about the long-term broader picture. While the numbers are up from last year, they’re down from 2009. How do you view that?

BRIAN FRANCE: I’ve always said ratings are a function of many things: the competition, how you’re viewed at the time by the fan base in a given moment, how the actual race is playing out. There’s all kinds of things that go into it.

No one around here is celebrating. We’re obviously pleased we’re up dramatically in our ratings. But we know that is an ebb-and-flow thing. We’re focused on a lot of things that will give us growth down the road. We’re going to work on those, not get too excited or too down.

I look at the interest level of the sport, and that’s growing after having peaked and maybe dropped back a little bit for some reasons a couple years ago. The general interest level is going up and that’s what we’re going to be working on, is creating new fans.

Q. You have the races where you grow ratings and attendance, then you have the off week. Can you detail the reasons why you have this off week so early in the season? Are you going to change that for next year?

BRIAN FRANCE: Well, it’s historically how many events in the calendar we want to run, regardless when they ran. Historically it has been around this time where we do have an off weekend.

Arguably you would like to have that come down eight or ten races later. But that’s just how the schedule and the climate issues that we face with certain markets and everything else has played out.

The reason for changing it is mostly driven that the other sports calendars are going to change on us – not just the NFL, but maybe some other things. So we’re trying to get into the right date.

It also does accomplish, when we change next year, moving back the 500 a week, we’ll eliminate the early schedule gap here. That will probably be a good thing.

Q. Brian, a lot of feedback that we in the media get from fans is about the post-race show or the lack of a post-race show. There seems to be a sense of frustration that fans invest so many hours into an event, then they get under 10 minutes of reaction after from the drivers that they’ve been watching. Is that something that NASCAR is hearing from your fan council? Do you have any input with FOX to try to solve this dilemma fans are faced with?

BRIAN FRANCE: We do have a fair amount of programming that happens with the SPEED Channel throughout the post race, even into the evening typically.

But, yeah, I think generally speaking we would agree, that it would be nicer to have a longer post-race. But if you think about it, most sports don’t have a particularly long post end of a game, whatever else. The networks don’t stick around for an additional half hour. It’s not something FOX should be thinking about because, after all, that’s just not the norm with network or even cable television.

Once the game is over, there’s typically a short post-race. You hope the rest of it, social media, NASCAR online, places to digest good post-race information is where they go.

Q. Several of the manufacturers have talked about the next generation of car being redesigned for 2013. Can you bring us up to speed on how that project is coming along?

BRIAN FRANCE: Going well. Obviously lots of dialogue with the car manufacturers. We’re addressing those needs, which is the need to keep the competition and safety and all that stuff where it is today, which is at a very high level. At the same time, evolving the car to give them even more identity with their manufacturer make.

There’s a way to do both. It kind of coincides with some of their new model launches and some things. So we’re working pretty closely, as you can imagine.

It’s going well. That’s the beauty of the R&D center today. We can do multiple tasking with big, big initiatives, and do them hopefully all fairly well.

Q. What do you see as the biggest impact on television ratings? Sponsorship revenues you and the tracks can earn or now are they becoming more critical on the rights fees as you start negotiating in the next couple years?

BRIAN FRANCE: We spend a lot of time looking at obviously traditional broadcast television. Our cable partners are critically important. We spent a lot of time recently looking at the other media, which is social and digital media, where that’s all going, where people are getting information, content and everything else.

We have a plan. We have a robust plan in the long run. We’ll try to capture both. But one of the ratings impact is people are getting their news, updates, their fix, if you will, in lots of different ways today. We’re going to want to, as a sport, make sure that we’re taking advantage of all of them.

Q. Brian, can you address the ethanol situation and what challenges have you faced with the implementation to the new fuel in the three top series?

BRIAN FRANCE: Well, the fact that we haven’t had a discussion is evidentiary proof of how well it’s working. We couldn’t be happier with it. From the early testing, we got good performance numbers. The teams certainly think it’s working well. It obviously takes us another step. Especially now that you see energy prices going where they’re going, it takes us a way down the road with a real biofuel that we’re using in the car. They’ve just been a really good partner so far and it’s going well.

Q. Will the elimination of the open week early continue after next season? Will the Daytona 500 still be moved up in years past this? Can you tell me the thought process why there always seems to be an open week early.

BRIAN FRANCE: As I said, it comes from the fact that we want to have 36 events, plus the All-Star Race, all that stuff. It’s just a logistical matter where you can place events, February, March, in some parts of the country. There was an open weekend even though it might not be ideal. We’re going to move that. It’s going to fix that, although it wasn’t the main driving reason.

In my view, all things being equal, we’d probably like to be racing this weekend. But I don’t believe that to be a significant challenge for us because we happen to have an open week. We have a long season, we’re going to have some open weeks.

In the long run, with the 500 moving, it will by definition take care of that. Our schedules are year-to-year, but you typically can see we have a lot of continuity.

Q. I asked you earlier in the year of the potential of an NFL lockout. How do you think NASCAR is now positioned should that happen? Why do you think we’re seeing the growth in the younger demos so soon?

BRIAN FRANCE: First of all, my hope is that they will figure that out. I am not close to that any more than anyone else is. We’re wishing that all of the leagues do well. That is just the reality of how we look at that. We don’t pay any attention to where they are, where they’re not. It’s obviously out of our control.

The younger demo is the bigger question. That’s good. I think having a young winner, and Jeff Gordon runs up our young fan base, and then Junior, arguably he’s competitive more than he was a year ago. Probably a lot of reasons. I think the kind of racing we had, just to get off to kind of a good start.

But the young demo is something we’re going to keep working at. It goes to candidly reaching new young fans. This is not a one-dimensional effort here just to get people to tune in on television. It’s to get young fans really interested for the long run in every aspect of enjoying NASCAR the way we want them to enjoy NASCAR.

Q. I’m intrigued by the schedule-making process. This year you added testing to Daytona. You can actually point to that as a catalyst for a big Speedweeks to where we are now. What is the process that you go through as you look at the 2012 schedule right now?

BRIAN FRANCE: Well, you look at historical dates obviously. We have been a sport that’s tried to build continuity around that. A lot of other motorsports, that’s not necessarily so important. With us, it is. Then you look at the broader sports calendar, the notable big events that we’re always looking at: the Masters, obviously the Super Bowl, other major events throughout the year that you want to make sure that you’re putting your events in the right place as to get everybody the most room to be successful that you can.

It’s all those factors. And the last point would be we have some limits as to moving dates around beyond even the continuity of events, which we’ve changed when we’ve had to. There are seasonality issues. You can’t run a race in Phoenix, Arizona, in July. You’re not running Cincinnati in February. On and on it goes. There’s a lot of things that have to go into making up the ideal schedule.

Q. We know you’ve been a big supporter of the diversity program. Where does that stand now? Has it taken a little longer to get minority drivers into the top three series?

BRIAN FRANCE: I really didn’t have a timeline. After all, there are limited seats available in the first place. But I will say that when we’ve had to change the program to maximize it, we’ve ended up partnering up with Revolution Racing, which has given some of these talented, diverse drivers a better opportunity to show their skills. It’s not just giving them the opportunity, it’s giving them the right opportunity.

I will tell you Darrell Wallace is a young African American driver that’s winning. He’s doing that now. We’re going to have a breakthrough in that area. It’s going to be on my watch, and I’ll be very proud of that when that occurs.

Q. A couple of the drivers after recent races have expressed a level of concern about the level of rough driving going on out there these days, especially at places that don’t normally feature that. Do you share their concern or do you think it’s normal racing?

BRIAN FRANCE: No, I don’t share that concern at all. They’re the best guys in the world. We’ve said, You have to mix it up, this is a contact sport. We feel really good about that.

It’s made the racing better. They’ve got to figure that out. They’re doing that largely. I would say, too, with the wild card situation, where the last two spots are going to be decided by wins, if you don’t happen to have the perfect top-10 performance in the first 26 events, I think you saw the disappointment with Tony not winning when he thought he should have won last weekend, he now counts that because he doesn’t start fast. He may need that.

I think you’re going to see an escalation of that. That’s what great competition is. I’m actually happy to hear people complaining about that. It means it’s working.

Q. Daytona obviously saw kind of a different style of racing than in the past. What did you think of that? Do you like that better or worse than the 30-car packs that we’d seen before?

BRIAN FRANCE: To tell you the truth, we were curious, too. It was a phenomenon. We’d never seen anything like that. We were curious going into Sunday. I remember talking to Mike in the tower. We didn’t know how that was going to play out.

But 74 lead changes, dramatic racing all the way through, although it looked a little bit different, the competition level went up. We look at a lot of things to come to that, but we like it. It’s different. But, generally speaking, if competition goes up, the races are exciting, we’re going to like it.

Q. What do you think was the single most important factor in getting the buzz and the ratings up? Was it Trevor winning? Was it Jeff Gordon, Danica?

BRIAN FRANCE: You know, I don’t know. We can’t monitor things and measure things that closely. We went out in a strong way, as you know, in 2010 down to the last laps. We hadn’t had that in a few years. You want to go out strong. It’s really important to have a good playoff, a good finale. You see where that’s helped the Super Bowls of late, which have been very competitive. So have some other series, other sports. You want to go out on a real high. We have a very short window to launch. If you’re going out a little bit down, it’s a little harder to ramp up.

So it’s probably all those things.

Q. Are there any things that are worth pointing out innovative that NASCAR is going to do like what they’re doing this weekend in the 1:00 special that will showcase on an off weekend a culmination of tape that hadn’t been seen before? Are there other things like that coming up?

BRIAN FRANCE: You know, the programming schedule, it’s pretty set. There will be a couple special shows that you’ll see. One will be on the ethanol and the biofuel transformation we’re working on. By and large, we’ll zero in on the events. FOX, they’re off to a very fast start. We’ll be working with Turner for the mid-summer package, and ultimately ESPN and ABC as we conclude to make sure that they’re getting everything they need from us and we’re getting everything we need from them.

Q. Regarding the schedule, do you see any changes?

BRIAN FRANCE: Do we see any major changes in the schedule? We don’t release that for another month or so. We did have a fair amount of changes last year and even some in the last couple years.

So by definition I don’t think you’re going to see a lot of changes. We’ll see how some of the new dates, their new time on the calendar works out. But I don’t think there will be as much as there was, say, in 2010.

