1. Will NASCAR and the teams make a deal?
Perhaps the most pressing story heading into this last stretch of the regular season will be NASCAR’s ongoing charter negotiations with the teams.
NASCAR has spent the past half a year insisting that a deal could come at anytime, while the teams have been clear that they are too far apart. A key new development was broken during the summer break which really does not paint these negotiations as going well.
Keep in mind that NASCAR indicated at one point that it wanted to get a deal done prior to the Clash in order to avoid potential team protests. It’s now almost mid-August and the protests may finally be coming.
It’s hard to imagine the owners splitting off from NASCAR. But it’s absolutely a possibility. I think a key aspect to this that not many take into account is who exactly is in the ownership ranks now.
Part of the reason NASCAR has almost always historically gotten its way on matters such as this is that the owners depended heavily on their race teams.
Go look at Jayski’s 1999 team chart and compare the owners there to 2024. Guys like Mark Melling, Ricky Rudd, Morgan-McClure, Andy Petree and Bill Davis all heavily depended on their NASCAR teams due to having invested so much of their wealth, percentage-wise, to their race teams.
Now there are so many extremely wealthy owners that are not living purse-to-purse. Rick Ware, the Wood Brothers and JTG Daugherty are the owners who don’t really fit that role, with the owners of the other 31 cars on track all being larger than the vast majority of them in 1999.
And the ones still there are larger than ever before. Roger Penske owns IndyCar and the Indianapolis Motor Speedway outright now. I wrote a column right before the summer break saying NASCAR needs to respect the teams better as they are also partners with them. This is why that respect is deserved.
2. How will the remaining Silly Season dominoes fall?
There are now two Cup seats that are for sure open for 2025, with the big news of the break being that Spire Motorsports has chosen to move on from Corey LaJoie.
LaJoie first joined the…
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