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JENSEN: It’s The Economy, Stupid
Written by:
Tom Jensen
03/24/2008 - 06:13 AM
Harrisburg, N.C.
Travis Kvapil takes over driving the No.9 Zasby's Ford F-150 at California Speedway. (Jamie Squire/Getty Images Photo) ยป More Photos
If you don’t like the way things are going in NASCAR, stick around. It doesn’t take long to change.
A year ago, the sky was falling because too many good cars were going home from Sprint Cup races. By the end of this year, though, one wonders if the folks from Daytona Beach will be calling up Morgan Shepherd or Kirk Shelmerdine, offering tow money to fill out fields somewhere.
And if that sounds like an exaggeration, consider the numbers: Car counts have been down at every race this season so far, with three fewer cars each at Bristol, Atlanta and California, five fewer at Las Vegas and eight fewer at Daytona.
But what’s most ominous isn’t what’s happened so far, it’s what could happen down the road. Doug Yates has run Travis Kvapil’s car without sponsorship for most of this season and David Gilliland’s deal with freecreditreport.com was for six Cup points races, which means it is set to expire after Martinsville this week. Chip Ganassi has been forced to run a patchwork of sponsors for Dario Franchitti, as has Dale Earnhardt Inc. for Regan Smith, two cars that are now outside the top 35 in owner points.
And there is plenty of unsold sponsor inventory among other teams as well. Getting a precise handle on exactly how much is impossible, because the nature of sponsor deals has changed with the escalating cost of racing.
It used to be each team had one primary sponsor all season, but now almost every team – even the big ones – uses multiple primary sponsors to help defray the multi-million-dollar budgets. For example, Matt Kenseth’s Roush Fenway Racing No. 17 Sprint Cup Ford will have DeWalt Tools, USG, Carhartt, R+L Carriers and Dish Network serve as primary sponsors this year, depending on the race.
Given that Kenseth is a perennial championship contender on a top-flight team, it’s a safe bet to assume that all of his various sponsors are paying Roush Fenway Racing and paying handsomely for the privilege of sponsoring his car. Almost certainly, the team has all 36 races sold.
But some of the teams further back in the field have only 25 or 30 races sold out of 36. In
One team owner told me he had three sponsors combine to buy 30 races this year and he was going to give away the remaining six to them. “What am I going to do, run a white car for six races?” he said.
There’s no real way to measure or know for certain which sponsors are paying to be on any specific car at a given race, or what they are paying. But you better believe there continues to be a huge disparity in how much sponsor money the guys at the front of the field – Roush, Hendrick and Gibbs – are taking in, vs., say, the Wood Brothers and Petty Enterprises.
If team owners were forced to open their books, it would quickly become apparent, too, that even some of the second and third cars on mid-sized teams are running on a wing and a prayer, too.
Unfortunately, with gasoline approaching $4 a gallon and the nation’s financial markets in utter chaos at the moment, things aren’t likely to improve soon. Right now, the U.S. economy is in a very rough stretch and the pain felt on Wall Street is felt every bit as deeply in the Sprint Cup garage, too. That’s just how it goes.
And since it won’t be long before teams and sponsors start putting together their 2009 deals, the hard times likely won’t go away next year, either.
Then again, you don’t hear anyone complaining that car counts are too high anymore.
Tom Jensen is the Senior NASCAR Editor for SPEEDtv.com, the former Executive Editor of NASCAR Scene and a contributing Editor for TruckSeries.com. He is the author of “Cheating: The Bad Things Good NASCAR Nextel Cup Racers Do In Pursuit of SPEED,” and has appeared on numerous television and radio shows to discuss NASCAR racing. Jensen is the President of the National Motorsports Press Association.
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