We don’t want there to be. We prefer to have a good continuity. That’s our preference.

Q. What do you think of Danica’s run last week, historically what that did, the highest finish by a female in any NASCAR national series?

BRIAN FRANCE: I think that elevated her. There was some discussion, did she have the right stuff to compete in the Nationwide Series. You know, I think she dispelled a lot of that. There’s always circumstances in the start of a new career. But sometimes things are out of your control, people can crash in front of you, a hundred other things.

I think she elevated herself quite nicely. That’s nice to see. She’s a very competitive person. She’s always said she’s here to compete, not just happy to be here. That fits my criteria.

KERRY THARP: Brian, thank you very much. We appreciate everyone’s participation today on the teleconference. We’ll see you at the racetrack real soon.

BRIAN FRANCE: Thank you all.

- NASCAR, Press Release

NASCAR Logo

(Applause.)

BRIAN FRANCE: Thank you, Kerry.

I know it’s been a busy week for all of you, been in and out of team headquarters, and hopefully the information you picked up has been worthwhile, and we really appreciate the support in this particular week.

Let me tell you one thing I can say for sure, and that is the level of competition has never been greater. You heard it all tonight. And we have the best racing in the world.

I look at things year to year and over longer periods of time. Let me just say what a difference a year makes for us. Think about last year sitting here. We’ve come off a Chase that wasn’t our most exciting Chase. We had questions about the competition, was it as good as it could be. We had questions about were we overregulating some of the racing action, and some fair criticism, some maybe not.

And so what did we do? We also had mentioned that and talked so much about marching forward with a green economy, taking some steps in that area. We talked about technology. And we talked about a lot of things.

But what we did is we listened to our fans very keenly. And the racing from the very beginning, the rule changes that were announced, implemented in the beginning, in the middle of the spoiler, opening up the racing, what did we get? We got the best racing that we’ve ever had. All the way down to the finale in South Florida where it was the closest championship and a dramatic come-from-behind by Jimmie Johnson, his fifth championship.

So we feel great about where this sport is. The fans have been clear, though, about one thing. They care about winning. They don’t want drivers to just be content with a good points day or a good run.

So here’s what’s new for 2011. First, we’re going to make the point system simpler and easier to understand. Beginning this year, we’ll award points in all NASCAR series by one-point increments. Race winners will continue to get extra points for the win, and then everyone else is separated by one point.

So a driver who gets 43 points plus three bonus points for winning a race, winning the race and a point for leading a lap, for a total of 47 points for the win.

So a driver can earn another point by leading the most laps. Consistent with our past history. Second place, of course, gets 42 points. Third, 41, and so on. All the way down to last place, which gets one point.

So now everyone will know, when a driver is down by 10 points, that he needs to pass 11 more cars to take the lead in the point standings. Very much a simple, easy-to-understand system for us.

We’re also adjusting how drivers qualify for the Chase for the NASCAR Sprint Cup. We will continue to have a 12-car field for the Chase. But the final two qualifiers will earn a spot in the Chase based on wins during the first 26 races.
Here’s how it works. The top 10 in points will qualify for the Chase. Of course that’s no different than we are currently today. But positions 11 and 12, the wildcards, will go to the drivers with the most wins who were not in the top 10 so long as they are ranked in the top 20 in points.

So the top 10 Chase drivers will continue to be seated for the Chase based on wins, and they will get a 3-point-each-win seating schedule during the regular season.

This puts emphasis on winning, even if you’ve had some bad luck. As an example, last year Jamie McMurray raced hard, collected two big wins during the regular season, Daytona 500, the Brickyard 400. He didn’t qualify for the Chase.

In 2009, Kyle Busch, he had four wins in the regular season. He didn’t qualify in the race for the Chase.
But under the 2011 format, both drivers would make the Chase and have a chance to compete for the championship. And going for the win, especially as we go through Bristol, Atlanta, on to Richmond, is going to create even more excitement and drama.

Let me make a couple of other announcements that we’re going to do. First, pick a series. Drivers must pick a series in which they want to contend for a driver’s championship.

Drivers can still compete in multiple series and still be part of contending for an owner’s championship in one or more series. This move helps us highlight young drivers and talent in the NASCAR Nationwide Series and the NASCAR Craftsman World Truck Series.

Let me announce another change for 2011. Qualifying procedures at NASCAR will now be set based on the slowest to fastest practice speeds. The top 35 in points will be grouped together and the teams that must qualify on time will be grouped together as well.

We implemented this successfully in the Camping World Truck Series in 2010 and it will be used in all three National series beginning in February with the Daytona 500.

It creates more of a fan-friendly qualifying format. But in case of inclement weather qualifying in the event cancels qualifying in the final lineup will be based upon practice speeds.

The same procedures stated in the rule book will be used to determine eligibility to start a race. So if weather cancels a practice session, then it will revert back to the setting the final starting lineup as we do now based on points.

Evolution of the Sprint Cup Series car. Saw it when you went around to all the team headquarters and shops this week. NASCAR continues to work with the manufacturers and teams to develop a new and smart look with a Sprint Cup car.
This evolved in 2011 model features a new front for the cars, for all the cars. This look will be more appealing to help the fans, to help further grow the manufacturer’s identity.

So the outlook as we see it in 2011: We expect to see even more rivalries. No doubt our biggest stars are being challenged by a new group of drivers who are emerging stars in their own right. We saw the great performance Denny Hamlin did getting so close to winning his championship. Kyle Busch has certainly emerged as a contender for wins and championships. Kasey Kahne with his new team. Brad Keselowski in the excitement he brings to the table. Joey Logano and Trevor Bayne to name a few of stars that we can see will contend for wins in championships in 2011.

We also continue to attract huge stars from outside NASCAR. Having Juan Pablo Montoya, Danica Patrick, Ricky Carmichael, and Travis Pastrana racing in NASCAR is exciting for our industry and for fans and taking our great sport to new audiences.

So as Joie said, it all starts in the coming weeks at Daytona International Speedway. The track’s new surface for the first time since 1979, and last week’s test was a big success.

I think we can all remember what happened during that 1975 Daytona 500, one of the fastest, one of the most exciting races in history.

So as we get to Daytona, we get closer, we’ll also remember one of our greatest stars. It was 10 years ago that we lost Dale Earnhardt, one of our fiercest competitors. Dale helped to build this sport to make it what it is today, and his legacy lives on.

So we’ll join all of Dale’s fans and his family and we’ll remember Dale and what he meant to all of us.

So in closing, I know we have dinner here in a little bit after the question and answers that Mike and I will be taking some questions. But you can hear the enthusiasm of everybody that was on the stage. Ticket sales are up. Enthusiasm is up. You’re going to hear some statistics in the Q&A. Energy levels are up. We finished so strong in 2010. So we are looking forward to a great 2011.

And thank you all for coming tonight.

(Applause.)

KERRY THARP: Thank you very much, Brian.

I’m going to ask NASCAR President Mike Helton as he is right now to join Brian on stage. And Mike and Brian are available right now. We’ll have about 30 minutes for Q&A with them. This will be really your best opportunity to ask them questions.

We’ve got three wireless microphone runners out in the audience. And you know how this is played. I’ll call on you to ask a question. You tell me your affiliation and we ask that you limit your questions to one question.

Q. A number of competitors have lobbied for maybe not awarding points from 25th on down so there wasn’t some cars that had been involved in crashes out there on the track, maybe impeding the racing. What was your decision to stick with the 1-through-43 point system rather than maybe stop scoring points after 25th and lower?

MIKE HELTON: The net result of not having points past 25 or 30, or just pick a spot back there, is the fact that — and I’ll go back and remind everybody. We’ve got 43 cars and 36 Sprint Cup races.

So if you don’t have points or the ability to collect points from a position on back, if you have a couple of bad races and can collect no points whatsoever, you’ve got a greater challenge of closing the gap over the course of the season.

So we’ve stuck with the tradition of having points all the way through when we made this change. We stuck with that.

Q. On a percentage basis, the margin between first and second is virtually identical under the new system to the old system. And under the new system you’re punished more for a poor finish than you’re rewarded for a good finish. So aside from bonus points for wins, which you guys already had under the old system, how does this put more of an emphasis on winning to go 1 through 43?

BRIAN FRANCE: I’ll tell you a number of things. You’re right on the math, although it’s slightly better for a win than the old system, albeit just slightly. What all the models do say is it’s going to — of course we don’t — everybody don’t know how they’re going to race, but they race similar to how they always race, the Chase, the regular season tightens up.

Most importantly, though, we didn’t make a fundamental change in wins or anything else because there’s always a balance. We like that balance.

This is a goal for the — the most important reason is simplicity. And this allows us a way to communicate the standings in all motorsports, has complicated formulas to add up to tracking someone’s — the standings.

This is a very, I think, straightforward way to do that.

Q. Can you talk a little bit from a competition side what will you do about penalties? I mean, in the past penalties can be a deal breaker. Clint Bowyer, he managed to come back and finish tenth last year, but how will you rate those bonus points — I’m sorry, rate the penalty points over that, and will owners who do not qualify for races still get points?

MIKE HELTON: I’ll say this: It will be proportioned similarly. Obviously the numerical number will be different. But it will be similar penalties for similar infractions.

Q. Dale Earnhardt, Jr., and Rick Hendrick both kind of made call for shortening more races. Is that something that’s been discussed seriously this off-season or possibly will be in the future?

BRIAN FRANCE: We have. And you see we’ve done that over the last several years. I think you see with Atlanta being a 500-mile race, going to Kentucky, that’s a 400-mile race. California going to Kansas, you’re seeing that’s a 400-mile race.

We already — we awarded the second one in California. That is a 400-mile. So the core fan does like the traveling a long way, likes to see, depending on which track we’re talking about.

So there will be alterations as we go down the road to shorten them up by a little bit. But I don’t think — we’re not in any — no expectations from us to make any drastic changes. But 100 miles changes a complexion of a race depending where you are for sure. And we’re going to continue to look at that. And we’ll look at the Nationwide events where we want to have good separation between a Sunday and Saturday show, and those will be looking at the length of Nationwide events as we go down the road.

We take all this into consideration.

