The Race Team Alliance "met at Hendrick Motorsports on Thursday to discuss the options presented by NASCAR for future 'framework concepts'" in relation to ownership structure, according to Lee Spencer of MOTORSPORT.com. This comes after NASCAR "invited all Sprint Cup owners to a meeting" last Tuesday led by Chair & CEO Brian France and COO Brent Dewar. NASCAR "followed up with each individual team after the meeting." NASCAR "hopes to have a program in place by season’s end, but there’s still a lot of work ahead on both sides of the proposal." Prior to the RTA meeting, Roush Fenway Racing co-Owner Jack Roush said, "There’s two problems -- there needs to be more income flowing to the teams with all the expenses they have. You couldn’t take a business man that was involved in one of the other traditional, capitalistic enterprises that are in our economy -- unless they were a race fan -- you couldn't interest them in the prospect of a return on their investment for NASCAR. So that needs to improve so we can have dynamic and renewed teams as time goes on." Spencer noted NASCAR also is "facing an aging ownership base." Roush: "When ownership decides that they can’t go forward either because the owners get too old or there’s some other economic circumstance that befalls the owners, the only thing you’ve got today is sell your cars and your parts for 10-percent, 20-percent on the dollar and back away. So all of the investment that the early NASCAR racers had, that the early NASCAR teams had, they didn’t build any equity that justified the investment they made. They either had to sell the opportunity of a short-term economic benefit or they were race fans" (MOTORSPORT.com, 10/8).
