CONCORD, N.C.— Despite a reeling economy, NASCAR’s second-tier Nationwide Series is in better shape than many expected and encouraged by what’s ahead.
A recent announcement that fan favorite Dale Earnhardt Jr., in his role as owner of JR Motorsports, got sponsorship for a second entry has helped. So has news that Roger Penske found backing to run ARCA champion Justin Allgaier for the entire season.
“At the end of last season, it was all doom and gloom,” said former Sprint Cup champion Rusty Wallace, now a team owner in the Nationwide Series, fielding full-time rides for son Steve Wallace and Brendan Gaughan.
“That was real good news about Junior … and Roger,” he said. “Then you’ve got Tony Stewart running the Nationwide race at Daytona for Rick Hendrick, and both of my teams are fully funded for the season.
“Things just aren’t as bad as they seemed a while back.”
The top-tier Cup series has seen changes since last season, with several team mergers and other operations selling out or cutting back. There has been some of the same in the Nationwide series, which struggled with a dearth of sponsorship even before the economic crisis.
But despite dire forecasts that Nationwide fields may fall short of the standard 43-car lineup as the season goes on, series director Joe Balash said Tuesday.
“From what I’ve seen so far, with the number of teams that are going to run limited schedules, I think our car counts will end up being pretty similar to what they were last year,” he said.
“I think there are some Nationwide teams, though, that have run on lower budgets than obviously some of the Cup teams have in the past. So although it does affect them, I don’t know that it affects them to a greater percentage than what you would normally see.”
Not everybody is so optimistic.
Series regular Mike Bliss said the car count may begin to decline after the first few races if everything doesn’t fall into place just right.
“I think there will be a lot of teams going into the new year still trying to court sponsors and, hopefully, something happens,” Bliss said. “Halfway through the year is always when you see that guys can’t keep on going.
“It’s not going to just be the races, it’s going to be everything. It all trickles down. I think it’ll probably be a tough year for this series and all of racing.”
Balash said NASCAR is going ahead with its plan to get a new Car of Tomorrow ready for the 2010 Nationwide series, a move that could add a substantial initial cost to the team budgets.
The sanctioning organization introduced a new car in the Cup series with a part-time schedule in 2007, then raced the car through the entire 2008 season to mixed results.
Drivers have complained that the new Cup cars, bigger and boxier in the name of driver safety, are too heavy for the tires and hard to keep balanced. But most of the initial uproar over the CoT died out as the drivers and teams came to the realization that it was here to stay.
“It is what it is,” Cup star Kevin Harvick said.
Harvick drives for Richard Childress Racing. The Kevin Harvick Inc. team also plans to run one car full-time in Nationwide, as well as two trucks in the third-tier Camping World Series.
“Everybody finally came to the conclusion in Cup that the car was here to stay, so just shut up and figure it out,” he said. “I’m sure everyone has learned a lot that will help with the new (Nationwide) car.”
Balash said NASCAR will work with the Nationwide owners to ensure that the introduction of the new car does not cause undue hardships.
“We’re still working very hard on the engineering project to develop the new car,” he said. “We have some upcoming (wind tunnel) tests coming later this month on the car and we’ll have everything going on as planned for launch in 2010.
“We’re going to keep a close watch on what the economy does and talk to the ownership in the Nationwide garage and kind of watch that program throughout the year to see whether we actually do the launch in 2010. A lot of that will have to do with the economics.”
Balash said he can hardly wait to get to Daytona next month and get the 2009 season under way.
“Hopefully, we can get to racing and stop talking about the economy and car counts,” he said. “I think the competition on the racetrack is going to be better than ever.”
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