Q. I’m not quite clear on what the adjustment of the replacement is for the seeding system that you had, the 10 points for Chase seeding under the old system. What’s the adjustment there to clarify, will there be an adjustment? Will there be seeding anymore?

MIKE HELTON: Yeah, it’s three points. It’s the same number of points for each win to seed the top 10 in the Chase field as it is for the bonus points to win a race all season long. The 11th and 12th place, if those are cars that enter into the Chase by wins and not by points, their wins do not count for seeding. They get the benefit of getting in the Chase. So they don’t get to count the wins and get the bonus points for the wins.

But the 10 point that you’re accustomed to now becomes three points to seed the Chase.

Q. In the models that you ran, would this have created more Game 7 moments, and how do you expect this to create more Game 7 moments?

BRIAN FRANCE: It does, but not dramatically. But it does. I think the wildcard feature is pretty significant in how we looked at that. Because you think about it, you can get hot late and get in, if you’re running 15th or 16th, you’re just about out of the picture, if you were at Bristol or certainly going into Richmond.

And I think in the beginning of the season wins are going to matter because you may need those wins if you should have some D and Fs down the road.

So everywhere you turn you see that we may not take leaps in some instances, but you’ll see a steady march to making and featuring winning as more and more important part of this sport. It’s always important. Don’t misunderstand me, but we’re going to — with our policies and approach — we’re going to try to feature that.

We still have 43 teams. And, by the way, it would still be true depending on what race a driver’s running, if he has a fifth-place finish, this is not a contest obviously with one team or another, so we have to have a level of consistency that is measured as well. But we’re shifting that balance.

Q. Why did brand identity become important again and how did it become important again?

BRIAN FRANCE: Talking about the manufacturers? What do you mean?

Q. I’m assuming, you referred to brand identity as far as changing, getting the manufacturers more brand identity. But my question is what happened when the new car was implemented? Why did it happen and how did it become important again?

BRIAN FRANCE: It’s always been important. That wouldn’t be accurate. When we’ve gone to common templates and ultimately the new car, we still had a huge eye on trying to make sure the bowtie or the Ford oval, whatever else, and other branding elements were featured into the car.

Now, we can debate — we diminish something here or there, so it’s never not been important. It’s just a step to enhancing that, which is what the manufacturers will really appreciate. And we’re working closely with them and the teams to do just that.

Q. Brian, how did you guys arrive at the three bonus points? We’ve had drivers and owners all week calling for a much more dramatic bonus. How did you settle on three? And how do you believe that that creates more an incentive for winning?

BRIAN FRANCE: I said it’s slightly better. It’s not — it’s not out on the margins. And if you change it too much, because winning ought to be more important. We ought to feature it and we ought to work on it. But we have to be careful because, as I’ve said, there’s still 43 teams out there. And you can’t expect a great season to just be measured on wins alone.

And so it’s a fine line between balancing with the point structure or any other system, the idea to focus, to motivate drivers to win, want to win more, take chances, et cetera. And part of that is that if they have somebody win five in a row, two and three might be a rain situation, a road — some luck of the draw, that might alter the championship in a way that wouldn’t be proportioned.

So there’s a balance, as you can hear — and you’ve heard us talk over the years. All we’re saying is wherever we turn or wherever we can to manage the balance and consistency of winning you’re seeing us take steps towards the winning portion of our rules package and procedures.

Q. Brian, can you give any comment following rumors in Korea and Germany that in long term Hyundai and Volkswagen will join NASCAR racing?

BRIAN FRANCE: There’s nothing to report. I will say that this is the premier opportunity for car manufacturers in auto racing in North America, and some would say the world. And my expectation is we get a lot of looks and interest, and we are open to talking to somebody under an approach that current manufacturers have from a competition standpoint.

We don’t have anything to announce, but there’s always discussions, and we’ll have to see how it goes over the long run.
But I will say one thing: We’ve got great manufacturers in this sport that are helping us heighten competition. Toyota, Ford, Chevrolet, and Dodge, all four, we’re very lucky to have those companies working with our teams and helping us put the best racing forward.

Q. Mike, we’ve heard the term that you wanted to simplify the points to give the fans a little bit easier understanding of it. My question is what if a Nationwide driver wins one race and wins a championship and a full-time Cup driver running Nationwide wins 10 or 12 or 14, how are you prepared to explain to the public that the champion won one race and somebody else who didn’t get points won 15 or so?

MIKE HELTON: I don’t think the point structure makes any difference on that argument. I don’t think it makes any difference if we use one that Brian just introduced or we’re using the one we used last year.

But to your point, there comes with the decision to have drivers declared to only collect championship points in one series — there comes some issues with it.

But we think it’s worth it in order to promote and create more of a clearer understanding on the difference between Sprint Cup and Nationwide races or Camping World races, and we think that — I don’t know whether we can ever explain it to everybody, but we think that those issues are worth the bigger goal of getting more attention paid to developing drivers. Not collecting points won’t stop a Sprint Cup driver by being any worse a driver than he is, there’s still going to be good drivers.

But the attention and the identity of the developing drivers we think is expedited with this move. And it comes with issues that we’ll have to work through. But we think it’s worth it.

Q. Saturday’s going to become a bigger show at some tracks which have qualifying on Saturday as well as the Nationwide race. Was there any consideration of giving a bonus point for the pole? And if it was considered, why was it declined?

MIKE HELTON: And we’ve had that conversation for 25 years about giving points for qualifying. And what stops us and still today is you have to have a finishing position in a race. You have to have a race, and you’re going to have a winner to a race.

There’s on more than one occasion throughout our seasons qualifying can be eliminated. And we have a provisional method, and it’s changed a little bit today as we announced to have a field set.

But weather can stop us from qualifying. So we can argue whether this is the right decision or not. But our decision’s always been that if you go in to pay points for something, then those points should be earned.

And in an inclement weather situation and we set the field by the rule book or by the practice speeds, you can make a debate at that point that those points were not necessarily earned in the traditional way. So we’ve stayed away from putting bonus points on qualifying.

Q. I wanted to ask you about Dale Earnhardt. Much has been made of his legacy and, in his death, of safety. But I’m wondering, looking back on his legacy and life, what you feel his greatest impact was on the sport and why you think no one’s really been able to fill those shoes in 10 years.

BRIAN FRANCE: I think it’s a lot of things. One is the performance on the track, the way he did it. You know, a true tough-guy on the racetrack, the intimidator. The way he carried himself. The way he was connected to the sport in terms of how he operated, just how he worked so closely with my father.

It’s any number of things. It’s just how he carried himself, plus his accomplishments.

And I’ll tell you one little thing about him; that he was going up through the ranks and his public speaking wasn’t at this point very notable, but what he did, he went and spoke at the Press Club in Washington D.C. Many of you may remember that. Did a great job for a guy who wasn’t known to be a good speaker. And I asked him. He said, I really, really worked on that.

So I’m just giving you one example. There’s so many. He was just the whole package of persona, performance and character.

Q. I understand that you’re going to a simpler point system, but you said you listened to the fans. And the fans that I hear, simpler point system really wasn’t on the radar. There was a long list of things ahead of that. What made you decide to go in that direction now ahead of a lot of these other things?

BRIAN FRANCE: We weren’t talking about it, and we didn’t — but we did, we definitely communicated with our Fan Council. And it’s intuitive. We have a point system that’s hard to describe for ourselves.

We were sitting around trying to articulate every portion of it. Mike and I couldn’t — we were unable to do it. And then that tells you that’s not intuitive enough.

And auto racing in general has always had a sort of unique system to their sport. We just thought this was the perfect time no matter what you do with the Chase or what you do with anything else, let’s simplify it so people can follow.

And, listen, we saw with — going back and forth, Denny, Jimmie, Kevin, through the fall, and it was — you needed a mathematician at the end, and you still might to some degree. But it was complicated to follow that.

You knew somebody was behind and whatever. This will be easier for our fans and for our announcers and others in the booth to cover what is at stake at any given time during a race or the season.

Q. Brian, with the last system in place, you guys tweaked it along the way, will this new point system be also a moving target as you see things that need to be changed here and there?

BRIAN FRANCE: I don’t know about a moving target. I think we try to put the right balance every year forward that, as I said, rewards consistency, takes the steps towards making winning more important, but not to be too out of balance and creates dramatic moments that everybody likes to see.

I will say one thing that was very clear to us: When the competition was tight down the stretch last year, the performances, the competition level, there’s no doubt about it, it got raised. It was exciting. It was electric, and that’s what we’re all about.

So as we take steps down the road to improve things, that’s the kind of thing we want. Now, obviously it’s got to be fair. Obviously it’s got to be organic and sensible. But we like the idea that big moments are created by the best drivers and teams in the world.

Q. This is a little bit of a follow-up to David Newton. Not so much why you changed the points, but what else are you looking at? Because the list that — the feedback we get, the list of things wrong with the sport is very, very long, and I know you’re not pleased with attendance, and I know you’re not pleased with television ratings, so what your plans and what are you looking at to attack some of those issues?

BRIAN FRANCE: There’s a positive start to the season.

(Laughter.)

Look. We’re very satisfied with the most important thing, the level of competition. Obviously we want to be trending up, not down, and television ratings we want to see the economy get better. We want to see a lot of things with attendance improve. Of course, we want to see the driver merchandise, the drivers become more popular, we want to see — so we’re doing the things — we also want to be good stewards of the responsibilities that we have, taking the sport in a smart, green direction, bringing technology forward to help our manufacturers and our young fans. We want to enjoy, consume NASCAR and different mediums in different ways.

So it’s easy to pull out one thing or another. And we’re 63 years old. Every sport is going to have periods where, for lots of reasons, you’re in a peak or a valley.

But over the long term we’re very confident that we’ve got the right partners, our collaboration with our teams, we’re setting ourselves up to work through any issues that we have, take the sport in a smart direction over many, many years and make sure the business models for all of the NASCAR community work properly. That’s an important thing.
And we’re going to have moments where you can select something that’s not going well. That’s fine. But we are on our course to deliver the most exciting racing in the world, and we’re going to get there. We are there on that.

Q. Mike, how does this Chase system work in the unlikely event that all the race winners are in the top 10 in points? Would you only have 10 drivers in the Chase?

