As in Dale Earnhardt Jr., who begins his first season driving for the Hendrick Motorsports dynasty. NASCAR’s most popular driver created (and endured) an epic soap opera last season, weighing whether to stay with the team (Dale Earnhardt Inc.) owned by his stepmother or sign with another race shop. He chose Hendrick last June, then finished out the season in his familiar Budweiser Chevrolet. He arrives in Daytona not only with a new owner in Hendrick, but also a new sponsor (swapping suds for Pepsi’s Amp energy drink), new number (88 instead of 8) and new heightened expectations (driving for a team that features four-time series champ Jeff Gordon and two-time defending champ Jimmie Johnson means Little E better become a big winner in a hurry). Can he move cases of Amp and help the moribund collectibles industry along the way? Analysts say yes and yes, though the transition from Bud to Amp may take a while for hard-core fans to sink in. |
As TV ratings fell during the 2006 season, NASCAR CEO Brian France and others in the sport brushed off the decline with a breezy air. When ESPN returns to the fold as a NASCAR broadcaster in 2007, they assured everyone, the audience will bounce back. So much for that theory. Despite the promised NASCAR hype proliferating on “SportsCenter” and throughout the rest of the self-proclaimed worldwide leader in sports’ empire, ratings took another plunge in 2007 across the board. NASCAR executives point to declines in other sports and say they’re no different. They say heavier online traffic at NASCAR.com and elsewhere shows that people get their NASCAR fix in new and different ways. All true, but there is little doubt that the wave of growth the sport rode in the first half of this decade is gone. “It was inevitable that it would flatten out,” said sports TV consultant Mike Trager. “Like other sports, I think they have found their range. Where they’ve ended up is a good, strong place to be. It’s not negative.” The coming season will tell NASCAR and TV executives much about whether the decline is over — or if new worries loom. |
| Toyota crashed the party in NASCAR’s top series last season — and then just crashed altogether. It was a disastrous debut season that began with team owner and driver Michael Waltrip’s cheating scandal and never got much better. During the offseason, Toyota cut a deal with Joe Gibbs Racing to provide cars, acquiring Gibbs’ engineering and motor expertise along with former champion Tony Stewart in the cockpit. Analysts say Toyota was bound to improve anyway, but the addition of Gibbs’ team should provide instant, and dramatic, acceleration. “I think they’ll win races,” said Zak Brown, CEO of Just Marketing. “Which is a hell of an improvement over their first year.” |
Sponsor shuffles among NASCAR teams are common, so why not with the series names, as well? The $35 billion, 2005 merger of wireless companies Nextel and Sprint has led to the debut of the Sprint Cup this season. It represents the top circuit’s third corporate name in five years. The Winston Cup ended after the 2003 season, followed by the Nextel Cup and now the Sprint Cup. Perhaps the larger concern should be on Sprint, a company with slumping business fortunes. Last month, Sprint cut 4,000 jobs and reported the loss of nearly 700,000 subscribers. Company executives say they are committed to NASCAR and believe the sport has demonstrated an ability to create customers. Insurer Nationwide arrives with a seven-year deal to replace Busch as the sponsor of NASCAR’s No. 2 series. Nationwide’s clever first-year campaign of collecting money for charity each time someone slips and uses the old series name is a fun way of helping smooth the transition. Nationwide execs plan to put rectangular boxes similar to the company’s logo in the TV booth and in team shops to collect donations for the slip-ups. At the end of the season, Nationwide will match the donations and give it all to the NASCAR Foundation. One more series name change still must play out. NASCAR is searching to replace the Sears Craftsman brand as title sponsor of the truck series. |
NASCAR loves to rattle off its bloated figure of having 75 million fans and ranking as the No. 2 TV sport (but only if you ignore cumulative audiences for competitors such as Major League Baseball and college football). Reality and nuance offer perspective, as does a glance at the grandstands. NASCAR races still bring out impressive crowds, but as California Speedway and others have demonstrated in recent years, filling up all the seats at the massive venues is much more difficult today than it was five years ago. Tracks including CaliforniaSpeedway have
found greaterchallenges selling tickets. “A lot of the new fans that we had made out of curiosity said, ‘We want to do something else,’” said Humpy Wheeler, president of track operator Speedway Motorsports Inc. “We’ve risen to these challenges before. We’ve got to get back to really good racing.” Wheeler points to the NFL, where fans watch the first three quarters of a game as avidly as they do the fourth period. To build the same passion in NASCAR, he said, purses must change so that more emphasis falls on leading laps. That, in turn, leads to more passing up front and makes for more exciting races. France, the NASCAR chief, believes fans need a break from all of the changes swirling around the sport in recent years: a new race car prototype, new TV deals, new championship format, new tracks and so on. “Change is good to a certain point,” France said. “We’ve got all the change we think the sport can stand and needs. Now we want to build on that.” |
