This week, there was a big reveal by Sports Business Journal of some big changes in the inner workings of NASCAR.
I won’t bore you with too many details. Layoffs are happening, because it’s a company whose only goal is to make more profit. The only France family member who is mentioned in the memo is Ben Kennedy, who is now an EVP. It’s not a surprise to see the young France ascending through the company after a number of scheduling successes in recent years, most notably in Chicago and Los Angeles.
There was a sentence in the article, however, that induced a massive groan on my end.
“NASCAR is showing teams it’s making changes at a time when it’s asking them to tighten their spending.”
What changes?
The teams have been making the point for years now that the current sponsorship-based business model is failing and that there needs to be a big increase in the amount of the television contract they will be receiving from NASCAR.
This has been a problem for many years now. To illustrate this, let’s go all the way back to right before the 2013 season. Then defending Cup champion — and now team owner — Brad Keselowski gave a long interview with USA Today.
Keselowski has always been opinionated, and reading the article now is an interesting time capsule. There are some things he’s completely off on, most notably that Instagram did not end up being a fad. But he was right then and is still right 11 years later on the current sponsorship model.
Keselowski introduces his various opinions on NASCAR with the following:
“The problem I see in the sport is that there are multiple entities that have to work together for us to be successful.
“We have sponsors — partners, or whatever the hell you want to call them — tracks, the sanctioning body and the teams. Those are our four groups, and how well they cooperate dictates what we have as a product for our fans.”
In the years since, this has changed somewhat. NASCAR purchased International Speedway Corporation in 2019, followed up by Speedway Motorsports, LLC going private a year later.
What this means is that there are essentially only three groups now: sponsors, tracks and teams. With the sanctioning body now directly owning or promoting tracks that host 20 of the 38 Cup races, that firmly puts it in the track group. Although there is a race hosted by a team (this weekend’s race at Indianapolis Motor Speedway, owned by Penske), this…
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