MIKE HELTON: No, there will be 12 drivers, with all the winners of the top 10, we’ll fill 11 and 12 by points as well. There’s always going to be 12. Wouldn’t be any more than 12. If there’s five drivers that are tied in theory for the opportunity to get 11 and 12, then we would break that tie via the rule book to fill the 11 and 12. But there will always be 12 drivers.

Q. Brian, kind of a follow-up to an earlier question, too, I think that you talked about where this idea came from to a certain extent. But how long has this idea really been seriously talked about, and where was the germ of the idea? Where did it actually begin?

BRIAN FRANCE: It begins in our planning processes that get formalized more and more throughout the balance of the year. Obviously in the off season which is very short for us, we do a lot of heavy lifting, analyzing ideas that we’ve heard through the season, or have been thinking about, and in some cases for many years.

So we’ll do more looks at it. We’ll talk about timing. And then finally what happens to us now, this is a good thing, that this collaborative effort that we’ve had where Mike and I meet with every team owner, every driver throughout January, pretty short period of time, we get their input. And we don’t — there are lots of varying opinions, and sometimes we’ll get some really good input that we’ll use. And we do.

And so it comes in various stages for us. We do a lot of heavy lifting in December, I will tell you that, to get things to a place where we can present it to the tracks, to the drivers and team owners in January, when we make our final decision very soon after that.

Q. This is I think the third change to the Chase you guys have made or to the point system since you brought the Chase in in 2004, and then you changed it in 2007, and now this. It almost seems like you guys are adjusting the system based on what you’ve seen the previous year in the Chase. Somebody didn’t get in, yet they won a bunch of races, and you’re altering it for various reasons like that. Whatever happened to coming up with a system, putting it out there and say, Guys, this is what it is, you either make it or you don’t?

BRIAN FRANCE: Think about it another way. Think about it right now, every league, every tournament is looking at the very thing we’re doing right now. They’re looking at — the NCAA tournament talked about expanding. A lot of teams, they ended up doing two. The NFL is talking about adding teams to the regular season. Baseball’s talking about adding an additional wildcard and so on. And golf has done various things. College football’s bowl and that, I don’t know how any of it will play out. But everyone is looking to make sure that they’re delivering the right championship format, the right regular season that meets the times of today.

So I suspect that is an ongoing process, and some will make big changes. Some will make what they consider big changes, what you might think are small. And that is the nature of big-time sports, to get it right and make sure that we have the right approach in a given time period.

MIKE HELTON: I have to step in on this because we talked about moving targets, changing, not changing, changing too often, why not leave it alone. The fundamentals of what we do are still the same.

It’s race cars on racetracks. Same thing stick and ball sports. But everybody, including NASCAR, in every form of entertainment, every form of sports, has to keep working on elements to stay relevant and to grow and to maintain, I guess, its opportunity against a changing marketplace or a changing environment or a changing generation.

Yeah, when you asked about a moving target, everything we’ve got is a moving target. It always has been. We’re always going to look at stuff that we think in our opinion based on the input we get and the knowledge we’ve got and the experience we’ve got, we’re going to make adaptations to it so we make the sport better.

We don’t ignore a change or make a change just for the sake of ignoring it or making it. We do things when we do it for the betterment of our entire community.

And the changes that we talked about today, it’s a big deal to go from 43 to 1. One point per position, based on the fact that for so long we’ve had the point standings we’ve got.

But the relativity of that is that we wanted to give fans an opportunity. Every form of motorsports championships is complicated. You have to be a really hardcore student or you look them up to figure out how it’s calculated. Including ours for a long time.

Our goal was, with this change, was to give a fan an opportunity whether that fan is five years old or 85 years old, an opportunity to sit in the grandstand without technology or anything — although there’s a whole other topic on technology at the same time — but being able to look at the racetrack and in their mind understand the fact that one position on that track is worth one point. And we think they’ve got a better opportunity to get more engaged in the race by being able to understand it.

If you’re watching it on television at home, the TV technology delivers it for you on television on radio. If we’re sitting in the control tower or media pressbox, all that’s delivered to us. But we were thinking about the fact, and have for a long time, is if a fan can look at that and in his mind calculate quickly that one position on the track is one point, then that may be engages him a little bit more in the race.

But everything we do is to make the sport better for the entire community. Everything we don’t do doesn’t mean we’re never going to. We know we have issues to address. And you saw three of our guys, Paul Brooks, Steve Phelps, Marcus Jadotte, up here this afternoon. But we’ve got a host of talent today. And I promise you, we haven’t spent the last 365 days just working on these topics that we announced today. There’s a lot of moving parts and pieces that we deal with every day. And we’ve got a lot of talent, more than we’ve ever had, in NASCAR.

And we work on the issues that are maybe in some cases of the day, but we also work on issues that we think advance and promote the sport. Things that we decided not to do over the off-season this year, they’re still there. All the research is still there, all the due diligence, all the models are still sitting there. We can go back at any time and pick up where we left off and look at them again. And that’s, I think, a solid way for us to run this sport.

But I think all the steps we take are for the better of it. And some of the steps we don’t take are not necessarily wrong, because we’re always going to get a variety of opinions on what we should or shouldn’t do. But at the end of the day our job, if we do it right, is to lay it out for everybody, and the guys in the garage area know what the rules and regulations are, and they know that they’re competing against everyone else with the same standards, the same rules and regulations and on the same playing field.

The other stuff is just about being relevant. It’s more important for us today more than ever for us to be relevant so we can compete in the entertainment world.

BRIAN FRANCE: One thing. I failed to mention this. There’s several people — there’s a lot of people that are joining us, and I wanted to recognize a couple people. First, my — that took time to be with us. My sister, Lesa Kennedy, from IMC is here. And Tony Stewart is here. And he’s a busy guy, so we’re happy to have Tony here. And then Marcus Smith with Speedway Motorsports is here.

Thank you all and others that I won’t mention for joining the media and us today.

Q. Along the lines of what you’re talking about, Mike, how much consideration did you give or will you give down the road to maybe the same number of points for guys 30th or 35th on back? Is there a cost savings to those teams, and also the safety factor?

MIKE HELTON: I don’t know if it’s a cost savings or safety, either one. We have regulations in the garage that makes sure that a car is okay when it comes back out, if that’s what you’re referring to on safety. We’ve got minimum speeds that we have to implement for cars that come back on the racetrack.

But the one thing — and we do look at it a lot. Look at it often and look at it constantly. The one thing that keeps us from changing that, that more often than not you can have a race where someone has trouble early in the race or is out of the race two or three laps into it. And another driver could work hard all day long, particularly today with their level of quality and the finishing the cars we’ve got, the count of cars we’ve got finishing, that works hard all day long, struggles, just works really hard up until the last lap and has a problem and he could be the next guy in the garage area.

So he gets the same number of points for working hard all day long that the guy that only had two laps under his belt got. So we’ve always kept that separation in positions mainly driven by that. We can manage the cost. We can manage the safety from other ways. Not the points.

Q. Forgive my jaded mind here. And maybe you can clarify something.

BRIAN FRANCE: You’re forgiven. I understand that.

Q. With the point system — and I understand the idea about simplicity, but in this era where you put everything together, attendance, television ratings and things like that, it seems like this points system now creates an illusion of a closer points race than maybe what you had, because you had a greater disparity with the old system. Is this as much about just — as you talk about your game set in a moment, just an illusion of trying to tighten everything up more so? And also can I just ask, there was at some point talk about expansion of the Chase and why that wasn’t done, please?

BRIAN FRANCE: Well, the last part of your question first, we looked at a lot of things and we thought this was the right step at the right time. But I would totally disagree that, first of all, it tightens things up organically. And second of all, the win to get in is not a small thing. And that does create excitement. It will. It will make starting with the Daytona 500, which is a big enough event anyway, that winning that would be paramount. It will be a little extra special because someone will know it will go into the bank to possibly get into the Chase if they should fall outside of the top 10.

So we like the changes, and we think that they build on the excitement of what we saw last year with the Chase.

Q. Brian, as you’ve listened to the fans and reacted accordingly, and with the overhaul of the point system and of the qualifying procedure, I’ve not heard anything about the top 35 rule here tonight. Why has it been important for you to maintain that when you have the opportunity to change it?

BRIAN FRANCE: Well, no new news on that. We looked at that. That was just not something that we thought made sense. And we were focused on the Chase — and, by the way, when I say simplifying the points system, depending on how you feel about it, it’s no small thing to figure out how to do that just the right way where it still works the way the old point system, but reflects a simpler, easier way.

So the top 35 has not been on the table.

KERRY THARP: Mike, Brian, thank you very much for your time tonight. We appreciate it.

FastScripts by ASAP Sports

- NASCAR, Press Release

NASCAR Chairman and CEO Brian France (Photo Credit: Rusty Jarrett/Getty Images for NASCAR)

France’s “state of the sport” address from the NASCAR Hall of Fame, expected to include an announcement regarding a revamped points system, is scheduled as part of NASCAR’s stop on the annual Charlotte Motor Speedway Sprint Media Tour.  Bob Dillner will report live from the NASCAR Hall of Fame.  In addition to full coverage of France’s speech, the Hub on Wednesday also features in-studio analysis with Jeff Hammond and a satellite interview with Darrell Waltrip.

- SPEEDtv.com, Press Release

If anything what Sadler’s crash illustrated – again – is the fact these cars are simply too fast to race unrestricted. Trap speeds at Pocono reach 200, and the reality of racing is that 190 has been the cut-off point for safety, and even that’s a bit iffy. With the Trucks making their Pocono debut on Saturday, it was noteworthy that they were noticeably slower down the straights than the cars, be they Sprint Cup or ARCA; the Trucks also displayed a noticeably stronger drafting effect, especially at Lap 40 when Todd Bodine from some ten lengths back in third got on Elliott Sadler’s bumper and blasted him down the frontstretch and erased the ten length gap to leader Denny Hamlin before they even got to Turn One – in contrast, though the battle up front in the 500 became at times downright stunning and Dale Junior and a few others tried to push-draft cars, it was obvious the COTs simply were too fast and too aero-tight for push-drafting to work at well.

It would thus seem that while adding more SAFER barriers is a done deal, Brandon Igdalsky should be pushing NASCAR to start restricting the cars there as well as everywhere else. The racing would certainly improve and its impossible to see any safety degradation from it.

