Everett, Wash.
Published: Sunday, November 16, 2008

Commentary: Slowdown May Not Be All Bad for NASCAR

By Liz Clarke
Washington Post

 WASHINGTON — It's no secret that America's fastest growing sport is getting slammed by the economic slowdown. NASCAR teams are losing sponsors, laying off workers and, in some cases, merging with former rivals to keep from going under.

But it's not a given that the competition will suffer as a result.

A return to frugality might be the best thing for stock-car racing, which has been transformed in the last decade by billion-dollar TV contracts and multimillion-dollar sponsorship deals that ratcheted up the cost of success.

Consider the late Alan Kulwicki, who won NASCAR's 1992 championship on such a lean budget — 19 employees and less than $2 million — that he scratched the first two letters from his Ford's nameplate so it read "UNDERBIRD." Kulwicki clinched the title in the season's final race on cunning rather than cubic dollars, edging Davey Allison and fending off four other challengers in what's considered the most dramatic points race in NASCAR history.

By comparison, Jimmie Johnson is cheered by the roughly 500 employees at his race shop, Hendrick Motorsports, which fields four NASCAR teams — each with an annual budget of $20 million to $24 million.

That surge in the cost of sponsoring a front-running team has enabled NASCAR owners to hire fleets of engineers, buy sophisticated equipment and build state-of-the art, 150,000-square-foot shops. But it's an open question whether it has made the races more exciting and the championship battles more compelling or simply amounted to a glitzy arms race.

"The money hasn't made the sport any better," says former NASCAR racer Jimmy Spencer, now a commentator with Speed TV. "As an old racer used to warn me about spending money, 'Just remember: Pigs get fat, but hogs get slaughtered.' "

If Kulwicki showed up in a Sprint Cup garage today, he would be derided as if he were Jed Clampett. Unlike today's top drivers, he didn't own a jet or million-dollar motor coach to lounge in trackside. He had just one college-educated mechanic on his team (himself). And he didn't even have a steering wheel and seat for each of his racecars. To stretch a dollar, he unbolted them and moved them from one car to another, mindful he could race only one at a time.

Back then, NASCAR championships were won largely on the guile of home-schooled mechanics. What engineering expertise existed was supplied by Ford and General Motors, which loaned teams Detroit-based consultants and provided automotive parts.

Larry McReynolds, Allison's crew chief at the time, remembers when the sport entered the big-time, at least in his eyes. It was the day his team's owner, Robert Yates, bought his first million-dollar piece of equipment, a CNC machine, in the early 1990s.

The CNC machine, essentially an enormous robot, could grind cylinder heads in a fraction of the time a crew member could, its blades slicing precisely as directed by a computer program, mass-producing one after another as metal slivers flew off, and each of them identical.

Today, top NASCAR teams like Hendrick Motorsports and Joe Gibbs Racing have at least a half-dozen CNC machines, each spitting out custom parts.

The late Dale Earnhardt won most of his seven NASCAR championships with even less sophisticated equipment.

"We had four scales, a ball of string and a tape measure, and that was all you needed," said Kirk Shelmerdine, crew chief for four of those seven titles, recalling the process of building and balancing Earnhardt's No. 3 Chevys. "And I had to re-use the string!"

Today, nearly everything about constructing Sprint Cup cars is computer-based. Race-day engines are tested on computers that simulate the banking and load of specific racetracks before they're ever put in a car.

And while NASCAR mandated in 2006 that all cars' bodies be identical (its so-called "Car of Tomorrow" ostensibly designed to reduce cost), the upshot has cost teams even more money. With so little variation among the cars, the well-funded teams are pouring millions into research and development to find the slightest edge.

And each time one hires an engineer with an MIT degree or Formula One experience, others scramble to do the same.

But not all NASCAR teams' excess is in payrolls. It can be found in lavish motor homes and Learjets.

"Greed has become a big problem in NASCAR," Spencer said, "and that includes me, working for TV. I want every damn thing I can get! But all of us need to start realizing we're spending too much."

NASCAR President Brian France took a step in that direction by banning testing in 2009, which could save teams as much as $1 million each. But he ruled out two other potential cost-saving measures: trimming the 36-race season and shortening the length of the races themselves.

According to Andrew Zimbalist, a noted sports economist and professor at Smith College, it's unrealistic to assume that NASCAR's competition won't be negatively affected if revenue goes away. The reason: The teams that field three and four cars, such as Gibbs and Hendrick, will have more leverage and be even more attractive to the sponsors, while single-car teams will struggle more.

Says McReynolds: "The bottom line is, it doesn't matter what rule you make: The strong are still gonna be strong, and the weak are still gonna be weak."
© 2009The Daily Herald Co., Everett, WA