Why NASCAR Doesn’t Have Any Current Stars

Ask any sports fan who doesn’t follow NASCAR to name you a current NASCAR Cup Series driver.

Maybe they can list off Chase Elliott, Kevin Harvick, Kyle Busch, Denny Hamlin and Bubba Wallace. Maybe they can name those five. Maybe.

Three of those are holdovers from NASCAR’s peak in popularity, and Harvick retires at the end of the year, so you’re about to lose him from this list. One is the son of the most popular driver from the booming 1990s. The final of those five is perhaps best known for the wrong reasons: the unfortunate noose mix-up.

Kyle Larson and William Byron are two of the top stars in Cup this year, and Larson has a dominant season and championship to his name, but I bet non-NASCAR sports fans aren’t familiar with either of them.

Maybe they know Ross Chastain because of the Hail Melon at Martinsville Speedway in 2022, and perhaps they’re aware of Austin Dillon from his USA reality show. But they’ve probably already forgotten both of their names.

This week, I interviewed NASCAR Hall of Famer Rusty Wallace (look for the interview on the Frontstretch Podcast), and it hit me while I was doing it that Wallace’s name is probably still more recognizable to non-NASCAR fans than majority of the current drivers despite not racing since 2005. I went to an autograph signing of his at a local car dealership back in 2003, when I was 11 years old, and the line wrapped around the building and then some. It took hours of waiting in line to see Wallace.

Would that happen out in public, not at the racetrack, with any of today’s drivers?

And Wallace wasn’t even one of the most popular drivers at the time. Dale Earnhardt Jr., Jeff Gordon and Tony Stewart were much more recognizable then.

You ask any non-NASCAR sports fan probably over the age of 30 if they’ve heard of those names, and I guarantee they have. They probably also remember names like Dale Jarrett, Bobby Labonte, Terry Labonte, Mark Martin, and most of all, Bill Elliott.

So why? Why are the names of the 1990s and 2000s still so much more recognizable than those of today?

More people were buying tickets to races and watching it on TV back then, of course. And there are plenty of reasons both in and out of NASCAR’s control as to why that popularity dipped.

But still, NASCAR is probably in line with the 1980s as far as popularity goes. Yet those calling the shots of that era did such a better job of selling the names of Richard…