——————-

Amid Brandon Igsalsky’s introduction to the larger NASCAR world, NASCAR’s Brian France found himself under fire for the secret fining of drivers Denny Hamlin and Ryan Newman. The reaction of other drivers was on the side of NASCAR to a striking extent, with a lot of verbiage about the need not to attack the sport.

It leaves one radically mixed. Certainly criticisms that are less than honest warrant censure, but what has been at work here is less appropriate censure than what appears to be a vengeful attack by Brian France in a fit of denial that the sport over which he presides has been faltering and that the changes he has wrought not only have not worked but have only worsened the decline in popularity. His push to market NASCAR The Brand has clearly not worked, with the term NASCAR more and more a pejorative than a positive thanks to promotion of The Brand instead of the product.

The laundry list of Brian France failures easily overwhelms whatever successes he may have brought – the Chase and the general refusal to change the points structure to punish mediocrity and reward hard-charging and winning; the bastardization of downforce and tires and its inevitable endgame the COT; the push to impose NASCAR on demographics (LA, NYC, Washington State, to a lesser extent Chicago) that don’t want it and the resultant campaign of speedway fratricide; the implosion of the sport’s economics to where even car owners have begun holding powwows to discuss cost-cutting (though the recent one seemed woefully dry on credible ideas toward that end); and the steady eroding of the sport’s competitive depth with lack of winners, lack of lead changes, and the renewed phenomenon of independents – aka start-and-park cars – actually a controversy.

“We shouldn’t have to lock the Constitution and the Bill of Rights in our glovebox when we drive….into the NASCAR garage.” Here Mr. Mulhern is correct. We also shouldn’t not hold critics accountable for their criticisms, and those in position of power manifestly should be held accountable – and with Brian France lashing out in what can’t look like anything except a fit of denial, the light of accountability needs to be shone.

——————————

Amid all that, the sport still has the 2010 season to go, as Watkins Glen beckons.

- NASCAR, Press Release

NASCAR Chairman and CEO Brian France answers media questions - Photo Credit: Jason Smith/Getty Images for NASCAR

BRIAN FRANCE: We’ll be brief because I know we’re going to be underway here in a little over an hour.

Real quick, it’s nice to have ESPN back in the saddle here promoting the final number of events on into the Chase. They always kick it off this weekend. So nice to have them back.

I know there are some questions sort of floating around that have been talked about since I addressed you guys in the Daytona on primarily the schedule. So happy to take any questions that you might have.

THE MODERATOR: We’ll open it up.

Q. As you probably know, Ryan Dennis, the chairman of McLaren, is here this weekend. He was telling some of us yesterday about his fuel management systems. With the things he said, he said he could provide anything. Obviously it’s just fuel injection that y’all are looking at now, but he’s talking down the road things like tire management, engine telemetry. Can you foresee a time when NASCAR would take step-by-step some sophisticated things such as tire management through electronics? He says he can guarantee you absolutely, positively a tamper-proof or cheat-proof system that the Formula One teams have not cracked. Do you see those steps? Do you think a cheat-proof system is possible?

BRIAN FRANCE: Well, I met with him this weekend. Look, we’ve been real clear. We’re on a steady march to more technology in the cars, which is historically unlike us in some respects, provided that it doesn’t burden the teams with additional costs that don’t translate to our fan base, and obviously that we can enforce whatever new technologies. The final thing is to make sure that it makes racing better.

No question about it, fuel injection is something we’re going to evolve to here in the short run. You said tire pressures and so on. If there’s ways to use technology that are enforceable and sensible financially, of course we’re going to do that.

It’s our slow, steady march. Fits into the green economy. Fits into where the manufacturers are obviously going. So any number of things you’re going to be able to look at. But they’ll just have to fit our criteria that I’ve laid out. That’s where we’ll end up.

Q. At Daytona right before you spoke ISC indicated they had officially requested a second date for Kansas. Also you had received requests from SMI, although they have been reluctant to specifically identify which races they’ve requested to be changed. My question is, has NASCAR made any decision on any of the requests that you have received so far? If so, what were they?

BRIAN FRANCE: All the requests are in. They all have lots of effects, as you can imagine. When anything moves around of significance on the Cup schedule, it has consequences for the second part, whatever part of the schedule you want to look at.

We’re digesting that, making sure it fits into our TV partners, fits into the track operators that have made the requests, all the other partners who count on the schedule to be done sort of correctly.

I hope we’re on the final throws of that. We had meetings this morning on that. I sense that we’ll be close to wrapping that up here in probably a week or two. There will be some changes as I look now, and that could not quite materialize, but I sense it will. We’ll have some pretty impactful changes to the schedule that I think will be good for NASCAR fans.

Q. Will we hear the results of that from you or the tracks?

BRIAN FRANCE: Historically we put our schedule out as early as we can, usually no later than September. We’ll meet that deadline. The question is, we may do it slightly different.

By the way, when you agree on a schedule, then you have to have sanction agreements that are executed, everybody has to agree on that. That process is simultaneous to the schedule.

My sense is that will all be wrapped up here shortly. I don’t know how it will get released, but it looks like there are going to be some interesting, good changes for the schedule in terms of how fans get to events, which events they’ll attend.

There’s been a big cooperation. Everybody has a slice of the pie that they want to make sure fits them perfectly. And so we’ve had to adjust that around where it fits everyone in the industry. That’s gone fairly well. Almost ready to announce something here shortly.

Q. Since you hinted at major changes possible for the Chase at Daytona, we’ve had three weeks to monitor the reaction of that. It seems as if drivers are lukewarm, they’ve expressed trepidation about doing a one-race championship, fans have been a little bit leery. How have you gauged the reaction of that?

BRIAN FRANCE: Let me tell you two things. One is we’re going to make changes in the Chase that we think would serve us well for many, many years. If that means it’s not something we’re reacting to, whether it’s lower ratings that we want, something like that. And I would remind you we look at these things annually. Looked at it very hard last year, almost a similar format change that is being proposed. There are few, but one in particular that we didn’t think the timing was right. Making changes in lots of other areas, there’s only so much you can do from a change-all-at-once approach.

But whatever we do, it will be with the industry having lots of chances to weigh in, and us in the end thinking this is something that we can build around that enhances winning, enhances the championship, gives us more of a playoff field than we currently have now, if that’s where we end up.

We haven’t made a decision. We may not think the timing is right. We’re doing some research. I’ll be in some focus groups myself on the 11th of August listening to fans directly as they hear the idea.

Today for us to do anything major requires a lot of buy-in, which we get. It requires a lot of input, which we get. So it’s not surprising that when we’re getting that input, some people haven’t heard it all, don’t like it, how it may affect them. They’re competitors.

I don’t know if there’s anything we could present to Jimmie Johnson – I don’t blame him by the way – on a championship format that he thinks is as good as what we have now. That’s not surprising. We take all that into consideration.

The second bigger issue is – it kind of fits into what we’re doing now anyway in looking over the long run of the sport – how does it fit in when the economy and other things we were doing were creating so much demand for this sport? A lot of those things are different today – different not just for the economy, but different because there’s better ways to approach things. You saw that on all the on-track decisions we made, which we think were the right ones. Double-file restarts, the way we decide the ending of events, so on, so forth. The news we made with the spoiler. On and on the goes. We think that fits better, not regulating the sport so hard.

Now we’re going to get a review of ourselves on things we can improve on, the Chase being one. There’s many, many others. It’s what you do when you’re sort of going through things and there’s a headwind. Things aren’t as easy as they have been in the past.

This is the time when you don’t necessarily do anything you feel like. Obviously, it has to be thought out. But this is a time when the industry can reposition some things that we can improve on. Tracks are doing a lot of that now. Team owners, drivers, ourselves all come together. Our TV partners all come together to give us some changes in some areas.

We’ve been at this 60 years. You’re going to have some peaks and valleys. Sometimes when you’re in a little bit of a valley for whatever reason, that’s the time to look at all the things you can improve on, make the changes, go forward, and sail back up.

That’s how we’re looking at the Chase and everything else for the future.

Q. As you’ve gone through this process in regards to the Chase, talking with various people, we’ve heard a lot of different things from the eliminations to the potential four or five guys, reset the points. Are there some ideas at this point that have come up that you feel need to be eliminated, that probably aren’t going to work out, and are there some ideas going through this process that you think this could work or is a direction you need to go? Lastly, the idea of not changing the Chase, is that a viable option or realistic option?

BRIAN FRANCE: Not changing the Chase is definitely a viable option. The Chase we think is certainly better, although we haven’t seen the results of that as often as we’d like, but certainly better than the total consistency model that was in place for so many years.

But regarding the options that we have on the table, there’s no question that the only ones we would consider are ones that make winning at a given moment more important than they are today.

How you do that? Well, there’s obviously a number of ways to do that. It comes with some version, as you go along, where certain races in the Chase, you have to win, you have to win or do very, very well to, in fact, move on.

Only thing I would say is when you peel that back and look at it, it’s not that different. It sort of forces that, like every other playoff and tournament kind of does.

But the truth is, you know, there’s a lot of people eliminated from the Chase, not necessarily mathematically, but they would tell you by the fifth race in. If you’re way, way behind, you only have five races to catch up, you’re probably eliminated at that point. That’s no different.

So if we formalize that a little bit, make sort of a transfer event feel like we have at Richmond, you know, that will be interesting.

The last thing I’d make on the Chase. If we have the perfect Chase that we would love to see, it would be just like every commissioner would tell you: they’d love to see great playoff events, as many game seven series as possible. When they get to either game seven or the final of the NCAA tournament, the Super Bowl, whatever the sporting event, they’re going to tell you it’s an action-packed, close game, lots of story lines. That’s what they’re after. I mean, that’s what anybody is after.

We’re no different. If we can have our format be more consistent with delivering those results and still have the flavor of NASCAR, which we obviously with 43 teams, the same time, different dynamics than anybody else has, we’ll weigh all that, figure that out, sort the right format.

The truth is, whatever we do is not going to be all that much different in terms of every formula we’ve run, Jimmie Johnson would win anyway. Winning and being the best, we’re going to balance that out correctly.

Q. Your third television partners takes over this weekend. We as media get a lot of feedback from fans. There seems to be a lot of consternation from the race fan. They don’t really like the broadcast, and perhaps that’s a reason for declining ratings, too many commercials, don’t like this announcer, whatever the reason is they cite. Does NASCAR see an issue with the product, not singling out any one television partner, but does NASCAR hear this feedback as well? Do you think there might be an issue in the product on television?

BRIAN FRANCE: No, I don’t hear that much at all. I mean, there’s obviously different announcers you like better, different ways that it’s presented from one network to another. That’s probably no different than I have certain things I like as a sportsfans, certain analysts I like to hear from. I don’t think that’s too surprising.

But they all bring something different. So, no, it’s not something that we’re concerned with.

Q. What did you think of Carl Edwards’ actions at Gateway and how do you balance letting the drivers police themselves versus the possibility of drivers or fans getting hurt?

BRIAN FRANCE: Well, Carl went too far. We think some contact, especially late in the race, is part of NASCAR. There are limits to that. The limits are pretty obvious. You can’t just spin somebody around,
especially intentionally. That’s number one. But is there going to be contact?

The issue that Carl had probably above it all is he already had a history with Brad, so he wasn’t going to get any kind of benefit of the doubt about was that just racing or whatever else.

So, you know, the point is, there have got to be limits. On the other hand, we’ve opened it up where the drivers, this is the big leagues, you’re going to have contact here. These are full-body cars. You saw at Loudon a few weeks ago, you saw a lot of contact late in the race. That’s part of it.

Q. You were talking earlier about the schedule changes, the potential domino effect that could have. Is there anything in the offing that you could see that would affect the race here at all? Beyond that, is there anything you’d like to see changed with this race, maybe a way to get more action on the track during the weekend?

BRIAN FRANCE: Yeah, well, there are things. That’s a good point. No secret that Kentucky is talking about hosting a Sprint Cup event. That’s not that far away. So it’s a good example of talking about Kentucky. It’s a worthy market to at least discuss. But it has implications to Michigan, certainly here to Indianapolis certainly from a geographic standpoint.

The best thing we can do is not have sort of the problems we’ve had from a tire standpoint, a very unique thing to this speedway. Goodyear has that problem solved. We’re looking for a very exciting race here today.
THE MODERATOR: Thank you for your time, sir.
BRIAN FRANCE: Thank you.

FastScripts by ASAP Sports

- NASCAR, Press Release

NASCAR Nationwide Series Logo

Chairman Brian France says the second-tier series likely will have new rules aimed at limiting the dominance of Sprint Cup drivers. Those moonlighting from the premier circuit have won 16 of 17 Nationwide races this season (most recently Dale Earnhardt Jr. at Daytona International Speedway). The top two in the standings are Brad Keselowski, who is running his first full Cup season, and Carl Edwards, who is in his sixth consecutive season of running full time in Cup and Nationwide.

It’s been five years since there was a Nationwide champion (Martin Truex Jr.) who didn’t run Cup concurrently.

“There’s such a concentration of Cup drivers, which we like on one hand, but we want to make sure that division is our version of college football,” France said. “We need to make sure the stage is not crowded so much so that we can’t give opportunities to Nationwide young regulars who need that experience.”

Two-time Cup champion Tony Stewart, who won the Nationwide season opener at Daytona, supports more opportunities for young drivers but says there might not be enough well-funded teams to support them.

- USA Today

Brian France Q & A Session at Daytona International Speedway (Photo Credit: Chris Graythen/Getty Images)

Brian, welcome.

BRIAN FRANCE: Yeah, good morning, everybody. We were just talking about all the things that are going on this weekend with the new Nationwide car and bigger plates, a little activity yesterday in practice. So the racing action, as you might think, certainly how we see things, has got a trajectory that it’s going in the right direction.

We’re real pleased. There’s always an event here or there that, you know, you could be critical of. But by and large, some of the policies that we announced back in January feel good to us. And the drivers have been terrific, mixing it up differently, not being in most situations crazy about that, but giving our passionate fan base what they want most, which is the close, competitive racing action. So we’re pretty pleased.

I’d also like to thank many of you in the room. We just yesterday in Gainesville announced with the V Foundation our biggest single gift yet for the NASCAR Foundation. That’s not possible unless the media helps us with NASCAR Day and throughout the year generating interest and all that. So thank you for your effort. It paid off for the Shands Teaching Hospital, the oncology center there.

I would also say that, you know, this is the time of the year, and we’ll talk about it with some questions, where we’re formulating the 2011 schedule. We’re looking at the Chase format very, very carefully, as we always do – maybe even more carefully.

I don’t want to have a big discussion today about the economy and all that. The economy is what it is. It’s still difficult. It was difficult six months ago. It doesn’t appear to have improved much for our fan base, a lot of our corporate customers. That’s sort of the bad news.

The good news is we’ve got 400 different sponsors within the sport. Most of them are renewing their sponsorships. It may look differently, but they’re renewing their sponsorships.

The car manufacturers, despite a very difficult climate for them, have made a lot of improvements in their own business models and are more stable. They, as well, are reinvesting in NASCAR for the long-term. So that’s good.

I think the other thing that’s happened to us, and it’s probably happened to a lot of industries, is when things are tough, and we all feel like we’re in a storm, it’s not as easy as it used to be. What happens is you get a chance to be more self-critical of yourself. The industry comes together a little bit differently because we’re all trying to get through to the other side.

So consequently I just spent two hours with our communications team looking at the next three or four years for us and re-zeroing in on the things we think we can improve on, a lot of them to do with the media here and elsewhere. And that’s just one thing.

So the point is that the industry, you’ve heard about our meetings which I chaired directly, which started last year. I met personally with every driver, every team owner in January as we talked about all the things that we were going to be looking at. Those meetings have continued. A couple weeks ago we began reengaging, we’re always talking, but in a very formal way, in a small group of our drivers and team owners, we’re talking about 2011, both in the rules packages, the Chase format, whatever it might be, that we’re looking at getting their input on.

It’s a long way of telling you that even though there are difficulties with the economic climate that we’re in, it kind of forces you in a good way to look at yourself, to work together closer so you can get a better result in the long run.

So with that I’ll be happy to take up any questions.

THE MODERATOR: We’ll go ahead and open it up to questions from the media.

Q. Can you talk about maybe what challenges you feel like the Chase is having and what are you looking at as far as changes there?

BRIAN FRANCE: We’re looking at it pretty carefully. And the reason we are is because — this is not uncommon, by the way. We look at it every year. The main reason is we want to make sure it’s giving us the biggest impact moments it was designed to do. That means, it is over a 10-race schedule in itself. Everything to us means pushing the winning envelope to mean what it needs to mean in our sport.

It’s different because there’s 43 teams, not 1 or 2, 2 or 3, some tournament thing here. We’re in a situation where, you know, in some cases winning can’t be possible. So we can’t have a winner-take-all, per se, like some of the other playoff systems.

On the other hand, we’d like to have it balanced correctly. We’re going to look at that more carefully than ever because we also have some historical things we thought would have allowed winning and big moments on a big stage. Maybe they did or maybe they didn’t. What’s important is we got a chance to look at a lot more seasons than we have up until now.

So it wouldn’t be surprising for us to take back the original objectives. We’re happy with the Chase. It just means that if we can enhance it in a pretty significant way, we may do that. So that will be the thing that we decide in the next couple of months.

Q. Brian, next year the NFL could not have a season potentially based on what’s going on with their labor negotiations, which could leave NASCAR really primed with no competition on Sundays in the fall. When you’re looking at next year, is that a factor for you guys at all in terms of what your strategies are or to try to capitalize on?

BRIAN FRANCE: (Indiscernible) that’s the best model. We don’t plan on failing, that’s for sure.

Q. I think it’s fair to say the on-track product has never been better. I think people would be pretty much in agreement NASCAR wide things are better and therefore the product is very good right now. That being said, you’re not really getting the return in attendance and in TV ratings. We look around this room and it’s half empty. Is it the economy or is there more to be done to bring people back to the sport?

BRIAN FRANCE: Yeah, that’s a fair question. You do things that are working, but you don’t see. The answer is because there’s always a number of things that are working against you or for you at any one time. Take this year. We did get the on-track product — we thought the on-track product was pretty good last year. There was a perception where it wasn’t. Certainly we have a tendency over many years to at some points in time overregulate the sport for whatever the reason. We obviously dialed that back.

But what we also had was we moved start times back out from where more viewers are back to an earlier start time. We knew that would have a short-term impact until our fan base could get a benefit from sort of a centralized start time for most of the events, East Coast, Midwest and West.

In the short run, there’s less people watching at 1:00 than there is at 3:00. You had the World Cup; still have the World Cup going on. You had a very, very popular Winter Olympics. Our first three events went directly heads up on us. We had more competition than even a normal busy sports calendar. They’ve had big moments, big story lines. If you recall back in our Vegas race, I think that hockey game did a 21 share or something in the Winter Olympics directly against us. We didn’t have that the year before.

Then the economy certainly plays a role, more so to us than anybody else because we ask our fans in the big event business to stay longer, drive further, buy hotel rooms and alike as part of what it takes to come to our events. That’s why the tracks and just about everybody in the industry has tried to help that situation out by lowering prices, working with hotels, restaurants, anywhere where they may spend money, to be reflective of that.

In some of our big states that we were very successful in traditionally, like Michigan and here in Florida, have been the hardest hit, some of the hardest hit.

A lot of reasons, a lot of issues. Still there’s 14, 15 million people a weekend tuning us in. We’re a sport that looks way down the road. In a pocket of the economy or other challenges, that’s our job to get through those.

Q. Brian, in June, in a story in the Sports Business Journal, David Hill was quoted as saying the biggest problem facing NASCAR is that the younger males have left the sport. If I was NASCAR, owner of a team, it would be something that I would be burning the midnight oil on a nightly basis worrying where they’ve gone and how do I get them back. One, your response to that. And, two, finding that balance between the younger audience and your older maybe core fans. It seems like a few years back you went towards that young side and kind of upset the core fan base. Where is your response to David’s comments?

BRIAN FRANCE: Any demographic that we lose ground on is something we worry about and get concerned about. Obviously he’s talking about the 18 to 35 demographic, which is very important to us. And, you know, that’s why you do some of the things that we’re going to try to do.

And it is a balance on the core fan, which is a little bit certainly older than that, that you want to satisfy your core fan but you have to do the things that are going to make you as attractive as possible. That’s social media to us, which is going to be the great opportunity, one of the great opportunities to reach that young demographic.

We’ve got some work to do to improve our effort. That’s what we met a couple hours today on. So there are going to be a lot of things, technology that comes down. We’re going to be an amazing place to validate and help these companies market these new technologies, which will be great for our teams and our tracks because they’ll have a different sponsorship and commercial base to work off of.

We’re not marketing against a certain audience. In our efforts, we’ll get it up.

Q. Of course, there’s the young drivers that come up that will make a difference as well.

BRIAN FRANCE: Make a huge difference. You got to let that naturally happen as they find their place with an audience.

Q. Brian, you mentioned looking at the 2011 schedule. Bruton has been making noises about moving his New Hampshire race to Kentucky, dealing with the police department up there, then the Kansas City question. Have you heard from SMI about a schedule change? Have you heard from ISC requesting a schedule change regarding Kansas City? And what is the deadline for them to get those requests in? Is it this week?

BRIAN FRANCE: Well, the deadline has come and gone, and we have heard from the public companies and the track operators as to some of their wishes. We are digesting that now and working with them. You know, we typically put our schedule out, as you well know, usually around Labor Day, give or take a couple of weeks here or there. It’s my hope we’ll meet that goal.

There are obviously now new requests from SMI and ISC. They’ve followed the policy that we have laid out on realignment. We’ll have to see how it all fits into the greater schedule as we go in the next couple weeks.

We just got it in pretty recent. I suspect we’ll work through that and figure out what’s best for everybody.

Q. A few years ago you made a lot of changes, then you backed off because you said it was too much for your fans to handle. Now it sounds you’re going to be making a whole bunch of changes again. Where do you get to the point where you say, Okay, we’ve got to do this, and maybe the fans are going to have to get upset, but we can’t stand still?

BRIAN FRANCE: Well, I don’t know that I said a bunch of changes. We have made a lot of things that are frankly pretty small. I’m talking about recently. Mostly it’s in how we officiate the events, how we put rules packages together certainly with the wing versus the spoiler, you know, the rules packages for Talladega and Daytona, the bigger plates. But, frankly, most of those things were not controversial to the fan base. They may have been to a driver or team owner. What they want is to open up competition, which we’ve done.

And the Chase is an evolution. So we’ll tweak that just like other sports leagues. You saw the NCAA tournament took a hard look at how many teams to add into their tournament and had a big idea, then they ended up adding a few teams. There’s lots of things that we’ll look at.

But we did do a lot of big things to what you’re referring to several years ago, the new car being one. We changed sponsors and did some very visible things that were unsettling. We’d like to not have so many things in our control or out of our control that happen at one time.

We’re in a normal course of adjusting things as we go along.

Q. Can you tell me where you stand on ethanol? There’s been a lot of talk that it’s something we will see in 2011 and touting that as part of the green initiative.

BRIAN FRANCE: Ethanol, I don’t know that we’ll see it in 2011 as a biofuel. It’s certainly an option that is interesting. But we have not made — there’s a lot of thought that goes into it. It will be important for us to evolve the fuel source in the national divisions over time. We’ll do that with Sunoco for sure trying to respect and value their set of rights. So we’ll have to put all of that together.

I don’t know what will happen in ’11. We’re working on a lot of things. But what I can tell you is we will have a very slow, very steady, and sometimes with big impact, but steady march towards, you know, this sport looking and feeling and acting more green. We believe that to be the right way and we’ll do that without compromising competition. It will be seamless over time.

But the tracks, you saw Pocono what’s happening. There’s lots of things on the drawing board – some we’re driving; some the industry is – recycling across the board, whatever it will be, to get to the right place over time.

Q. Just to be clear on what you’re saying about the Chase. You like the basic structure of a points reset, but you might look at giving additional points to wins?

BRIAN FRANCE: Yeah, here is the thing. We like a playoff style format for sure. It distinguishes us in motorsports, number one, distinguishes our national divisions number two. And, number three, the big design is to have playoff-type moments that only can be, in any sport, created when there’s a lot on the line at any one moment, right? That’s what the essence of Game 7s, eliminations and all that are.

We’ve always had in motorsports a challenge with that because there’s a continuity issue because there’s 43 teams. Nobody can win a winner-take-all scenario. And we have to balance sort of the body of what you’ve done as a driver across the board. So continuity will always be a factor in our playoff-style format.

What we’re talking about is, you know, enhancing it in a way that will bring out more of the winning moments, the big moments that happen in sports. And if there’s a way we can do that, and there are a couple of ways, we’re going to give that a lot of weight.

Q. Letting these guys express emotion, they’ve done so verbally, also with action. What is your reaction to some of the things we’ve seen? Is it one of concern or are you satisfied with the way things are going?

BRIAN FRANCE: I like it personally. I like the emotion. You know, a little less worried about what we’re gonna do. They always have the sponsorship stuff. It’s not easy for them. They have to be accountable to a company that has a big investment in them.

But, you know, I think the more we can do of that with obviously some limits, but we like it. We liked it anyway. It wasn’t like we’re the guys that like to just put a cap on everything. Rather things evolve. This is a 60-year-plus sport. Things evolve over time. You just sort of keep dialing it down or down or down. All of a sudden you look up, you’ve taken yourself slightly off course. We’ve done that before. We’ll admit if we’ve overregulated in certain situations, and I think we did. I think Mike Helton said that directly. But we like where we’re at now. We like where we’re going.

Q. Looking at the 2011 schedule, you talked about that. Is there any consideration to shorten any races, perhaps Pocono? Also, the threat of rain is looming over the weekend. I know that years ago we dragged the tires around, now we’re using the jet driers. Anything in the wings of maybe looking to dry the tracks quicker or work around some of the rain issues at speedways?

BRIAN FRANCE: Yeah, and I mentioned a lot about technology, all the rest. We’re looking at some things. People are coming to us with certain ways to dry asphalt faster and better. That would be a welcomed technology advancement. So we’ll always try to do that.

You know, the surface out here, I know everybody has zeroed in on that, as well. The track has found an issue, but believe we’ve fixed it. Of course, they’re going to repave beginning next week.

But, look, the job for us is, you know, if inclement weather happens, it’s out of our control, but to get the track as dry as fast as we can, but it’s got to be in a raceable condition for the drivers. If we can speed that up down the road with technology or anything else, gosh, we’ll be the first ones to do it.

Q. We talked with Bernard, the IRL guy, the other week. He liked the idea of doubleheaders with NASCAR Cup racing. That’s never been done. Are you for it or against it? Does it sound like a good idea for California or a couple of tracks or is it like, We’re NASCAR and they’re something else?

BRIAN FRANCE: We won’t be doing doubleheaders with the Sprint Cup levels. They’ve had some of our lower divisions which do about the same in terms of audience and everything else, like the Truck Series has run a time or two with the IRL. That won’t be possible because of scheduling issues. We don’t have any interest in doing that either.

Q. Talking about the realignment of dates, can you sort of address NASCAR’s role in making those decisions when a proposal is given to you? There’s a lot of debate about attendance, we fill up this track or not, it’s nearer to a city or not. Talk about NASCAR’s perspective on the dates when you make that decision and how you make it.

BRIAN FRANCE: Well, first of all, it’s got to fit in. One track hoppers effect has an effect, needless to say, across the schedule. We have to take all of that into context. The second thing is we have to look at what a certain thing does across a bunch of different measuring points. You know, it starts with what’s best for the fan base in a market, in a region, wherever we’re talking about. We’ll take a look at that. Then there’s the size of markets that obviously matters in some way. Lots of things go into it.

But in the end it’s got to work for the track operator. If it’s not financially working as well as it could work somewhere else, by definition it’s not working for the fans as well either. You know, so we look at all those things. It’s why we’ve got to make the decision on that because we’re the only ones that have the entire industry’s best interest going with our fans at any one time.

Q. I’ve been watching this sport for a while myself. It seems 15 or 20 years ago there was more to root for in the sport. You could be a fan of different drivers, so many different car owners, crew chiefs, the car make itself. Somehow it seems like now if you want to be a fan of Jimmie Johnson or Jeff Gordon, you have to be a fan of Rick Hendrick. If you want to be a fan of one of eight drivers, you have to be a fan of Jack Roush. My question is, now that we go forward in this sport, is there any platform in the future that you see where the engine department and a team’s ability in particular to have to pay a Hendrick $4 million for an engine program, do you see that going away with kit engines or anything else so the perception from the race fans is that you’re not battling four or five car owners? I don’t know if that was clear enough.

BRIAN FRANCE: I essential get your point. I would tell you a couple things. One is, you know, on story lines or more people to pull for because they’re essentially maybe aligned with one organization or another, well, that’s a concentration of power issue that we’ve always believed is better treated when there was more competition not concentrated in one area. We just generally believe that. We’re not always perfectly successful at achieving it, but we generally believe that to be the best way to approach it.

I would also tell you that all sports leagues have periods in time when they don’t have their best story lines or best, you know, stable of athletes, they’re the most appealing, the most anything. If you look across all the sports, just about, they’ll ebb and flow in some major way based on their star power at the time and their story lines and rivalries.

You know, we certainly had a range of retirements and whatnot, some of the younger drivers that are making their mark to get up to a level of success and positioning where they’re gonna be more appealing.

You know, we can do more. NASCAR is going to do a lot more in that area. I said earlier I met for a while today. We’re going to be doing a lot more, you know, positioning ourselves, getting more aggressive at marketing the sport. There won’t be any doubt about that as the next two, three, four years go on because we need to and it’s important.

Generally speaking, though, the other thing in the concentration of power, what we would prefer not to see is because it’s a barrier to entry for new owners, new drivers, new team owners. You’re likely to see us make some changes in the Nationwide Series as a result of that phenomenon because there’s such a concentration of Cup drivers which we like on one hand, but we want to make sure that that division is our version of college football; that there’s drivers, owners, crew members all building their identities and careers through that channel, and there needs to be a big enough place for them to do that.

If it’s just narrow, if there’s not many seats available because we don’t accomplish a lot of things, so you’re gonna see from us a policy standpoint begin to deal with that issue beginning in 2011. That’s something that we’ll do carefully.

You know, I’ve given you a long-winded answer, as I typically would – sorry about that. But generally agree and generally we can do more and we can do more with our policies to help on that.

Q. (No microphone.)

BRIAN FRANCE: No, I didn’t say that. I said we like Cup drivers racing in the Nationwide Series. We need to make sure the stage is not crowded out so much so that we can’t give opportunities to Nationwide young regulars who need that experience.

And you know what, in my discussions with the Sprint Cup drivers, they agree with us. They think just that way, too. The owners certainly agree with us. So there are going to be some things that we can do.

Frankly, a lot of people you don’t see, led by Steve O’Donnell and others who you do see, who are working at the R&D center, setting these policies, looking at all the things we can do to effect either the car or the policy of how we organize things, and they’re taking into account all of the ramifications that come if you do this, then five other bad things might happen or 10 good things or whatever the look forward can be.

That’s the difference between us having invested a lot of money, and still do, in research and development and in policy to be able to not just run the races and be on the treadmill, but to be able to look around the corner on what’s important. That group has been instrumental in saving the industry 10s of millions of dollars by pulling out, starting with the Truck Series a few years ago, all the way up from testing policies, you know, to what parts and pieces go in the car, what limits are here and there.

If we pull a lever, what we can do, there’s always — unfortunately, you might have unintended consequences downstream. We’re trying to have a group of people that are smart and serious about looking way down the road so that we get all this stuff right. We won’t get it all right, but we’ll try to do as best as we can.

Q. My question concerns the COT chassis and Sprint Cup races on the 1.5-mile, 2-mile tracks. Do you believe there are tools you can provide the teams, as far as the chassis go, that will increase the ebb and flow amongst the leaders during long stints of green?

BRIAN FRANCE: I don’t know if there’s ever been a situation we can change situations on long runs of green if somebody gets hooked up, that they’ll have an automatic way to catch that person that’s hooked up. That’s not racing.

But we certainly have seen the spoiler play a nice effect in that. Most of the drivers think it’s easier to pass, on the margins, but it’s easier to pass. We actually feel like the stuff on the mile-and-a-half, you know, has been pretty good. The racing has been pretty good.

There’s not any silver bullet we can do to emulate a perfect racing scenario every weekend. But by and large, we’re pretty happy where we’re at.

Q. I wanted to ask you quickly about the drug testing policy. There’s been a steady stream of violators. I’m wondering if that has surprised you and if you find that troubling or more a case of this is working.

BRIAN FRANCE: Probably both. I think it is a policy that what you don’t really think about is how many crew members are in all four national divisions, how many people. It’s in the thousands who get tested virtually monthly. I don’t know the exact numbers, but it’s a lot. We, of course, did this enormous amount of additional testing a couple years ago. We said very surely, Listen, these are very, very, very thorough tests. They’re very, very not only accurate but thorough.

You know, I don’t know about surprising. You know, it’s always disappointing. What I’m really encouraged about is the vast majority of people that stumble are working back in the program and going through the program, getting reinstated.

One of the things that happened, we all remember the saga of another driver in a courtroom, what was missed in all that is there’s a road back for almost any infraction of our substance abuse policy. That’s our wish, to work with somebody to get them pointed in the right direction, where they’re out enjoying a career with us, whether it’s driving, being a crew member, tire changer, you name it. That’s our goal that was missed in the saga of the court battle.

But the vast majority of people that have an infraction are jumping onboard and getting some help. I wish that would happen with everybody.

Q. You touched on the track issues a little bit earlier. How concerned are you that there could be more issues this weekend? Now in hindsight, have they waited a year or two too late to repave this place?

BRIAN FRANCE: It’s easy to say based on a perfect storm they had in February, how cold it was, it rained, done a bunch of things, and the track was just time to have been repaved. That’s easy to sort of look back.

I’ve got a high degree of confidence that the track here at Daytona are very prepared for what might happen under virtually every scenario. They had an issue yesterday. They were right on it. So I have a high degree of confidence.

Anything can happen. But, you know, I think they’re as prepared as you can be. I have confidence in that.

Q. There’s been a lot of information here today. I don’t want to sort of try to interpret it. I want to give you the opportunity. Is it fair to say on the Chase stuff, you keep talking about big impact, big moments, are you guys looking at potentially eliminations or a different points system or different emphasis on winning?

BRIAN FRANCE: Well, I would tell you that the base of the Chase in terms of 10 races that decide it, resetting of points, we like the Chase format. We’ve always liked it. But I can’t tell you exactly what because there’s a number of things that we are looking at. So we haven’t made a decision.

Some of those are more dramatic. We may think that they are not either necessary or would go against this balance that we’ve always told you that we want to have, which is the continuity of going week in and week out is always important. So we’re not going to lose that.

But on the other hand, if there’s some high-impact changes to the Chase that we think we can make, and we’ve also digested a lot of other things over the last several years, we’re in a position to do that.

We’re talking to people now about what some of those ideas are. You know, we haven’t made a decision. Like I said, I think you saw that get played out with the NCAA tournament, as a matter of fact. A lot of things were discussed on their end. I won’t speak for them. They ended up doing something that they thought worked for them, which was a lot less than they had originally considered.

We’re no different than that. We’re looking at that. It’s their tournament, it’s our Chase. So we’ll look at what we think can make the biggest impact, managing the either unintended consequences or certainly the integrity of the format itself, compromising it.

Q. You touched on the ratings earlier. One of the things I hear a lot from people is they’re kind of confused about the smorgasbord of networks they have over the course of the NASCAR season, TNT, ESPN, ABC. When the contracts come up for renewal, is that something you’re going to be looking at hard in terms of maybe going back to a single network or two? Part of the changes you’re talking about for the Nationwide Series is limiting the amount of Cup drivers that race in the series. Is that something that’s on the table?

BRIAN FRANCE: Well, I’ll take the first part of your question.

You know, that group that you mentioned should have been with us 10 years ago when virtually every week was different on what network partner. We have a long season. We’re going to have and we need a number of the right television partners. I don’t think that’s likely to change.

On limiting Cup drivers, we tend to like more competition, so policies that we put in place tend to create incentives rather than, you know, try to put hard caps or regulate.

What I can say is we’ve got to have the rules and the requirements for the Nationwide Series much more tilted to new drivers, giving them a greater opportunity – that would include new owners, by the way – than we do now. There’s several ways to get there. I think you’re going to see us start down the road to get to that place, knowing that we need to have Cup drivers. That’s part of a little bit of the magic of it, too. You get young guys in a different car to have a chance to compete head-to-head with Dale Earnhardt, Jr.

We like that. We just think we have to get the balance a little bit better.

Q. We just completed the Grand-Am Rolex qualifying. Can you talk about the plans for Grand-Am? We have a new team here from Colombia this weekend, the international flavor that may be coming in, FIA, with Grand-Am racing.

BRIAN FRANCE: Yeah, it’s important to note that that is a division that we put a lot of emphasis on in the last few years because we think road racing is underserved, has been for a while, not to mention that internationally you’re right, it’s certainly what people race in terms of the circuit and whatever else, is mostly road racing.

We’ll want to keep making sure that division is prominent and achieves that for any international growth that we have in the future, I would expect that division would play some role.

We’re happy with the road racing component. We put a fair amount of resources and time on it. It does give us an international flavor. It also gives us a chance to attract different car manufacturers where there’s a better fit, like BMW, who is in the series, and others. It gives them a chance to get the NASCAR flavor of how we go about things, but fits into their makes and models a little bit better. We like that a lot. It’s also a very good product for the SPEED Channel. So we’re very committed to Grand American Road Racing.

THE MODERATOR: Thank you for your time, Brian.

- NASCAR, Press Release

Gillette sponsorship, though, proved more troublingly ironic as the Pocono 500 saw a close shave in the last-lap melee that nearly sent Kasey Kahne into the wooded area near the Long Pond stream whose presence dictated the track’s design. Cars getting upside down at Pocono isn’t a new phenomenon – Turn One and the Tunnel Turn have seperately seen airborne melees involving Richard Petty, Tim Richmond, Dale Earnhardt, Neil Bonnett, Greg Sacks, Davey Allison, Dave Marcis, Dale Earnhardt Jr. and Steve Park, and now Kahne.

Kahne was livid at AJ Allmendinger for swerving down to stop the pass; AJ deserves some criticism but the advocates of no-blocking rules in racing are all wet if they want to cite this, for Kahne, despite seeing no lane open, tried to force it anyway and plowed into the grass – forcing a pass by itself is not a negative; trying to race through grass, though, is stupid. If it counts as poetic justice, it was hardly worth shedding a tear that Greg Biffle and two of the Hendrick cars plus Ryan Newman got ruined, so though AJ acknowledged fault he has nothing to apologize for.

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It almost became the defining image of the race, until the earlier spin by Joey Logano turned into yet another of the season’s absurd near-fights that have gotten the blessing of the sanctioning body from its “Boys, Have At It” approach. The sport may think these set-tos in the pits after races are allowing the display of emotion and thus helping the sport; the reality is they are displaying that the core of the sport’s competitors are not ready for prime time. There is plenty of blame to go around in the Harvick-Logano situation and neither competitor deserves sympathy, but the sanctioning body has to at some point engage in some honest thinking about whether “Boys, have at it” is really in the sport’s best interest.

People will of course cite the 1979 Daytona 500 as the example of why this apporoach is necessary for the sport, and they will of course ignore that Billy France was aghast when the postrace fracas erupted, and the premise is absurd on its face – people wanted to see racing because of a fight after the race? Wanting to see racing after a last-lap melee and resulting shockert of a finish is to be expected; the figbht part is a lot harder to swallow.

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It all served to further muddy the season as Hendrick Motorsports’ slide continued and the ascension of JGR to dominator status accelerated while RCR continues to hold its own, Roush-Fenway’s slow steady slide continued, and the rest of the field continued to try and hang on with RPM at least flexing some muscle to go with its chaotic family feud.

It also served to rebut critics of the track’s 500-mile distances, which produced more competition and a more dramatic shift in outcome than any shorter race can.

The Michigan Speedway now has some juicy prerace buzz to help with its first race weekend of the year as the 2010 season continues to fly off the course a lot of people expected of it.